Today we uploaded version 1.012 of PocketBible for Windows, and version 1.002 of the iPocketBible.com Server Synchronization Provider (formerly known as the iPhone Sync Provider). These updates address three issues:

1. Notes containing certain special characters could become corrupted in the synchronization process as those special characters were passed from platform to platform, each of which may have treated them differently.
2. Because of differences in the way the PC and our server implemented the synchronization algorithm, “old” data from the PC could be deleted when syncing with existing data from an iPhone.
3. Since we were making changes, we also changed the way the PC keeps track of the date/time of the last sync. The new method eliminates rare problems caused by differences in the system time between the server and your PC.

To get the latest version of PocketBible for Windows, simply log into your download account, download it, and install it.

To get the latest iPocketBible.com Server Sync Provider to replace your old iPhone Sync Provider, go to the PocketBible for Windows site (http://www.laridian.com/pc) and select “Synchronization Providers” from the Products menu at the top of the page. Follow the instructions near the bottom of the page to download and install the iPocketBible.com Sync Provider.

The previous version of PocketBible should refuse to work with the new sync provider, and the new sync provider will refuse to work with the old version of PocketBible. So if you don’t get them installed correctly the program will tell you.

An important new feature added to PocketBible for Windows is the ability to reset your sync history. This forces PocketBible to treat the next sync as if it is the first. If you ever have to restore your PocketBible for Windows user data database, you’ll want to reset the sync history or you risk confusing the sync algorithm. When it sees that you have old data in your database that is no longer on the server, it will delete the data you just restored from your backup (thinking that you deleted it from the server). If you reset your sync history, it may find duplicates and ask you about them, but it won’t delete anything.

iPhone/iPad Users: There will be an update to the iPhone/iPad version of PocketBible to make some adjustments to the way certain special characters are handled. We currently are planning to roll this into our “iPhone 4″ update, which will be uploaded to Apple just as soon as we can.

Thanks for your patience while we worked on these updates.

Synchronization between PocketBible for Windows and the iPocketBible.com server has been turned off while we work to correct an issue related to synchronizing your personal data between multiple devices.

We’ve discovered a very specific sequence of events that could result in data added on your PC being removed from your PC on a subsequent data synchronization. Even though we believe that the likelihood of this affecting you, specifically, is low, we’d prefer to disable synchronization until we can address the issue. As the old adage goes: “Better safe than sorry.”

We expect that the fix will be included in an update to PocketBible for Windows. The update will be required for all customers who synchronize PocketBible for Windows with the iPocketBible.com server. If you are using synchronization only on the iPhone or iPad, you are not affected by this problem.

The fix shouldn’t be hard but any time we work on the code that directly manipulates your user-created data we try to be extra careful. So give us a few days to get this updated.

We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you in advance for your patience while we address this issue.

A recently posted comment questioned the wisdom of our policy of not talking about what may or may not be under development here. I thought I had discussed that policy here but apparently I haven’t.

As you know, before we started Laridian 11 years ago (October 1998) we spent ten years working at Parsons Technology. It was great to be able to make our mistakes at someone else’s expense before launching our own company. One of the things we learned was not to talk about our release dates before we were ready to ship a product.

There are two main reasons we’ve kept this policy over all these years and through two different companies. First, we don’t want to signal our plans to our competitors. We all compete for a limited number of customers. If we signal our intentions it helps other Bible software companies know how to allocate their limited resources to better compete with us.

The second reason we keep quiet about what we may or may not be working on is to avoid the extra work it creates. If we announce a product, we start getting calls and emails from people who want to know when it’s going to ship. If we announce a date and miss it (which is about a 100% probability in our business) then we have to deal with the customers who call or write to ask what’s going on. They always want to know an updated ship date, though if we missed it the first time I’m not sure why they think we’d get it right the second, third, or fourth time.

If we ignore those requests we’re perceived as unfriendly to our customers. So we have to take time to respond. You might argue that we have the same problem when we choose not to comment on what we’re doing. I can tell you, though, that it’s significantly different. When I can say, “We don’t talk about what may or may not be under development, but we appreciate your suggestions” it brings the discussion to a close. In fact in Tech Support that’s a predefined response that we can just paste into our reply and move on quickly. On the other hand, once we’ve opened the box and projected a ship date, we can’t easily close the box.

