It’s been a while since I talked about PocketBible for Android so I thought I’d give you an update.

Before going further, you can download the PocketBible for Android alpha version here. Make sure you read the entire post because it’s the only place you’ll find any instructions for downloading and using the program. A lot of your questions will be answered there.

Suffice to say this project is taking me longer than I had hoped. The main issue has been being able to spend as much time on it as I want. You have to understand that I have a broad range of responsibilities here. If I spend 100% of my time programming, we won’t have any new Bibles and books for you, publishers won’t get paid any royalties, employees won’t get paid, and problems on the website won’t get fixed. You may not have noticed, but we’ve released more new books in the last three months than in the entire year before that. The people who do that for us report to me, and I am responsible for acquiring content from publishers so that I can keep them busy.

Current Status

The version of PocketBible I’m running in-house is able to handle dictionaries, commentaries, and “other” books. No devotionals yet. No “look up” function and no searching.

In order to release this version to you, I need to rebuild all our books because PocketBible for Android requires a few extra pieces of information in the LBK file. Because that will be a major task involving probably two or three people for a week or two, I want to make sure I get it right. That is, I don’t want to get half-way through and discover I left something out. Or worse, get all the way done and only then discover I have to re-do it because something isn’t right.

The search functionality of the Android program is going to be more like what you’re used to on the Web. That is, when you use Google to find “Jesus AND Peter” you just type “Jesus Peter” and it finds everywhere both of those words occur in close proximity. And if you want to find all the forms of the word “baptism” you would just enter “baptism” and you’d expect Google to find “baptist”, “baptize”, “baptized”, and of course “baptism”. In PocketBible you would have to type “bapt*”. The Android version of PocketBible will do this search for you automagically like Google does.

Currently if you enter “nibachanezer” for “Nebuchadnezzar” you won’t find anything. The Android version of PocketBible will figure out that you probably meant “Nebuchadnezzar” and show you the verses in which that word occurs.

In order to support this new search algorithm, there are a couple new indexes I need to add to the LBK file. I need to do that before I can rebuild all the books, and I need to rebuild all the books before I can release the latest alpha version of PocketBible for Android. I hope to get all of that done before Christmas. Or at least enough of it that I can go ahead and release the update.

The Challenges

Some of you have been quick to complain about the pace of development. All I can do is remind you that our mantra for twenty years was “we don’t comment on what may or may not be under development”. If this was any previous version of PocketBible, we wouldn’t even tell you we were working on it, let alone give you access to a pre-release version. Sure, it’s not full-featured, but it isn’t nothing.

Mobile software development is a challenge for small shops like ours. There are no good solutions. Consider the fact that when we started Laridian there were two dominant platforms: Windows CE and Palm OS. Both were programmed using the C++ programming language that we already knew from our prior experience programming for Windows PCs. Today the two dominant platforms are iPhone and Android. iPhone uses Objective-C and supports non-user-interface objects created in C++. Its operating system is based on the familiar Mac OS X. Android uses the Java programming language and has a proprietary operating system that is still evolving. And if we throw Windows Phone into the mix, it uses C# as its programming language. The result is that we can’t be like diplomats who have to learn the language of their host country, but rather we have to be like a representative to the United Nations whose headset is broken so he has to understand every language being spoken by all the other delegates.

Next Steps

After this release, I’ll add support for devotionals. That mainly amounts to adding a calendar-style “go-to” function and rebuilding all the devotionals. Next up will be searching, then support for all the user-created data like notes, highlights, and bookmarks. You can expect enhanced notes functionality as compared to the iPhone and other versions of PocketBible, and potentially some enhanced synchronization features.

We just heard from Apple saying that 2.0.3 has been approved. You should already be seeing the update in iTunes on your device. We recommend everyone grab this update, as it fixes a few little problems. It also adds a couple of small enhancements that should make the program more enjoyable to use.

If you’re still running 1.4.7 or an earlier version you need to follow the instructions here to get this new version. Version 2.0.3 is not an automatic update to 1.4.7 or any 1.x.x version of PocketBible.

Enhancements

Double-tap on any image to blow it up in a window where it can be zoomed and scrolled. This is handy for maps and some of the detailed charts that appear in some study Bibles and reference books. It works best to go into Settings and tell it to fit images to the screen, then just double-tap them when you want to view them in detail.

If an image has links in it, those links are “hot” in the zoom view. Most images do not have links, but the maps in our Laridian Maps product do.

