Hi everyone,

You may or may not recognize me from the forums here. Among other things, I built the ExportProject plugin for FlashDevelop.

I just released Bible Reader as a free application for Palm on the App Catalog, using none other than FlashDevelop for all my development. HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP and SQL were all written and compiled for my web services and Palm application. I love FlashDevelop!

I did my best to translate it into Spanish, French and German, too, so if you're a webOS user outside of the United States, please feel free to try it out (and to correct me if my translation is bad

You can search "Bible" in the App Catalog to find it, or you can follow this link:

http://developer.palm.com/webChannel/in ... iblereader

I've also put up a Facebook page if you want to leave comments, suggestions, or any other positive feedback.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Bible-Rea ... 5560881688

Thanks everyone and have a great day!

Hi.
Regarding Hebrew translation... sadly, this language and computers are no friends. Which is because there are no "native" punctuation signs in it, and when you have to put one, it'll use one from the Latin alphabet, but then it will treat the whole word connected to that sign as though it was Latin. Long story short, the words have swapped places in there, so, for instance (I don't know if this HTML page supports it, but I'll try), the first verse reads as follows:

בראשית ברה אלוהים את השמיים ואת הארץ

[Earth the] [and] [sky the] [] [god] [created] [beginning the in]

And here's how you've got it:

אלוהים ברה בראשית ואת השמיים את הארץ

[Earth the] [] [sky the] [and] [beginning the in] [created] [god]

But, anyway, one sees this sort of things happening almost every time dealing with Hebrew, like, every e-mail would be broken, even official papers! and you would guess the dates (most of the time, I do that wrong ) because you don't know what program had created them and what was intended to be the correct order. And so on...

Hi wvxvw,

Yeah, Hebrew support has been really tricky to work out! As near as I can remember, here's the list of issues I'm working through:

- webOS does not natively support Hebrew characters
- webOS does not natively support right-to-left languages
- The source I'm using seemed to have it's characters mixed up
- Various browsers and editors all have varying representation of the same characters, due to various levels of Hebrew support

When it comes down to the share and copy features, I know I'm limited by the device people use to view the text. However, I'm doing my best to try and make sure that it is represented properly on-screen. I'm already doing a lot of transforms to get it in the right order, but I definitely want to know if I still don't have it quite right! I don't read Hebrew so it's hard for me to double-check how things are being presented.

[img=http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=249466&id=124785560881688][/img]

If I understand correctly, the text flows from right-to-left, top-to-bottom, correct? So each of these verses should flow from the upper-right corner of their box, across to the left, then it should wrap to the beginning of the next line and continue moving to the left?

Oh, I see it now! Yeah, I had trouble seeing what you were saying from your examples, but I get it now. I could tell that the original source had the characters running in the wrong direction, so I've flipped them, however now I see that it was in the right order, except that the entire orientation of each verse needed to be flipped. Great! Thank you. I'll see if I can get this fixed

Aha! I think I FINALLY figured it out!

Thank you again, SO MUCH for your example. It was very, very helpful as a reference while working on this.

It turns out that the source had all the characters flipped, so that it would represent well on older browsers. I think that's what was going on. So when I view it in Opera it was presenting it in right-to-left orientation, which was flipping everything. I think that's what was going on. That or Windows was supporting right-to-left.

So I finally got it to show up right on-screen, and I think I have it correct for off-screen sharing/copying/sending as well, but please let me know if this is right:

Even though it should be presented right-to-left, the actual storage order should be sequential, which basically means left-to-right. So, for example, if you were to want to store something like this:

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1


You actually would store it like this:


1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10


And rely on the reader on the other side to flip it around. Is that correct? That way when you combine verses ...


1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20



It's still in correct, sequential order. The client just has to understand the whole thing is supposed to be printed right-to-left.


So that's the way I have it returning from the server now. The first character is the first character of the verse, so on, and so forth, then in my code in my reader I'm flipping things around to get it to display correctly on the screen. However, if you share, it's sending the raw data from the server, which is in the order I mentioned above.

Does that sound right?


Thanks again!

בראשית ברא אלהים את השמים ואת הארץ׃ (Genesis 1:1)

-- Sent from my Palm Pre

Awesome! Looks like I've got it. Windows/Opera *is* flipping it around, so it looks like it's rendering right through sharing and in the application. Great!

Thank you, thank you, again. I don't really know Hebrew but my parents are learning Hebrew and they're really excited about being able to see it in my application. Do you have a Palm, or did you see the image of Hebrew I posted on Facebook?

Yeah, now it's correct
Just some funny info. Before RTL support if you had to do some minor typing in Flash-related programms, and you wanted to use embedded fonts, then there were essentially two ways:
- use a flipped font (that is a font that would have all the characters mirrored) and then flip the entire TextField.
- type backwards, that is hit right arrow button each time you type a letter
Hebrew isn't my mother tongue either, so, I had quite some headache figuring those things out... Another funny thing that because of Mozilla added support for RTL languages much later than MSIE, most of the sites in Hebrew target only IE. So, say and I want to see the bus schedule online, or order tickets to the cinema, be it government in institution or pizza shop - everything will behave unpredictably, if you are on Mac / Linux Or, sometimes, if the understanding of text is considered very important, people would send you a JPEG image with that text instead of a plain text file

Well, most of the things you mentioned are alright now...

Hehe, you should try to apply for visa to the US (from Israel). If you do that on Mac, you are pretty much limited to either running IE on Parallels or downgrade to OS9 (the last version that had Explorer 5)
Well, maybe they changed it in the last year, but last time I tried, it was like that.

I'd be curious to know if Opera behaved any differently. I think they might be a little more tuned into localization since they're based in Europe.

Even if the site was hard-coded to allow IE-only, you could probably get around it by doing Edit Site Preferences > Network > Identify as Internet Explorer

Nevertheless, I can definitely imagine the frustration! I never would have thought that using OS 9 was a US requirement

In Hebrew heaven is always plural, there's not a singular form of that word. Just like scissors in English. Regarding the word "god", in Jewish tradition, there's not a name for that entity, different words are used to substitute it, but they are rather acronyms / imply that meaning in a certain situation, while it's not their original meaning. Nowadays the word, which sounds more like "aelohim" is used to express the concept. Though religious people would avoid saying this word.
In any case, I don't think you are asking your question at the proper forum.

Well it's most definitely the most non-AS3 / FlashDevelop chit chat we've had here, but I guess that's what the catch-all is for. BibleGateway or another forum may be more appropriate but I am impressed with the knowledge shared here. (Years ago I gave up coding for half a year and was a lay pastor for my church; a story for another forum.)

There are many interesting things when you realize how deeply the Christian New Testament is rooted in Hebrew. While many old transcripts of it are recorded in Greek, the phrases and terms which are used in the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John don't really make sense in Greek like they would if they were Hebrew. It is for this reason that it is believed that these were originally written (or at least spoken) in Hebrew.

For example, here is a short passage from Proverbs:



Similarly, here is an excerpt from the book of Matthew:



In English (or Greek), there's little reason why you would talk about money one moment, then about a person's eye the next. However, if you consider that the concept of a "good eye" or "bad eye" is associated with greed or generosity, it makes perfect sense to talk about these things together.

Since my last post, I was (fortunately!) able to add audio of the Tanakh as well, and I hope to add the parashiot soon.