We have tried lifting this policy at various times. We did it for iPhone and it was OK for a while but when we ran into some technical issues that delayed the project by six months we ended up having to just shut off the flow of information for a while until we could figure out how to handle the issues. The combination of not really having anything helpful to say and having to answer a few customers who were downright nasty was difficult to deal with.

This raises the point that plans often change or are disrupted. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve completely changed our direction in an afternoon. Our decision to develop the original Web-based app for the iPhone (back when that was the only way you could do iPhone apps) was made on July 3, 2007 and a large amount of development on it happened on the July 4 holiday. Projects we had previously been working on were abandoned or delayed while we dedicated people to iPhone development. However, because none of this was public information, there was no time wasted explaining this massive change of direction to anyone. We didn’t have to apologize for missing a ship date, or reveal our plans for this new platform until we were completely ready to do so. (We actually hinted at it on July 5, but we didn’t really formally announce it until about three weeks later, when most of the work was done.)

I think part of our problem is that we want to be friendly and accessible. I think we’re way more accessible than most other software companies. I reply to every email sent to me, and we reply to all our tech support email in a timely fashion. (Just don’t call me at home. I mean, seriously, some people have no boundaries.) I reply to comments here on the blog. So the more information we have available and out there to talk about, the more time it takes. If we limit the information it helps us also limit the amount of communicating we have to do.

For example, I haven’t been tempted to give a long dissertation on the Android. It’s sufficient to say we may or may not be working on it. If you want to argue that it’s the Next Big Thing and that Google is obviously taking over the world and that we should just get over it and develop for Android, I can end the conversation by saying “we may or may not already be working on it”. I don’t have to get into a discussion of the relative size of the Android market vs. other platforms, the technical challenges of porting to Java, the state and maturity of the SDK, etc. I may or may not already agree with you. There’s no need for me to go into more detail. If I disagree with you, saying so might reveal our plans for the platform. If I agree with you, that also might reveal our plans. And I might be working on it while disagreeing with you on how great the platform is. Or I might not be working on it now, but agree with you and have plans to do it in the future. No matter what the situation is, commenting on it could lead you to the right or wrong conclusion, and now we’re back to the problem of signaling our intent to competitors and having to take time to communicate about it.

The obvious problem with this policy is that it may cost us some customers in the short term. However, if we’re not developing for a particular platform, then we plan to lose those customers anyway. If we are developing for the platform, we could still lose them in the time it takes for us to get our product out the door. So no matter what we do or plan to do, and no matter what we say, we still risk losing customers at any time. So if the other factors outweigh the benefits of talking about projects in advance, it’s worth not talking about them.

This isn’t always an easy rule to maintain, but every time we’ve broken it we’ve been stung by it sooner or later. We’re currently on a pretty tight-lipped phase after having been bit earlier this year. I’m sure we’ll loosen up again in the future and who knows, maybe our experience will be better. At least now you have some idea of our thought process on this policy and I hope that helps.

In the meantime, we may or may not be working on whatever it is you want us to be working on.

Our technical support site was down for upgrades between the afternoon of Monday, October 12, and the morning of Friday, October 16. The upgrade has been completed, and technical support is available again. Thank you for your patience if you’ve been trying to contact us.

During the upgrade period, emails sent to technical support departments were returned as undeliverable. If you sent an email during that period and it was returned as undeliverable, you’ll need to send it again.

Additionally, due to an outage on October 9-11, we may not have received all emails sent to us on those days. If you wrote to us during that period, and did not receive a response, please contact us again. Remember to include all of the pertinent details.

Again, thank you for your understanding and patience.

We are upgrading our technical support software.

During the upgrade process, technical support will be unavailable. Email sent to us may be returned as undeliverable.

We hope that the upgrade process will be smooth and quick and that technical support will be available “soon”. However, a more realistic expectation is that support will available again within a few days.

This is a good time to point out that all of our products include either built-in help or a user guide (or both!). We find that most questions that we receive are answered in these resources. So, even though we might not be here to help you for a few days, you may find the help you need in the built-in help or user guide.

Thanks for your patience during this upgrade process.

Apple has approved the first maintenance release for PocketBible. You’ll be happy to see synchronization can actually be turned on and off now. When it’s turned off, you can synchronize all your open Bibles and commentaries to any verse by tapping-and-holding on the verse, then selecting “Sync To…” from the context menu. When it’s turned on (Menu > Settings > Synchronization), all your open Bibles and commentaries should track to the active Bible.

