Xiphos 4.0.0

Karl Kleinpaste — Sat, 24 Jan 2015 16:18:57 -0000

It has been literally years since we thought to update news here. The 3.1 series was long-lived, but represented a somewhat dry period in Xiphos development. 2014 was a much better year, as a close-out 3.1.6 release was made in January, but then many new features and enhancements occurred during the briefly-lived 3.2 series.

On Christmas Eve, Xiphos 4.0.0 was released. Version 4 is a huge step forward in many areas, most notably in the support of alternate versification (av11n) by which Xiphos now exercises the full capabilities of the Sword engine to provide access to Bibles with Apocrypha as well as other, less serious differences in BCV (book/chapter/verse) layout. As well, the arrival of a mature BibleSync shared navigation facility, new support for module authors in CSS controls and for the Xiphos user himself in default CSS, plus countless enhancements to improve the user's experience in GTK3, make v4 by far the best, most featureful release of Xiphos ever. Our file area contains unofficial builds for major platforms, and regular Linux repos are gaining the updated release. The Win32 installer is present here.

As well, beyond the initial v4 release, the new developer habits of the last year include irregular production of test bundles available under the Testing subdirectory of our files area. Already past 4.0.0 (it is exactly 1 month after Christmas Eve as this is written), there have been 6 post-release updates, similarly packaged, and users are welcome -- encouraged -- to try them out. These are not alpha-level experiments, but rather fully-fleshed-out updates and improvements that are individually not enough to justify another announced release but which nonetheless represent additional capability that users may wish to have.

Please take our latest work -- whether official 4.0.0 or post-release test bundles -- out for a test drive. We believe you'll be pleased with the results.

Xiphos 3.1 is released

Karl Kleinpaste — Sat, 15 Sep 2012 18:13:36 -0000

We are very pleased to announce Xiphos 3.1, a Bible study system built on the foundation of The Sword Project's cross-platform libraries from CrossWire Bible Society. Xiphos provides a feature-rich environment in which to study Biblical texts, commentaries, and other resources suitable to sound theological learning. This release adds features to our Windows version, text-to-speech and transliteration (now near parity with Linux); improves on module manager, journal/prayerlist, and bookmark support; adds new capabilities to the exporter; corrects some problems with RtoL (right-to-left) languages; adds automatic lemma lookup in ancient texts; plus other minor updates and bug fixes too numerous to list here. Source and binary packages are available for Fedora, Ubuntu, and Win32. Xiphos supports any flavor of Linux, Solaris, BSD, and Windows (XP, Vista, 7-beta). Download https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=5528&package_id=104941 Crosswire Bible Society http://crosswire.org/ The Sword Project http://crosswire.org/sword/

Xiphos 3.0.1 is released

Karl Kleinpaste — Sat, 15 Sep 2012 18:13:36 -0000

As an urgent bugfix release, we have just put 3.0.1 out the door. Xiphos is the best free Bible software ever produced, based on GNOME libraries and the The Sword Project's underlying cross-platform framework and modules. This release was necessary due to the discovery of incompatibilities with Windows' filesystem (NTFS) in the face of users whose login names contain characters beyond the ASCII lower 128. Such names previously caused grief in NTFS because of the need for UTF16 encoding. This release corrects this problem as well as a few other minor issues. As always, Xiphos supports any flavor of Linux, Solaris, NetBSD and FreeBSD, and now Windows (XP, Vista, 7-beta). Ready-to-run Linux binaries (*.rpm, *.deb) should appear in distros' repos very soon. Download source tarball or Windows installer https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=5528&package_id=104941 Crosswire Bible Society http://crosswire.org/ The Sword Project http://crosswire.org/sword/

Xiphos 3.0 Bible study software released

Karl Kleinpaste — Sat, 15 Sep 2012 18:13:36 -0000

We are proudly pleased to announce the release of Xiphos 3.0, a Bible study system built on the foundation of The Sword Project's cross-platform libraries from Crosswire Bible Society. Xiphos provides a feature-rich environment in which to study Biblical texts, commentaries, and other resources suitable to sound theological learning. Formerly known as GnomeSword, we have changed our project's name due to the perception of our old name as being too obscure. Our new name is the transliteration of ξίφος, one of several Greek words for Sword. The single biggest feature of 3.0 is that we are no longer bound to just the Linux platform. The WIN32 port is substantially complete, and the few features not yet supported will be done in the very near future. Aside from WIN32, we have had an amazing number of developments since our last release, 2.4.1. In just 90 days, we have implemented some 20+ new features: a fabulous new look developed by professional graphics designers, involving our logos, splash screen, and icons; many module manager improvements for resource management assistance, including standard repository setup; commentary by chapter display; many search improvements; a revamped website with embedded manual, automatically updated from SVN; respect for module configurations' preferences for font and font size; and other movements forward too numerous to mention or count. WIN32 binaries are available for download from SourceForge, and per-distro Linux binaries are in progress and should be available from their repos almost immediately. Project website: http://xiphos.org/ (http://xiphos.sourceforge.net/) Release notes: https://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?group_id=5528&release_id=659746 Download: https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=5528&release_id=659746 The Sword Project, at Crosswire Bible Society: http://www.crosswire.org/ (please be patient with us as we make efforts to complete our renaming)

Recent posts to news

Xiphos 4.0.0

Xiphos 3.1 is released

Xiphos 3.0.1 is released

Xiphos 3.0 Bible study software released