Month: November 2014

Using Drafts and Pythonista for Quick Bible Verses (ESV)

Ben Volio Technology , , , , , , ,

This workflow has been turned into the BibleDraft project. Visit that page for more info.

I have long had the desire to have quick access to the text of bible verses. Maybe I want to email it, text it, put it in Day One, or just have it for my immediate consumption. I've always felt that the Bible apps were too slow or had too many taps for that time when you just need to get the verse and move things forward.

So while on vacation this summer I took two of my favorite apps, Drafts and Pythonista and built a very simple Bible action. Drafts is perfect for this because when you open it up, it's ready to accept text. And I'd already modified a Python script for Editorial to take sermon notes with inline Bible verses. So I took those two tools and created a simple Drafts action to:

  1. Take the draft, needs to be a Bible verse (call me Captain Obvious)
  2. Send the reference to Pythonista
  3. run a Python script entitled “quick ESV verse” and have Pythonista pull the reference text from the ESV Bible's API
  4. Return the reference as bold markdown with the verses on the lines below it.

And that's all the action was designed to do. For the 3 people in the world who:

  • use Drafts
  • use Pythonista
  • use the ESV translation
  • are dissatisfied with the speed of looking up verses in their current Bible app

I hope you find this helpful. Grab the “Quick ESV” action for Drafts and create a script in Pythonista entitled “quick ESV verse.py” with the code below or if you have the “New from Gist” workflow installed in Pythonista you can get the link here.

Update 1: I realize that the way I tweaked the Drafts Action now requires Drafts 4. Some of you may still be running Drafts 3. If that’s the case let me know and I’ll update the script so it works on both versions

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