A related problem came up when you were using a Bible with Strong’s numbers. Going to the dictionary for a particular number would show you the correct entry in your preferred Strong’s dictionary, but if you had other Strong’s dictionaries open they would not move to the new entry. This is fixed now so you could have several Strong’s dictionaries open and they’ll all go to the right entry (as long as synchronization is turned on in the Settings menu.

After the nightmare of the first 24 hours after PocketBible shipped, we’ve updated the network error reporting to include more detail than the classic “(null) (null) Customer ID (null)” message that was so informative in the last version.

We’re currently working on the note feature. That will be the next update. I don’t have a time-frame yet but it’s coming along nicely. There are also a couple more little bug fixes that will be rolled into that version.

Fixes in 1.0.1

• Synchronization was effectively always on. Fixed so it honors the setting in the menu.
• Once zoomed for link disambiguation, it was possible to choose something from the menu or tap the title bar and confuse the app about the zoom state of the text. Fixed so that any interaction with the program resets the zoom state.
• Following a link to a Strong’s number would display the preferred (or default) Strong’s dictionary, but other Strong’s dictionaries would not follow when synchronization was on. Fixed so all sync links to dictionaries result in proper synchronization.
• Registering an email address containing a + (plus sign) failed. Probably other special characters would fail, too. Fixed to use proper URL encoding.
• Significantly beefed up the error handling while communicating with the server to register new users, send login credentials, and download your books. Eliminated the now-famous “(null)(null) Customer ID (null)” message that was so informative.
• Changing from “reference only” search results to one of the results with excerpts would result in a correct results list but some excerpts missing. Fixed to always check the selected results format and always reformat each result.
• Fixed typos in Welcome and Help documents. (These are downloadable now using Add/Remove Books.)
• Built with book reader engine 1.066 which contains support for a new Bible translation.

Monday morning (April 20th) between 1 AM and 5 AM EDT, we will be performing maintenance on one of our servers.

During that time we will temporarily take down our blog, support site and list server.

If all goes according to plan, the server will be back up before the start of the business day on Monday.

Thanks for your patience.

The new version of MyBible now supports HTML tags. PocketBible for Windows Mobile and Windows desktop also support HTML tags. This gives you some very nice formatting options.

HTML is a “mark-up language” that allows you to control text formatting by inserting special “tags” in the text. For example, to make a word bold you just put <b> before the word and </b> after the word. This simple example demonstrates the basics of HTML: You have an “open” tag at the beginning (<b>) and a “close” tag at the end (</b>). Both tags are surrounded by less-than and greater-than (< and >). The closing tag has a slash after the less-than (</). The “name” of the tag is “b” in this case.

Remember you can always just type plain text notes in PocketBible or MyBible. There’s no need to worry about HTML tags. But if you want to do some more sophisticated notes, you have that ability if you learn a little HTML.

Ordered Lists

Outlines start with the concept of an ordered list. An ordered list is simply a list with numbers. By creating an ordered list instead of just numbering your items manually, you can re-order the items by using cut-and-paste because there are no numbers actually in the list — the numbers are created by the program when it displays your list.

Ordered lists start with <ol> and end with </ol>. In between those tags are “list items”. List items are the items in your list. They start with <li> and end with </li>. So a simple ordered list would look like this in the note editor:

<ol>
<li>Light</li>
<li>Separation of water</li>
<li>Dry ground; plants</li>
<li>Sun and moon</li>
<li>Fish and birds</li>
<li>Land animals and humans</li>
</ol>

Notice that the list has an open and close tag and each list item has an open and close tag. When you view this note it will look like this:

1. Light
2. Separation of water
3. Dry ground; plants
4. Sun and moon
5. Fish and birds
6. Land animals and humans

Note that there were no numbers in the original text above, but when you view it in PocketBible/MyBible the numbers are automatically inserted.