Books and voices are now marked as “non-purgeable” as they are downloaded. We got some reports that iOS would delete your books if it needed space for another app. This can be disturbing when you discover that books you spent a long time downloading are suddenly gone. By marking these as non-purgeable, Apple promises us they won’t delete them.

Note that while we retroactively mark your existing books as non-purgeable, and that we mark books and voices as non-purgeable as they are downloaded, we do not mark existing voices as non-purgeable due to the complexity of the file structure for voices. If you operate on the edge of available memory and want to make sure your voice files get marked as non-purgeable, you should delete them with Add/Remove Books, then download them again.

If there’s only one book open in a tab, we use that book’s abbreviation as the title for the tab rather than using the book’s category (“Bibles”, “Commentaries”, etc.) as the tab title.

Fixes

On iOS versions prior to 3.2, there were controls to allow you to turn on the tabbed interface even if you didn’t own the Advanced Feature Set. Unfortunately this didn’t really give you the full features of the tabbed interface because the rest of the program would get confused by the fact that you had tabs turned on but did not own the Advanced Feature Set. This version fixes that by hiding those controls.

Printing, emailing, or texting the selected text could crash or do nothing. This has been fixed.

We believe we’ve fixed a problem in which the text window was offset right and up so you could see the gray background behind the text window. This only happened to some users and only under certain circumstances. We could only duplicate it on one of our iPhones. It wasn’t related to which version of iOS you were running or which type of device you had (though I think we only saw it on iPhones and iPod touch devices, not iPads). What it was related to was the version of the development tools we used.

Turns out Apple swapped out a portion of the compiler that converts our Objective-C programming code into the machine code that runs on the phone. The new compiler apparently generates flawed code. (Compare to what happens when an inexperienced translator flubs up the translation of a speech at the United Nations. The original speech is fine but the translation doesn’t say what the original speaker said. That’s what happened to our code. Our code was correct by Apple’s translation of it made the device do something different.) We fixed it by turning off all the special optimizations that the compiler can do for us. Hopefully another programmer will be able to demonstrate this bug in some simple way so Apple can fix it. We were never able to do it reliably, so we couldn’t report it.

As I said, everyone should install this update. You don’t need to re-download your books or voices, nor do you need to sync your personal data after you update. This is just a normal program update that won’t affect anything you’ve downloaded nor any of your notes, highlights, or bookmarks.

We’ve just been notified that our latest update to PocketBible (version 2.0.2) has been approved by Apple. It should become available in the App Store over the next 24 hours.

This update mostly affects people at either end of the range of supported iOS versions. For those of you still running some version of iOS less than 3.2 (primarily those of you with first-generation iPod touch devices running 3.1.3) you’ll finally get to see what PocketBible 2 looks like. Both the initial release and the 2.0.1 update had problems that prevented them from running on those devices. We had been relying on our development tools to tell us if we were using features of iOS that were not present on those older devices. Unfortunately, it turns out they are very silent on that issue. We’ve learned our lesson and have “downgraded” an old iPhone to 3.0 for testing. (Previously we were limited to running 3.2 in the iPhone emulator.) As a result we’ve been able to identify the issues that were preventing PocketBible from running on 3.0 and 3.1 devices.

On the other end of the iOS version spectrum we ran into an interesting bug in iOS 5. When we put verses on the pasteboard (that’s “clipboard” everywhere else but in Apple Land), we always store both a plain-text version and an HTML version. This allows applications that understand HTML to paste nicely formatted text, including superscripted verse numbers, words of Christ in red, and bold headings. Simpler applications expecting only plain text have the option of requesting just the plain text from the pasteboard.

When an application pastes data from the pasteboard, it specifies what format it wants. Unfortunately, in iOS 5, when an application asks for the traditional “utf8-plain-text” that has worked in all iOS versions since the beginning of time (OK, since iOS 2), the operating system will not give it the “utf8-plain-text” version of the pasteboard text, but instead will substitute something else — in our case, the HTML text that is also there. Since the pasting application neither expects nor understand HTML, it treats it as plain text and pastes it, tags and all, into your document.

To get around this, we have to add a third form of the text to the pasteboard, which is identified simply as “text”. This version is identical to the more correct “utf8-plain-text” that has worked on previous iOS versions. Doing this tricks iOS 5 into supplying plain text to apps that request it, so that pasted verses no longer include HTML tags.

