OpenWord v1.30.0

Added

• Meet a verse before you build it. A verse learnt for the first time
  now opens with where it sits — its heading and chapter — the text,
  read out if there is a voice, and a box for a word of your own on what
  it is about. Meaning first is what makes words stay, and the word is
  yours: whenever the verse is asked for bare, Your word for it is the
  cue you are given, not the first letters.
• Long verses are built up clause by clause. A verse of fourteen
  words or more is first put together as its opening clause, then the
  first two clauses, and so on to the whole, each step rehearsing the
  last; Build it up · 2 of 4 says where you are, and a wrong step is
  simply asked once more.
• Your memory, measured. Progress now says how long you keep a
  verse against the common run, and that the gaps between recalls have
  been set to match.

Changed

• The ladder is now a memory model. Each verse carries a stability —
  how many days it stays recallable — and a difficulty, and is asked for
  when its chance of recall is reckoned to have fallen to nine in ten,
  rather than on a fixed row of days. A recall grows the stability by
  more the easier the verse, by more again when the verse was left late
  and recalled against the odds, and by less when the answer came slowly;
  a miss keeps a quarter of it and marks the verse harder. The waits run
  a day, two, five, twelve, a month, two, five, and then a year at most,
  so the old ceiling of four months is gone and a verse long known is
  still met now and then. Verses already on the ladder carry their rung
  over. The gaps are also scaled to the reader: a recall made long after
  the verse fell due says you keep verses better than reckoned, and a
  miss made while the chance was still high says the reverse, and the
  whole schedule moves a little each time.
• Easiest first. A session's due verses now come in order of how
  likely they are to be recalled, the surest first, so it warms up before
  the hard ones; verses still to be learnt come last, as before.

---

Every translation is bundled with the app — the World English Bible, the
Berean Standard Bible and the World English Bible, British Edition, all public
domain — along with the book introductions and the maps. Nothing is
downloaded to read it.

From 1.5.0 the app does one thing over the network: it asks GitHub, once a
day, whether a newer release is out, and on Android can fetch and install it
for you. That is the only reason it now asks for the internet and
install-packages permissions, and it can be switched off in Settings, after
which nothing reaches the network at all.

Install the Android APK with adb install OpenWord-*-android.apk, or allow
installation from unknown sources on the device. It is not published on Play.

iOS and macOS builds are not attached because they need an Apple signing
identity; build them yourself with flutter build ipa / flutter build macos.

OpenWord v1.29.0

Added

• Sleep on a new verse, and find out whether it helps. A night's
  sleep soon after learning helps a memory settle: in studies, material
  learnt in the evening and asked for next morning is relearnt faster
  and kept longer. New verses are now timed against sleep. Each one is
  allotted, at random, to be learnt in the evening with its first recall
  next morning, or learnt by day with its first recall a few hours on;
  the lesson card says Learn a new verse tonight in the evening and
  Recall last night's verses in the morning, and tells of verses
  waiting for their time. After a first recall the app asks one thing:
  whether you have slept since learning it. Once five verses of each
  kind are in, Progress reports, for you, how often verses slept on
  were recalled right against verses asked the same day, and a week on.
  Settings → Sleep and new verses chooses measuring it, nights only,
  or off, and when evening and morning are. Verses already on the ladder
  carry on as before.
• How sure are you? Answering from memory now begins with a word on
  how sure you are: sure, fairly sure, or guessing. A miss made while
  sure is the kind most readily corrected once shown, and most likely to
  come back if it is not, so the verdict says so and the verse comes
  round again before the session ends. Progress shows how often you
  were right at each degree of sureness, and how many sure misses there
  have been.
• Guess before you read. A plan chapter not yet read opens with a
  card offering two of its verses to finish before reading; guessing at
  what is about to be read makes it stick, even when the guess is wrong.
  The same two questions wait at the chapter's end, and the card then
  shows the two scores side by side.

---

Every translation is bundled with the app — the World English Bible, the
Berean Standard Bible and the World English Bible, British Edition, all public
domain — along with the book introductions and the maps. Nothing is
downloaded to read it.

From 1.5.0 the app does one thing over the network: it asks GitHub, once a
day, whether a newer release is out, and on Android can fetch and install it
for you. That is the only reason it now asks for the internet and
install-packages permissions, and it can be switched off in Settings, after
which nothing reaches the network at all.

Install the Android APK with adb install OpenWord-*-android.apk, or allow
installation from unknown sources on the device. It is not published on Play.

iOS and macOS builds are not attached because they need an Apple signing
identity; build them yourself with flutter build ipa / flutter build macos.