List Attributes

Before showing you an outline, let me point out a useful feature of ordered lists. HTML tags have names (we’ve seen “b”, “ol” and “li”). They also have “attributes”. An attribute is an optional feature of the tag that controls its appearance. One attribute of the <ol> tag is “type”. We use the type attribute to tell the <ol> tag what numbering system we want to use. If we say “type=A” we’ll get upper case letters instead of numbers. “type=a” gives us lower case letters; “type=I” and “type=”i” are Roman numerals, upper and lower case, respectively. So here’s the same list as above, but with Roman numerals:

<ol type="I">
<li>Light</li>
<li>Separation of water</li>
<li>Dry ground; plants</li>
<li>Sun and moon</li>
<li>Fish and birds</li>
<li>Land animals and humans</li>
</ol>

When rendered in PocketBible/MyBible you’ll see:

1. Light
2. Separation of water
3. Dry ground; plants
4. Sun and moon
5. Fish and birds
6. Land animals and humans

Note one of the advantages of using ordered lists instead of just manually numbering your items: You can make a small change to the <ol> tag and it completely changes how the list is numbered.

Sublists Within a List Item

We now have all the tools we need to create outlines except for one small thing: We need to know that list items can actually contain other lists. That is, instead of a list item being some text like “Separation of water” it can actually contain an entire ordered list. We still have to be careful to include the open and close tag for each ordered list and each list item, and this can get confusing. But if you’re careful it’s not hard to get good at it. Here’s a simple example of including a list inside a list item:

<ol type="I">
<li>Seven Days of Creation
<ol type="A">
<li>Light</li>
<li>Separation of water</li>
<li>Dry ground; plants</li>
<li>Sun and moon</li>
<li>Fish and birds</li>
<li>Land animals and humans</li>
</ol> (This is the end of the sublist under “Seven Days of Creation”)
</li> (This is the end of the list item “Seven Days of Creation”)
</ol> (This is the end of the main list)

Note that we don’t close the “Seven Days of Creation” list item until the end of the list that is under it. This is important and is what makes the outline work correctly. If you type the above into PocketBible/MyBible (without the italicized comments at the end) this is what you’ll see:

1. Seven Days of Creation
   
   1. Light
   2. Separation of water
   3. Dry ground; plants
   4. Sun and moon
   5. Fish and birds
   6. Land animals and humans

Outlines

We now have everything to create a complex outline. Here is the code you would type into the note editor, followed by what it looks like when fully rendered:

<ol type="I">
<li>The Account of Creation (Gen 1:1-2:4)
<ol type="A">
<li>Light</li>
<li>Separation of water</li>
<li>Dry ground; plants</li>
<li>Sun and moon</li>
<li>Fish and birds</li>
<li>Land animals and humans</li>
<li>God rests</li>
</ol></li>
<li>The Man and Woman in Eden
<ol type="A">
<li>Garden of Eden
<ol type="1">
<li>The conditions before
<ol type="a">
<li>No plants</li>
<li>No rain</li>
<li>No people</li>
<li>Springs came up to water the ground</li>
</ol></li>
<li>God plants a garden
<ol type="a">
<li>Where: In the East</li>
<li>Puts the man there</li>
<li>Fruit trees</li>
<li>Tree of Life</li>
<li>Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil</li>
</ol></li>
<li>The river
<ol type="a">
<li>Flows out of Eden</li>
<li>Four branches
<ol type="i">
<li>Pishon</li>
<li>Gihon</li>
<li>Tigris</li>
<li>Euphrates</li>
</ol></li>
</ol></li>
</ol></li>
<li>The Man and Woman
<ol type="1">
<li>Their purpose
<ol type="a">
<li>Tend it</li>
<li>Watch over it</li>
</ol></li>
<li>The warning
<ol type="a">
<li>Eat freely except...</li>
<li>Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil</li>
<li>Eat its fruit = death</li>
</ol></li>
<li>The helper
<ol type="a">
<li>Man was alone; not good</li>
<li>Animal parade</li>
<li>Man sleeps</li>
<li>God creates woman from his rib</li>
<li>Man happy</li>
</ol></li>
</ol></li>
</ol></li>
<li>The Man and Woman Sin</li>
<li>Etc.....</li>
</ol>

1. The Account of Creation (Gen 1:1-2:4)
   
   1. Light
   2. Separation of water
   3. Dry ground; plants
   4. Sun and moon
   5. Fish and birds
   6. Land animals and humans
   7. God rests
2. The Man and Woman in Eden
   