On the subject of iOS 5, it introduced some new fonts and some new ways of identifying old fonts. Since iOS makes it very difficult to determine if a font provides the bold, italic, and bold/italic versions that PocketBible requires, we use a somewhat fragile technique to try to make that determination by looking at the names of the fonts. This didn’t work exactly right in iOS 5. The result was that Helvetica Neue was displayed as condensed and bold, and both Optima and Hoefler Text were missing from the list of available fonts. This has been fixed and the code reinforced so that hopefully it will do a better job identifying fonts in the future.

Some of you have had the unfortunate experience of selecting two or three verse and when you ask PocketBible to highlight the selected verses, it highlights the rest of your Bible. This happens when the end of your selection is right on the little gap between paragraphs. This is fixed in version 2.0.2 so that your entire Bible isn’t highlighted when you only want to highlight a couple verses.

Finally, probably because of the load that PocketBible 2 has put on our servers, many of you ended up with corrupted book files. Since PocketBible can’t read the file (the were corrupted during download) it can only identify the book by its 8-character alphanumeric file name. So you would see a message that “0065001d.lbk” was damaged, but there was no way to know what book that was so that you could re-download it. This message came up every time you ran PocketBible. The new version deletes damaged books automatically so that you won’t be nagged by warning messages.

For all the complaining we do about the App Store approval process, this update was approved in about 24 hours. Hard to complain about that!

We’ve just been notified that PocketBible for iOS version 2.0.1 has been approved. This is essentially an update that tries to squash the inevitable little bugs that show up in any x.0.0 version.

Some of you were completely unable to run PocketBible at all. Turns out if you weren’t running a relatively recent version of the operating system, PocketBible would display its splash screen then immediately exit. This has been fixed. We were all somewhat surprised we hadn’t found that problem before releasing the program, since it was trivial to reproduce once we set our minds to it. We get used to our programming tools warning us when we try to do something that’s not available in older versions of the OS and don’t always test for compatibility as thoroughly as we could.

Some of you were surprised to hear Heather or Ryan or one of our other voices start reading the Bible to you when you hung up after a phone call. Turns out if you paused PocketBible’s synthesized voice instead of stopping it, then any interruption would restart the reading. That was an easy fix once I figured out what was going on. Sorry if it caught you at an inopportune time.

This brings up an interesting point: You probably didn’t realize that the “mute” switch on your iPad or iPhone is only a “suggestion” to the device. You might think you’re turning off the sound, but you’re not. Apple treats the iPod app and other apps that play “foreground” sound (such as PocketBible) as immune from the effects of the mute switch. They believe you only intend to mute background sounds from games, key clicks, and that kind of thing when you flip the mute switch. Hmmm.

A couple of you reported that you only had two panes/tabs on your iPhone after upgrading to the Advanced Feature Set, instead of the advertised five panes/tabs. It could be fixed by exiting the program and re-launching. We were able to find the problem and fix it so you won’t have to do that in the future.

While printing out one of my own sermon notes I discovered the Autostudy CSS settings for ordered and unordered lists were overriding my list types. So my nice outline with roman numerals and upper/lower case letters was displayed with all arabic numerals. I made a change to the default CSS so this won’t happen.

Some of you were able to crash the program while doing a “Paste to Email” or “Paste to Text” operation. When we looked at the code, it looked like it should always crash, yet it never crashed for us and it didn’t crash for many of you. So this is one of those cases where we’re not sure why it ever worked at all. Nevertheless, it’s fixed in 2.0.1.

Finally, we got a nice note from Apple saying they were concerned about the effect our Bibles and books would have on the amount of data backed up to their new iCloud service. Data that can be re-downloaded from our server, they said, should not be stored in a directory that is automatically backed up. We see it the other way. We think you’d like to have your entire PocketBible library restored when restoring from a backup set, without having to separately log into our server (and any other server for any other program you might have with ebooks or other downloadable data). We read the developer documentation as “suggesting” that we don’t do that, so after considering the suggestion we decided to leave it the way it was.

However, Apple seemed really concerned about the few dollars this might cost them in additional hard drive space for iCloud, and given that they’ve gone through some tough times lately we decided to help them out. Version 2.0.1 automatically moves your books to a folder that does not get backed up to iCloud. So if you ever have to restore a backup, you’ll have to log into your account on our server and re-download your books. Just don’t everyone do it at the same time.