OpenWord v1.28.0

Changed

• The library is built around learning. It opens on Learn: a line
  for today's goal and the streak, then one button — Today's lesson,
  the verses due followed by five questions, with about how long it
  takes — then the verses being learnt, and the rounds as chips. A
  reader with nothing on the ladder is offered verses worth knowing by
  heart — John 3:16, Psalm 23:1, Romans 8:28 and two dozen more, grouped
  by what they are for — each a tap from the ladder; Add beside the
  list opens the whole set. Progress holds the level, the week, the
  badges and the numbers behind them. Saved holds bookmarks,
  highlights, notes and recent chapters behind one row of choices. The
  reader's button for it all is a mortar board now.

---

Every translation is bundled with the app — the World English Bible, the
Berean Standard Bible and the World English Bible, British Edition, all public
domain — along with the book introductions and the maps. Nothing is
downloaded to read it.

From 1.5.0 the app does one thing over the network: it asks GitHub, once a
day, whether a newer release is out, and on Android can fetch and install it
for you. That is the only reason it now asks for the internet and
install-packages permissions, and it can be switched off in Settings, after
which nothing reaches the network at all.

Install the Android APK with adb install OpenWord-*-android.apk, or allow
installation from unknown sources on the device. It is not published on Play.

iOS and macOS builds are not attached because they need an Apple signing
identity; build them yourself with flutter build ipa / flutter build macos.

OpenWord v1.27.0

Added

• Android Auto. OpenWord is a media app to the car. Its screen lists
  Continue listening, which takes up where listening left off down to
  the word, Today’s reading from any plan under way, Recent chapters,
  and every book and chapter under Books, grouped by testament; a
  chapter plays from the car with no screen of the app open, and goes on
  to the next. "Play Psalm 23" works through the car's assistant, and a
  request it cannot place takes up where listening left off. A plan
  chapter heard to its end in the car is ticked off like one heard in the
  app. The phone's own screen, when it is opened, takes the voice over.

---

Every translation is bundled with the app — the World English Bible, the
Berean Standard Bible and the World English Bible, British Edition, all public
domain — along with the book introductions and the maps. Nothing is
downloaded to read it.

From 1.5.0 the app does one thing over the network: it asks GitHub, once a
day, whether a newer release is out, and on Android can fetch and install it
for you. That is the only reason it now asks for the internet and
install-packages permissions, and it can be switched off in Settings, after
which nothing reaches the network at all.

Install the Android APK with adb install OpenWord-*-android.apk, or allow
installation from unknown sources on the device. It is not published on Play.

iOS and macOS builds are not attached because they need an Apple signing
identity; build them yourself with flutter build ipa / flutter build macos.

OpenWord v1.26.0

Added

• Points, levels and a daily goal. Every right answer earns XP — 10
  for a verse on the ladder and more the higher it stands, 5 for a
  question — with a bonus for three, five and ten right in a row and
  20 on top for a perfect round. Points add up to a level, quick to come
  at first and slower later, and towards a daily goal of your choosing:
  gentle, steady, keen or intense. The Learn tab opens on a ring for
  the day, the level and its bar, the streak, and the last seven days as
  bars against the goal.
• Badges. Twelve to win, each once: the first step, a week and a
  month of fire, ten verses on the ladder, a verse known after a month
  away and five of them, a perfect round, a verse written out, one put
  together from hearing it, a hundred right answers, a week of goals met,
  and the fifth level. The Learn tab shows them won and still to win,
  with what wins each.
• Streak freezes. Every seventh day kept up earns a freeze, two at
  most, and a freeze is spent unasked the first time a day is missed, so
  one bad day does not undo a month. Shown as snowflakes beside the
  streak.
• The end of a session says how it went. Points earned, right out of
  answered, the best run of right answers, the goal if this is what met
  it, a new level, any badge won, and the streak — under a shower of
  confetti when there is something to celebrate. Rounds end the same
  way. A right answer taps back, a wrong one thumps.
• The voice throughout learning. Practice and the rounds now speak
  the way a language app does, in the app's own voice: a verse is read
  as it appears where it is shown, each tile is heard as it is tapped,
  and the verse is read whole once an answer is checked. Which book?
  reads the verse it asks about and Finish the verse reads the half it
  shows, then the whole once answered. Beside the speaker is Hear it
  slowly, at two thirds of the pace. A button on each screen, and a
  switch under Learning in Settings, turns the automatic reading off;
  the speaker button works either way. Not on the web, which has no
  voice.

---

Every translation is bundled with the app — the World English Bible, the
Berean Standard Bible and the World English Bible, British Edition, all public
domain — along with the book introductions and the maps. Nothing is
downloaded to read it.

From 1.5.0 the app does one thing over the network: it asks GitHub, once a
day, whether a newer release is out, and on Android can fetch and install it
for you. That is the only reason it now asks for the internet and
install-packages permissions, and it can be switched off in Settings, after
which nothing reaches the network at all.

