Blog

build your Bible reading habit.

New Year / New Plants

Have done quite a bit of development/tweaking over the Christmas break, mainly around rendering speed – now some of my trees are a year old, they are quite big and take a while to render. So have been looking at caching a bitmap for each tree to speed up rendering (rather than the procedural generation…
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The garden is growing

Composite image of the garden after five months of Bible reading From left to right Note to self: I made this by stitching together screenshots: Should make this a function in the app to export the whole garden as an image.

Technical Architecture

The app is developed using MS Visual Studio with the Xamarin framework. The app holds data in a SQLite database- this gives us a flexible data store to handle all the course and lesson data, user progress etc. The app connects to a server for lesson content etc. This allows us to add or update…
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Plants

A garden needs plants We need the plants in the garden to grow with time and also change as they are tended or neglected. Rather than draw a lot of bitmaps (which would take a lot of work and storage) we are going to render the plants algorithmically. The graphic shows a maple tree rendered…
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The main thing…

The point of the Bible Garden app is to encourage users to develop a habit of regular bible reading. Other apps and games do a great job of encouraging users to come back and thus foster strong habits. For example the game Wordle has the concept of the users “daily streak” the incentive is to…
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Jan 2023 – First Steps

First working version. This is the main view of the garden. The view can be panned left and right to see the rest of the garden (which is empty at the moment). When we want to do our bible reading, we tap on the plant, this open the reading page, this first plant is the…
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Jan 23

January 2023 Development Update January 2023 After a quiet period, we had space to work on the app development early this year. In particular one of the developers wanted to start using a “through the whole bible in a year” reading plan and decided to use the app to support this. So. The immediate short…
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