By the time you read this, PocketBible 2 for iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch should be available in the App Store. It introduces several new features and a new pricing scheme.

Quick Summary for the Horribly Impatient

PocketBible 2 is called “PocketBible” in the App Store. It is a free download. PocketBible 1 (“PocketBible FREE” in the App Store) is no longer available in the App Store. YOU MUST DOWNLOAD THE NEW POCKETBIBLE FROM THE APP STORE IN ORDER TO GET THE ADVANCED FEATURES MENTIONED BELOW. Some of you are trying use the feature set upgrade on the old PocketBible FREE 1.4.7. That won’t work. You must download the new PocketBible from the App store in order to get the advanced features mentioned below. There’s a link to PocketBible 2 in the next paragraph.

Click here to download the new version of PocketBible. (NOTE: Do not skip this step!)

The free version of PocketBible 2 has pretty much the same features as PocketBible 1.4.7 (one exception is described below). To get the new features, you need to purchase the “Advanced Feature Set” either at our website ($4.99) or through In-App Purchase inside the app ($5.99).

After you purchase the upgrade at our website, go to “Buy/Apply Upgrade” inside the app to apply the upgrade and enable the advanced features. You must provide your Laridian login credentials during this step so the program can find your purchase on our website.

If you have notes, highlights, bookmarks, or devotional reading progress you want to preserve, you need to move that data to your new copy of PocketBible using the process described below (and also in the built-in help). To get your Bibles and books into the new version, you need to simply download them using Menu > Add/Remove Books.

All PocketBible users should switch to the new version even if you don’t upgrade to the Advanced Feature Set. The old version of PocketBible will not be updated and has been removed from the App Store.

New Features in Free Version

The free version of PocketBible 2 has essentially the same features as PocketBible 1.4.7. The only significant new feature in the free version is related to expanding the Toolbox. In version 1, the expanded toolbox covered the Bible text. When we first implemented the expanding Toolbox, we figured it would be a temporary action. However, we’ve found that we prefer to have the Toolbox expanded while entering notes, and it’s inconvenient to have to collapse it to view the BIble text. So now PocketBible moves the active pane to the empty space above/below/next to the expanded Toolbox. And if the keyboard obscures part of the pane, the pane is shrunk again to fit in the available space.

All PocketBible users should switch to PocketBible 2. Version 1 has been removed from the App Store and won’t be updated. To make sure you get the latest bug fixes and updates, you should make the switch now to version 2 even if you’re not planning to purchase the Advanced Feature Set. This unfortunate circumstance is the result of the way Apple has us sign and identify applications.

Advanced Features

To access the advanced features in PocketBible 2, you need to purchase the “Advanced Feature Set” — either inside the app for $5.99 or directly on our website for $4.99. Advanced features include:

• Automatic verse studies. Select a verse and PocketBible prepares an HTML or plain-text document chock full of information about that verse from your Library. This file can be viewed from within PocketBible, transferred to your Windows or Mac computer through iTunes, printed using AirPrint, or copied and pasted to an email. Each Verse Autostudy report includes:
  • The text of the selected verse from all your Bibles (you choose which ones)
  • The text of the selected verse with Strong’s numbers (if you own one of our Bibles with Strong’s numbers)
  • The definition of each English word in the verse from all of your dictionaries (you choose which ones)
  • The definition of each Strong’s word number from your Strong’s dictionaries (you choose which ones)
  • Commentary on the verse from all your commentaries (you choose which ones)
  • Cross references from the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge (if you have it installed)
• Automatic word studies. Select a word and PocketBible prepares a similar HTML document, this time with information about the selected word. Each Word Autostudy report includes:
  • Definition of the selected word from all of your dictionaries (you choose which ones)
  • A summary of search results from selected Bibles (you choose which ones)
  • A list of related Strong’s numbers (original language words translated to the selected word)
  • Definitions of the related Strong’s word numbers (you select which Strong’s dictionaries)
• Synthesized voices read any Bible or book to you. Purchase a voice from a selection of six English and three Spanish voices, and PocketBible will read to you! Works with any of your Bibles or other books, does not require an internet connection once the voice is installed, and takes only about 50MB-75MB (compared to
  4000MB for a pre-recorded audio Bible). Start a playlist of hymns and have PocketBible read to you from the Psalms for an inspiring time of daily devotions. Or have PocketBible read while you do other tasks on your iPad. No other mobile Bible program can do all that.
• New tabbed view. Both iPhone and iPad now support up to five panes (iPhone was previously only two panes) and you can choose to view five full-screen tabs instead of splitting the screen into panes. Just select a tab to view the books open in that tab.
• Automatically open all your books into tabs. PocketBible will open Bibles, commentaries, dictionaries, devotionals, and “other” books each into their own tabs for easy access to your entire library.
• AirPrint support (iOS 4.2 or later). Print Autostudy reports, passages, or selected text to your AirPrint-capable printer.
• Improved text selection. Drag through any text to select it. Copy, print, speak, or perform other operations on the selected text. Uses familiar iOS interface components (such as the magnifying glass and lollipop-shaped “drag handles”). (This seems obvious but we had to implement them from scratch as Apple doesn’t expose those components to developers, so it seems worth mentioning.)
• Highlight selected verses. Highlight more than one verse at a time by dragging through any portion of the verses, then select “Highlight selected verses”. You can’t highlight portions of a verse, but you can highlight more than one verse at a time.