Install the Android APK with adb install OpenWord-*-android.apk, or allow
installation from unknown sources on the device. It is not published on Play.

iOS and macOS builds are not attached because they need an Apple signing
identity; build them yourself with flutter build ipa / flutter build macos.

OpenWord v1.25.0

Added

• Practice that asks, and checks. A verse on the ladder is no longer
  taken on trust: each practice sets an exercise its rung calls for and
  marks the answer. A new verse is put together from tiles with the text
  in view; then its blanks are filled from a bank of words; then it is
  put together unseen — heard first, where the device has a voice — and
  then written out, with a slip of a letter forgiven. A right answer
  climbs a rung; a wrong one, or Show me, drops to the bottom and the
  verse comes round again before the session ends. Hint shows the
  first letters without costing anything.
• Hear the verse. Practice has a speaker button that reads the verse
  in the app's own voice, as Listen does; Tap what you hear plays it
  as the exercise opens.
• A streak. Days in a row with learning done — a verse answered, or a
  round finished — shown as a flame on the Learn tab and at the end of
  a session or a round, with the best run kept. A day missed ends it;
  nothing nags. The streak goes into the backup and the better of two is
  kept on restore.
• Test yourself. The library's Learn tab offers rounds of ten
  questions drawn from the translation being read, never the same round
  twice. Which book? shows a verse and asks which book it is from, with
  the other choices from the same testament. Finish the verse shows the
  first half of a verse and asks how it goes on. Books in order asks
  which book comes before or after another. A bit of everything shuffles
  the three. A wrong answer shows the right one, every answer has the
  passage a tap away, and the end of a round lists the ones missed, each
  leading to its passage. The deuterocanon is asked about only when it is
  shown.

Changed

• The practice prompts are gone, replaced by the exercises above: a
  verse is read over, hinted or asked bare by what it is put to, not by
  a choice at the top of the screen.
• Memory is now Learn. The library tab that held the verses being
  memorised holds the rounds as well, with the memory verses beneath them.

---

Every translation is bundled with the app — the World English Bible, the
Berean Standard Bible and the World English Bible, British Edition, all public
domain — along with the book introductions and the maps. Nothing is
downloaded to read it.

From 1.5.0 the app does one thing over the network: it asks GitHub, once a
day, whether a newer release is out, and on Android can fetch and install it
for you. That is the only reason it now asks for the internet and
install-packages permissions, and it can be switched off in Settings, after
which nothing reaches the network at all.

Install the Android APK with adb install OpenWord-*-android.apk, or allow
installation from unknown sources on the device. It is not published on Play.

iOS and macOS builds are not attached because they need an Apple signing
identity; build them yourself with flutter build ipa / flutter build macos.

OpenWord v1.24.0

Added

• Learn a verse by heart. A verse's sheet offers Memorise, and the
  verse goes on a ladder: it is asked for today, then after a day, three
  days, a week, a fortnight, a month, two and four — climbing a rung each
  time you have it and dropping to the bottom when you do not, so what you
  know well is asked rarely and what you are still learning is asked
  often. Memory, a new tab in the library, lists the verses with when
  each is next due and practises the ones due today, one after another:
  read it over, see only the first letter of each word, or nothing but the
  reference, then show the verse and say whether you had it. A verse not
  recalled comes round again before the session ends. A dot on the library
  button says something is due. Memory verses go into the backup and are
  merged on restore like everything else.

---

Every translation is bundled with the app — the World English Bible, the
Berean Standard Bible and the World English Bible, British Edition, all public
domain — along with the book introductions and the maps. Nothing is
downloaded to read it.

From 1.5.0 the app does one thing over the network: it asks GitHub, once a
day, whether a newer release is out, and on Android can fetch and install it
for you. That is the only reason it now asks for the internet and
install-packages permissions, and it can be switched off in Settings, after
which nothing reaches the network at all.

Install the Android APK with adb install OpenWord-*-android.apk, or allow
installation from unknown sources on the device. It is not published on Play.

iOS and macOS builds are not attached because they need an Apple signing
identity; build them yourself with flutter build ipa / flutter build macos.

OpenWord v1.23.1

Changed

• Books are listed with their short forms. Each book in the book list
  now shows its abbreviation — Gen, Exo, 1Sa, Phm — beside its name, the
  way references are written and the way they can be typed into the
  search. The book being read has its short form highlighted.

---

Every translation is bundled with the app — the World English Bible, the
Berean Standard Bible and the World English Bible, British Edition, all public
domain — along with the book introductions and the maps. Nothing is
downloaded to read it.

From 1.5.0 the app does one thing over the network: it asks GitHub, once a
day, whether a newer release is out, and on Android can fetch and install it
for you. That is the only reason it now asks for the internet and
install-packages permissions, and it can be switched off in Settings, after
which nothing reaches the network at all.

