Stephen J.
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Posts by Stephen J.
Help Direct Olive Tree’s BlackBerry BibleReader
February 19, 2009
by Stephen J.
in What's New?
See this blog post for how Olive Tree decides where to spend engineering time.
We would like your help to direct where we should spend our time in the BlackBerry BibleReader.
Click here to take the survey.
Stephen
Help Direct Olive Tree’s iPhone BibleReader
February 12, 2009
We are so excited about the level of enthusiasm and interested in Olive Tree’s iPhone BibleReader! We gets lots of excited users asking us when will feature XYZ be in the iPhone BibleReader. I want to explain a little about how our engineering process works and then give you a chance to help us decide what features to include.
Most engineering teams follow an established work process that was established for a 6-36 month time period with milestone deliverables throughout that process. Most of the time the schedulers underestimated the amount of time the project would take and so the engineering team is almost always behind schedule. (As a side note I usually way underestimate the amount of time something would take. Most projects look “easy” until I am faced with the reality of making something that barely works into production level quality.)
At Olive Tree we take a different approach to scheduling. We know what we are currently working on, we know what we will work on next, and we have a list of things to work on after that. The list is only partially prioritized. When it is time to pick the next item to work on we look a number of factors like what people have been requesting, what we feel is important, what we need to publish certain books, etc to decide what to do next. This allows us to be flexible and quickly change our engineering to meet demands, market shifts, and capture opportunities with vendors or publishers.
This does mean that it will difficult for us to say when we will have feature XYZ done since we don’t actually know ourselves. We do know if that feature appears higher on the to do list that means it will get done sooner, but we haven’t actually scheduled that feature for engineering yet.
We had one of these meetings today for picking the next features. There are so many important features to work on we wanted to get more of your feedback to help us decide. We created a survey you can fill out to help us decide what you would like to see us work on next.
Click here to fill out the survey.
Thank you for your support, help, and enthusiasm!
Stephen Johnson
Senior Software Engineer
Olive Tree Twittering
September 24, 2008
by Stephen J.
in Uncategorized
You can now following the latest and most up to date news at Olive Tree on Twitter. Our Twitter username is OliveTreeBible (http://twitter.com/OliveTreeBible).
The blog is still a great way to keep up with what is happening at Olive Tree. We will continue using the Olive Tree blog in the same way we have been using it. Twitter will accompany the blog with the most up to date postings about what is going on at Olive Tree.
If you are not sure what Twitter is, check this out http://twitter.com/.
You can also follow some of the Olive Tree employees on Twitter. My username is RearCog (http://twitter.com/Rearcog). You can follow Matt in book formatting with matthewlhudson (http://twitter.com/matthewlhudson) and you can follow Mike in tech support with mrborgs (http://twitter.com/mrborgs).
Stephen,
Software Engineer
Free and Early Release Products for Bloggers
August 22, 2008
by Stephen J.
in Uncategorized
Are you a blogger? Would you like free and/or early release products from Olive Tree? We are looking for bloggers who would like to write about the BibleReader. We will give you free and early release products in exchange for you writting about them. You can say what ever you want about the products, good or bad. We only ask that you write at least 200 words.
Right now we are looking for bloggers to write about our new BlackBerry BibleReader beta and our new iPhone beta. If you are a windows mobile, Palm, or Symbian user you time will come (patience is a virture) 
If you are interested please email stephen@olivetree.com with a link to your blog and the device you have. If you are a BlackBerry user can you let me know what product(s) you would like to write about. If you are an iPhone user we have just one beta with a lot of Bibles and books in it.
Stephen
The wait is over – BibleReader is now available on the iPhone :)
August 11, 2008
by Stephen J.
in Uncategorized
Olive Tree’s BibleReader for the iPhone is now available on Apple’s App Store!! There are two bundles you can choose from.
This version has a three tap verse chooser, continuous scrolling, and the books are store locally on your iPhone so that you don’t need an internet connection to read them.
For more information see our iPhone web page.
We are currently working on content management issues. For more information on this you can see the discussion in our forums http://www.olivetree.com/help/forum/viewtopic.php?t=518
BibleTech 2008 Roundup
January 29, 2008
by Stephen J.
in Uncategorized
This years BibleTech was a great event! I enjoyed meeting and talking with so many people that are passionate about the Bible and technology. The highlight of the conference for me was talking with so many people about Bible software and mobile technologies.
I also found Sean Boisen talks on zoomable user interfaces very thought provoking. Almost all of the talks I went to were very applicable and interesting.
You can find some great summaries of some of the talks on palmsolo and blogos.
I also had a great and entertaining time playing rock band with some of the logos developers. Singing is not one of their talents (it certainly isn’t mine)
If you are interested in the Bible and technology I would highly recommend going to the next BibleTech.
Stephen