Apple Changed the Rules

As many of you know, Apple now requires that ebook apps like ours must not link to a website for add-on book sales, but must use Apple’s In-App Purchasing (IAP) capability and pay Apple 30% of each sale for doing little more than processing a credit card (which costs them about 3%). Amazon responded to this by entirely removing all links to their website from their Kindle app. We opted to implement Apple’s IAP but at a slightly higher price to offset Apple’s fee. (You’ll pay on average about 17.6% more for a book you buy using IAP vs. purchasing direct on our site, which results in us splitting the 30% fee 50/50. The proof is left for the reader.)

This would have very little consequence except that PocketBible 1.4.7 was created in a way that prevented it from ever using IAP. As a result, version 2 could not simply be a new version of the existing “PocketBible FREE” application. Instead it had to be a separate product. This is confusing for those of you upgrading from version 1, but should not be a problem in the future.

Moving Your Notes, Highlights, Bookmarks and Daily Reading Progress to the New Program

Since PocketBible 2 is a different program than PocketBIble 1, you will need to move any notes, highlights, bookmarks, and daily reading progress that you want to keep from PocketBible 1. Again, this is only necessary if you have data you want to preserve. To do that:

• Launch the old version of PocketBible. Verify it’s the old one by looking at the version number at the bottom of the menu. Next to “About PocketBible” it should say “1.x.x” (the latest version is 1.4.7).
• Choose Menu > Manage My Data.
• Enter your Laridian login credentials and select either “Sync My Data With Server” (if you’ve been sync’ing your data with the server in the past) or “Back Up My Data To Server”. Note that if you have been keeping your data in sync with the server and you know it is up to date, you can skip this step.
• When that is complete, exit PocketBible and launch the new PocketBible program.
• Verify you are in the new PocketBible program by going to the bottom of the menu. Next to “About PocketBible” it should say “2.0.0″ (or later).
• If you have not yet registered, do so now. (You’ll see “Register PocketBible” near the top of the menu if you haven’t registered.)
• Choose Menu > Manage My Data.
• Enter your Laridian login credentials and select either “Sync My Data With Server” (if that’s what you did in version 1) or Restore From a Backup (if you used “Back Up My Data To Server” above). If you are restoring from a back up, you’ll be presented with a list of backup sets. Find the section labelled with the name of your device followed by “com.laridian.PocketBible” and choose the top item from that list (the most recent backup).
• When that is complete, you have transferred your personal notes, highlights, etc. to PocketBible 2. You can remove the old PocketBible program from your device and download Bibles and reference books into PocketBIble 2.

Some Screen Shots

Here are some quick screen shots to give you an idea of some of the new and improved features.

Before you get too excited, let me tell you more about this version of PocketBible for Android.

First, you can’t download it if you’re with AT&T unless you’ve done some magic to your phone to allow it to install “non-Market” applications, and I don’t even know if such magic is possible. There may be other carriers or devices that prohibit you from installing programs from “unknown sources”.

Second, this is an alpha, not a beta, version of the program. That means there are many features that are not implemented. You don’t normally see software when it is at this stage of development. However, the demand has been so great that we’ve agreed to do something we haven’t done in the 23 years I’ve been in the Bible software business. You shouldn’t hold this app to the same standards you hold other apps. Not even to the same standards you hold our apps.