   1. Garden of Eden
      
      1. The conditions before
         
         1. No plants
         2. No rain
         3. No people
         4. Springs came up to water the ground
      2. God plants a garden
         
         1. Where: In the East
         2. Puts the man there
         3. Fruit trees
         4. Tree of Life
         5. Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil
      3. The river
         
         1. Flows out of Eden
         2. Four branches
            
            1. Pishon
            2. Gihon
            3. Tigris
            4. Euphrates

   2. The Man and Woman
      
      1. Their purpose
         
         1. Tend it
         2. Watch over it
      2. The warning
         
         1. Eat freely except…
         2. Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil
         3. Eat its fruit = death
      3. The helper
         
         1. Man was alone; not good
         2. Animal parade
         3. Man sleeps
         4. God creates woman from his rib
         5. Man happy
3. The Man and Woman Sin
4. Etc…..

I get the best ideas from customers. I’m corresponding with one now who is lamenting how hard it is to use BookBuilder to bring a text file into PocketBible. That gave me an idea to just tell you how to do it. It’s pretty easy.

Let’s just take the text of my blog posting from April 21 and turn it into a Laridian book. Laridian books are HTML files with some added tags. They all look like this:

<html><head>
<!– meta tags go here –>
</head><body>
<!– your book goes here–>
</body></html>

The meta tag section comes right out of the documentation. Here are the meta tags for a dictionary, which we’ll modify to make our book:

<html><head>
<meta name=”pb_title” content=”Tyndale Bible Dictionary”>
<meta name=”pb_abbrev” content=”TBD”>
<meta name=”pb_copyright” content=”Copyright &copy; 2001 by Tyndale House Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved.”>
<meta name=”pb_publisher” content=”Laridian Electronic Publishing”>
<meta name=”pb_city” content=”Cedar Rapids, IA”>
<meta name=”pb_date” content=”2004″>
<meta name=”pb_pubid” content=”101″>
<meta name=”pb_bookid” content=”35″>
<meta name=”pb_editionid” content=”1″>
<meta name=”pb_revisionid” content=”1″>
<meta name=”pb_synctype” content=”word”>
</head><body>
<!– your book goes here–>
</body></html>

We’ll change a bit of the text in the meta tags to make it make sense for our blog article. We end up with this:

<html><head>
<meta name=”pb_title” content=”April 21 Blog Article”>
<meta name=”pb_abbrev” content=”BLOG”>
<meta name=”pb_copyright” content=”Copyright &copy; 2008 by Craig Rairdin. All rights reserved.”>
<meta name=”pb_publisher” content=”Laridian Electronic Publishing”>
<meta name=”pb_city” content=”Cedar Rapids, IA”>
<meta name=”pb_date” content=”2008″>
<meta name=”pb_pubid” content=”9999″>
<meta name=”pb_bookid” content=”1″>
<meta name=”pb_editionid” content=”1″>
<meta name=”pb_revisionid” content=”1″>
</head><body>
<!– your book goes here–>
</body></html>

In addition to changing the text of the copyright message etc. I also changed the Publisher ID (pb_pubid) just because it doesn’t matter and I didn’t want it the same as the Tyndale Dictionary from which the example was lifted. I set the pb_bookid meta tag to 1, and I would change that for every book I create. And I removed the final pb_synctype tag, because that’s what tells PocketBible this is a dictionary, but my file isn’t a dictionary.

I have to add at least one heading so I have something in the table of contents for the book. So I put that on the top of the text of the blog article. I paste in the text of the blog article and add <p> tags at the start of each line to indicate new paragraphs.

Text in bold is text I modified in some way just so you can see how little I changed from either the sample meta tags or the text of my article.