Install the Android APK with adb install OpenWord-*-android.apk, or allow
installation from unknown sources on the device. It is not published on Play.

iOS and macOS builds are not attached because they need an Apple signing
identity; build them yourself with flutter build ipa / flutter build macos.

OpenWord v1.23.0

Fixed

• Gibberish at the end of a phrase. A long sentence was cut into pieces
  at a plain space where there was no comma to cut at, and the voice,
  finding no punctuation after the last word of a piece, swallowed that
  word or said something else a third of the time — "said let the" came
  out "said let me", "was evening and" as "…and twice". Pieces are now cut
  at verses, sentence ends and commas, and one that still ends mid-phrase
  is given a comma, which a speech recogniser run over the result hears
  put every last word right.
• The highlight did not keep up with the voice. The voice said where
  it was only at the start of each piece it spoke, and a piece could run
  across several verses, so the highlight stayed on the first until the
  piece ended. Every verse now begins a piece of its own, and the
  highlight moves the moment the voice reaches it, at any speed.

Changed

• 1× is the voice's natural pace. The runtime slowed each of Kitten's
  voices to four fifths of the pace it was trained at, which is why 1.25×
  sounded right; that is divided back out. A speed chosen before is
  carried over as the one that sounds the same.
• One loudness from verse to verse. Each piece is brought gently
  towards the same level, by no more than 3 dB, before the peak limit.

---

Every translation is bundled with the app — the World English Bible, the
Berean Standard Bible and the World English Bible, British Edition, all public
domain — along with the book introductions and the maps. Nothing is
downloaded to read it.

From 1.5.0 the app does one thing over the network: it asks GitHub, once a
day, whether a newer release is out, and on Android can fetch and install it
for you. That is the only reason it now asks for the internet and
install-packages permissions, and it can be switched off in Settings, after
which nothing reaches the network at all.

Install the Android APK with adb install OpenWord-*-android.apk, or allow
installation from unknown sources on the device. It is not published on Play.

iOS and macOS builds are not attached because they need an Apple signing
identity; build them yourself with flutter build ipa / flutter build macos.

OpenWord v1.22.0

Added

• The licences, in the app. Settings credits the voice — KittenTTS,
  Apache-2.0; sherpa-onnx and ONNX Runtime; and eSpeak NG, GPL-3.0, with a
  link to the source of the version built in — and a new Licences entry
  shows the full text of every licence, the voice's among them. eSpeak NG
  is compiled into the library the voice runs on, so the app as built is
  distributed under the GPL-3.0 as well as the MIT licence of its code.

Changed

• One voice, built in. Reading aloud is now always in KittenTTS, the
  open neural voice, which ships inside the app: nothing to download, and
  Listen works straight after installing, with no connection. Its eight
  speakers are chosen in the voice sheet. Kokoro and the device's own
  voices are gone, and with them the flutter_tts plugin; a voice chosen from
  either before is read as Kitten's first. The files 1.21.0 downloaded are
  deleted. The download is about 55 MB larger for it.
• Kitten is at full precision. The 8-bit edition 1.21.0 offered now and
  then made a garbled sound — KittenML itself warns of it — and was, on the
  processors tried, three times slower to make speech than the full one.
• Reading aloud on Linux, which it never did before, since the voice no
  longer comes from a plugin Linux lacks. Not on the web any longer: a
  browser cannot run the voice.

Fixed

• OpenWord's voice took a long time to start, and paused part way.
  Its model was loaded only when Listen was tapped, and a model's first
  run is far slower than any after it; it is now loaded, and run once, in
  the background as the app opens for anyone who has listened before.
  Nothing was heard until the first piece had been made whole, and that
  could be a long sentence; the first piece is now forty characters at
  most, cut where the words allow, and each after it may be twice as long,
  so the voice starts almost at once and keeps ahead. Reading was handed
  over a passage at a time, each starting from nothing, which was a
  silence every minute or so; the voice now has the rest of the chapter at
  once, and three pieces are made ahead instead of one. Where a device
  still cannot keep up, the reader says so once.
• A crackle on the loudest syllables. The voice's output can go past
  full scale, and the loudest samples were cut off flat as they were written
  out. A piece that would be is now made a little quieter as a whole.

---

Every translation is bundled with the app — the World English Bible, the
Berean Standard Bible and the World English Bible, British Edition, all public
domain — along with the book introductions and the maps. Nothing is
downloaded to read it.

From 1.5.0 the app does one thing over the network: it asks GitHub, once a
day, whether a newer release is out, and on Android can fetch and install it
for you. That is the only reason it now asks for the internet and
install-packages permissions, and it can be switched off in Settings, after
which nothing reaches the network at all.

Install the Android APK with adb install OpenWord-*-android.apk, or allow
installation from unknown sources on the device. It is not published on Play.

iOS and macOS builds are not attached because they need an Apple signing
identity; build them yourself with flutter build ipa / flutter build macos.