Third, there really isn’t any support for this program. There’s not a “department” for it in the Help Desk. In fact nobody in Tech Support has seen it. I’m the only one here who knows anything about it and I don’t have time to hold anyone’s hand. As I’ve said before, this is a you asked for it, you got it release.

Fourth, this version only supports Bibles, not commentaries, dictionaries, devotionals, etc. And some of the Bibles aren’t working. In particular, the NIV, NET, and BBE Bibles are known to either be missing from the list or don’t work.

Installation Instructions

Below you’ll find a link to the PocketBible APK file on our server. You should browse to that address using the browser on your phone. If you do it that way, the program will be installed automatically. You just answer a few questions. If you are an expert Android user, running a rooted Android-powered toaster oven with your own custom build of the OS, you may have another favorite way of installing non-Market apps. That’s fine; whatever floats your boat.

Operating Instructions

When you run the program it will prompt you to either create an account or log into your existing account on our server. If you are a Laridian customer or have ever been one in the past, it’s best to log into your existing account rather than create a new one. There’s a button there that will let you request your password from the system if you don’t remember it. Once you’re logged in, you’ll see a list of Bibles you own. Pick one Bible to download. You can download more than one at a time, but for now don’t go nuts with it. There will be a large demand on our servers and after all, it is just an alpha version.

Note that books are installed to your storage card first, then to main memory if the storage card is full or not available. There may be more options in the future, but for now the program automatically selects where to install your books.

When the Bible finished downloading, use the “Back” button to view the Bible text.

Flicking up or down scrolls the text, which is displayed one chapter at a time. Flicking left or right goes to the previous or next chapter. If you have a left/right button on your device, it will work, too. If you happen to have a Bible that contains links to other Bible verses (such as the Amplified Bible), those links should work.

To go to a particular verse, select the Menu button then “Go To Verse”. Either type a reference or select the book of the Bible from the list then type the chapter and verse. Most book abbreviations you are familiar with will work. You can use a period or colon to separate the chapter and verse. Note that the list of book names comes from a standard list — not necessarily from the Bible you’re viewing. So if you open a Bible that contains only the New Testament, you’ll see OT books in the list but they won’t work when you try to go there.

If you’ve downloaded more than one Bible you can switch between them by choosing “Open Book” from the Menu. To download another Bible or to delete one you’ve already installed, choose “My Library” from the Menu, then “Add/Remove Books”.

Suggestions and Bug Reports

The purpose of a beta version of a program is to gather real-world results from users and hopefully find bugs that weren’t uncovered during in-house testing. This is not a beta version of the program. As a result, we don’t care about the bugs you find. This isn’t to say there aren’t any, but rather that we’re not really at that point yet. If you run into a devastating bug that you can easily reproduce, feel free to send me an email at craigr@laridian.com. Make sure you completely and accurately describe the steps to recreate the behavior. I also need to know the version of the operating system you’re running. Other than that, there’s no need to send bug reports.

As you might imagine, I already have a long to-do list for new features. I’m not looking for suggestions at this point. I’m not saying I don’t care what you think; I’m just trying to manage my email volume. I have this bad habit of being accessible and responsive and as a result you end up burning a lot of my time. I hope you can appreciate my concern.

The Download Link

You can download the program here: www.laridian.com/android/download/PocketBible.apk.

About the Launcher Icon

The launcher icon is just a draft I whipped up one afternoon. It may or may not be the final artwork. I’m interested in your feedback on that subject, either here or by email.

System Requirements

The program should work on devices running Android OS 1.6 or later and which have adequate memory to store at least one Bible. Note that Bibles are larger on Android than on some of our other platforms — in the neighborhood of 15MB as opposed to 4MB.

I hesitate to post an article with that title. Phrases like “famous last words” come to mind. Perhaps more than any other platform, it has been difficult to predict how long any task is going to take on Android. The primary issue is a lack of good documentation; secondary has been performance issues.

This article is going to be long, so I’m going to put the fun stuff up front, the interesting stuff in the middle, and the technical stuff at the end. Stop reading when your eyes glaze over…

Current Plan and Caveats

My plan is to release an “alpha” version of PocketBible for Android that will allow you to download, view, and navigate in Bibles only. No searching, no notes, no bookmarks, no highlights. But all our Bibles (with the exception of those with Strong’s numbers) will be supported. One Bible at a time (no split screen). Few if any configuration options (font, size, etc.).

