Xiphos 4.0.0

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.