For the past year I’ve been working during my free time on a personal project called White Paper Bible (http://www.whitepaperbible.org) under the umbrella of my development company, Simply Profound (http://www.simplyprofound.com). Just launched is a micro-site promoting White Paper Bible and the companion iPhone app (http://app.whitepaperbible.org).

White Paper Bible is a personal Bible study tool that can be used as a daily devotional, a topical Bible, a Bible promises reference, and pretty much whatever a user can think to do with it. Users collect verses by whatever grouping is meaningful to them. One of my favorite features is the ability to stream a professional recording playlist of the entire user-created paper.

What’s with the name? A “white paper” is commonly defined as “an authoritative report or guide that often addresses problems and how to solve them; used to educate and help make decisions”. Well, that sums of the Bible for most Christians. And it works on other levels too, but I’ll leave that for you to discover.

For a quick overview of the tech bits, the site is built with Ruby on Rails and some jQuery love. I use Shadowbox.js for the paper “focus” feature that displays inline divs. The iPhone app is native Obj-C and talks to the site via JSON calls facilitated by HTTPRiot (http://labratrevenge.com/httpriot/). The site talks to the ESV Bible web service (http://www.esvapi.org) using a forked version of Geoffrey Dagley’s great ESV Bible gem (http://github.com/gdagley/esv_bible).

The iPhone app is not currently available in the App Store, but as soon as it is I’ll post a link here.