I don’t have a specific date for this release other than to say “soon”. I’m tying up some loose ends and trying to make sure that what is there is working right. I keep running into new little things to fix. For example, last night I discovered you can’t go to any book that has a space in the name. “1 Cor” fails, but “1Cor” works fine. That will be an easy fix, but you get the idea… it’s one little thing like this after another.

This version will be distributed as an APK file downloaded directly from our site. If your carrier does not permit you to install APK’s directly to your phone, you’ll have to wait for a later version. We haven’t yet tried this, so I wouldn’t be surprised if there are problems getting it to work. That would be normal for Android.

There will be menus and buttons that don’t do anything, and these will be subject to change. For example, there are currently buttons to take you to today’s reading in your devotional, search, and buy new books. None of these do anything and may vanish in a future version.

This version will have limited tech support. The platform is new to us, and it’s not as well documented as the others we distribute for. There’s a “wild west” feel to it. You’ll have to play cowboy and just grab the bull by the horns.

There will be some method for feedback but at this point it will be largely ignored. Obviously if we hear about giant problems, we’ll do our best to fix them. But this isn’t a beta version. It will not be feature-complete. As a result, your comments may not fit into our plan and you’ll have no way to know that. So we’ll probably provide a special email address you can use for comments. We’ll read them and glean what we can, but probably won’t respond.

Comments

This is kind of a “you asked for it” release. We wouldn’t normally let something like this out the door because we risk getting more criticism for its incompleteness than compliments on being so brave and helpful by releasing early. We’ve never done this before. Be nice, and maybe we’ll do it more often. Cause us headaches and we’ll reconsider.

It should be the case that updates to this alpha version will come frequently. Once Bibles are implemented, I’ll work on linking to the Strong’s dictionaries so I can release our KJVEC and NASEC Bibles. In order to display those dictionaries I have to provide a method of navigating books that aren’t Bibles. Right now, the only “go to dialog” in the program is for Bibles. It allows you to enter a book, chapter, and verse. In order to support dictionaries, commentaries, and “other” books, we need a go-to method that navigates using the book’s table of contents. So in order to do the Strong’s dictionaries I will have to create this more general go-to method, thus making it easier to release commentaries and other books.

The point is that once we have the ability to show you text of any kind (in this case, Bible text) then everything else should fall like dominoes. Along the way we’ll have to make sure we handle all the different kinds of links, Greek and Hebrew text, and searching. Incremental releases containing those features should come in fairly rapid succession.

That sets us up to implement notes, highlights, bookmarks, and devotional progress, which is a fairly major task. The good news is that we’ve already figured out server synchronization when we did PocketBible for iPhone. So we just need to duplicate that code in Java for Android. The bad news is that there is a lot of user interface issues with these features, and those tend to be the most time-consuming tasks in any program.

Somewhere between now and then we’ll move the app to the Android Marketplace and start charging some nominal amount for it. We realize that everyone expects everything to be free these days, but we can’t continue doing this full-time unless it generates enough revenue to pay our expenses. In the last two or three years publishers have raised their royalty rates as much as 900% (for those of you who are percentage-challenged, that means our royalty expense is ten times what it used to be on many titles). They aren’t providing any better quality text, nor are they doing any additional development, support, or marketing work. They are just demanding more money. Yeah, I know.

Technical Discussion

In my last update I commented on how I had originally thought I was going to be able to display continuously scrolling (i.e. non-paged) text. I ran into problems that prevented me from taking that path and had changed to a new plan where Bible text would be presented in chapters, and that was working fine. At the time, that was a major milestone. Unfortunately, further testing revealed that performance was completely unacceptable. It was taking about 7-10 seconds to move from chapter to chapter.

After thinking about this for a while, I decided to port some more code from iPhone (in this case, my HTML rendering engine) which would permit me to present paginated text just like we do on the iPhone. Even though we would be adding more time per line of text displayed, we’d be displaying fewer lines of text. The result should’ve been to reduce the page load time dramatically since we’d only be displaying a page of lines instead of a chapter of lines at a time.

The amount and complexity of code that needed to be moved was daunting. For example, we make use of “templates” in C++ for a handful of key objects in the program. Java has “generics”, which are advertised to be a lot like C++ templates, but they’re not. They solve some (but not all) of the same problems and have some (but not all) of the same features. It didn’t take long to discover that we weren’t going to be able to simply “genericize” our templates and as a result we were going to have to re-design some low-level functionality of the rendering engine.

So a couple weeks ago I had an epiphany (in the shower, where I have all my best epiphanies) that would allow me to not only bypass the porting of my rendering code but also bypass all the code that was consuming all the time while loading a chapter. This could be done at the expense of downloading some additional book data from our iPocketBible.com site when you download the LBK file to your phone. Then I could use the built-in webkit browser component to display the text and not port my HTML renderer.

It didn’t take long to put this plan in place and as a result chapter loading is infinitely faster. It takes longer to download books (working on that — will implement some compression in a future release) and they take up more space on the device, but space is cheap while processor speed is limited. We also have the benefit of having a CSS-capable rendering engine (mine has only limited CSS support) that also supports JavaScript (mine does not). This lets us very easily apply styles to the text and act on the text programmatically using JavaScript. This will all come in very handy when we implement notes and highlights.

So for those keeping score, I’m on my fourth implementation of text loading/rendering/displaying in PocketBible for Android. This one is far from the original plan but will probably turn out to be the way we implement PocketBible on future platforms because it’s significantly easier. But more importantly, this is why we don’t commit to dates. We couldn’t have predicted it would take us this long to implement basic functionality. We had to learn the limitations of the operating system and SDK before we could determine the right way to do this. On the other hand I seem to recall about six implementations on the iPhone before we settled on the current pagination style, so maybe some of this could’ve been predicted.

I can’t bring this to a close without mentioning the low quality of the Android documentation. Let me give you two examples.

A fairly common scenario is this: The user interface objects (buttons, lists, text entry fields, etc.) can be created in your Java code or they can be described in XML then “inflated” by the OS when they’re needed. When creating them in code you provide values such as height, width, color, position, etc. as parameters to functions. When describing the same object in XML you do it by providing values for XML attributes. So you might say:

<TextView android:height=”50sp” android:width=”150sp” />

In this case, “android:height” and “android:width” are attributes of the TextView XML tag. If you look at the documentation for the TextView object, there will be a link to “XML Attributes” where these are described. However, for many objects, the link to “XML Attributes” takes you to a single sentence which says “XML Attributes for the blah-blah object”.

This is a simple example, but stuff like this occurs all over in the documentation. Here’s a more complicated example:

Recently I was adding a “progress bar” to my download activity. I was already reporting download progress as “Downloading 1.6KB of 3.983MB”, so all I needed to do was drop a progress bar on the screen and give it a percentage of completion to display each time I updated my existing status message. Easy.

I found the ProgressBar object and added one to my user interface. I added the appropriate calls to update the progress based on how many bytes were downloaded. Couldn’t be easier.

Run the program: I get a huge spinning “indeterminate progress” indicator — like the hourglass in Windows or the beach ball in Mac OS — instead of my simple progress bar. Reviewing the documentation it appears that “ProgressBar” could be either “determinate” (where it colors in a portion of itself to represent the amount complete) or “indeterminate” (where it just spins to indicate activity). Ignoring the obvious observation that those are really two completely different objects and should be implemented in different classes, I went to find the setting that would allow me to specify that I wanted a “progress”, not “activity” indicator.

I found a true/false setting for “indeterminate” and set it to “false”. There was also an “indeterminate only” setting, which I set to “false” for good measure. Run the program. No change.

After a few more experiments I resorted to Google. I was able to find a blog article describing how someone with the same problem had downloaded the Android operating system source code to figure out what it was expecting. After a lot of research, he came up with an obscure line of XML that caused a progress bar to be displayed. This line of XML wasn’t in any of the documentation. The only way to figure it out was to read the source code for the operating system.

Think about this for a minute: Imagine if you had to download and read the source code for Word in order to figure out how to create a table. Or if you had to read the Internet Explorer source code to figure out how to open a new tab. This is insane. But it’s what every single day of Android programming is like.

Finally, consider this: Before starting programming for Android I spent $400 to buy a “developer device”. This is an unlocked Android phone that allows me to install unsigned applications and run them under the debugger. Little did I know that when I bought it in August 2010 it would have Android OS 1.6 on it, ten months after 2.0 was released and 1.6 became obsolete, and three months after 2.2 was released. It’s now eight months after that and there is still no way to upgrade this phone to any version after 1.6. Meanwhile, the iPhone I use for development not only came with the latest iOS version but iTunes automatically updates it every time I plug it in.

As a result, the PocketBible “alpha” release will run on OS version 1.6. It has to. It’s the only version I can easily test on.