<html><head>
<meta name=”pb_title” content=”April 21 Blog Article“>
<meta name=”pb_abbrev” content=”BLOG“>
<meta name=”pb_copyright” content=”Copyright &copy; 2008 by Craig Rairdin. All rights reserved.”>
<meta name=”pb_publisher” content=”Laridian Electronic Publishing”>
<meta name=”pb_city” content=”Cedar Rapids, IA”>
<meta name=”pb_date” content=”2008“>
<meta name=”pb_pubid” content=”9999“>
<meta name=”pb_bookid” content=”1“>
<meta name=”pb_editionid” content=”1″>
<meta name=”pb_revisionid” content=”1″>
</head><body>
<h1 pb_toc=visible>On the Problems of Designing User-Friendly Software for PDAs and Smart Phones</h1>
<p>A comment from one of our PocketBible 4 beta testers got me thinking about the nature of what we do and what users complain about. I’ve expressed this with respect to the iPhone but I haven’t put it into a larger context that might help people understand what software designers are up against when we implement a solution, regardless of the platform. These issues are especially true of the mobile device market but the same ideas apply to the desktop and other general-purpose computing platforms.
<p>If you start from the beginning, you find a user with a problem. It might be: “How do I take my contact database with me?” or “How can I work on my spreadsheets on the train?” or “How can I browse the Web when I’m away from my computer?”. Hardware companies like Sony, Apple, HP, and HTC get together with software companies like Microsoft and whatever Palm is calling itself today and come up with a device and operating system software that address those problems. In the course of doing so, they create a way for third parties (that’s us) to create software for their new device/OS platform.
<p>By the time we consumer software companies (independent software vendors or ISVs) get our hands on these products, we’re no longer solving the original customer problem. Instead, we’re programming for a device, and the device is solving the problem. When we program for a device we have certain limitations imposed by the hardware and software. The screen is only so big. There may or may not be a keyboard. There may or may not be much memory. There may or may not be good internet connectivity. The tools provided by the OS software developer may not be very powerful. There are a host of these limitations, and we have no control over them. It is the sandbox in which we have to play if we’re going to play at all.
<p>etc…..
</body></html>

That’s all there is to it. If you can master cut and paste and typing <p> you can create books out of text files. If you know a little HTML you can add bold, italics, underlines, and even tables and lists.

I just had a customer write to ask how to solve a problem. His pastor speaks very extemporaneously and as a result, the computer operator/projectionist is scrambling to look up every verse he mentions in a printed Bible, type each into PowerPoint, and display it on the screen.

At a minimum, running PocketBible for Windows and cutting/pasting into PowerPoint would be a good idea.

But better yet:

1. Turn off the toolbar (View > Toolbar)
2. Set the size of the Bible text to 72 points (Edit > Options > Appearance, make sure “Bible” is selected next to “Set”, then change Font Size to 72)
3. While you’re there, choose pleasing foreground and background colors
4. OK to close the Options dialog
5. Zoom the Bible window (using the zoom button or View > Zoom Window)

Now your Bible will appear in very large type. On Sunday morning, all you need to do is type the reference into PocketBible. Remember, with its instant “type-n-go” feature all you do is type the reference while the Bible is selected. So to go to John 3:16 there’s no need to select Search > Go To or press Ctrl+G. Just type J O H N [space] 3 : 16 [enter] and the Bible will go there. Assuming PocketBible is running on the monitor that you’re projecting, you’ll instantly see the referenced verse on the big screen.

(In case you’ve wondered, this is why we gave you the ability to set the point size up to some outrageously large number.)

Awhile back I had created a series of articles on using your Bible resources.  This included commentaries, reference books, devotionals and more.  If you missed that series or could use a brush-up on the information you can enter “Using Your Bible Resources” in the search dialog box to the left of this article and do your search.  Once you have the list of articles you should scroll down to the September 9th article and work your way up so you read them in order.

This new article is on how to use the Bible Maps. The Bible Maps are available for use with PocketBible 4 for Windows Mobile and our PocketBible for Windows software for desktop PCs running Windows. (more…)

Recently, Apple released the 1.1.3 update for the iPhone and the iPod Touch. This update included a feature that some of you requested we take advantage of… the ability to add iPocketBible to your “home” screen.

1. Update your iPhone/iPod Touch to version 1.1.3.
2. Launch iPocketBible from within Safari. If you are already there, I suggest that you “reload” the page in order to ensure that the latest version of iPocketBible is loaded. One thing to remember: you are essentially creating a bookmark that gets placed on the home page of your iPhone/iPod Touch. Whatever page within iPocketBible is visible when you start this process will be the page associated with this bookmark. You may want to consider going to the “front matter” or “table of contents” of your favorite bible or commentary before starting this process.
3. Click on the “+” located on Safari’s bottom navigation bar.
4. A menu will appear with the options to “Add Bookmark”, “Add to Home Screen”, “Mail Link to this Page” or “Cancel”. Select “Add to Home Screen”.
5. A new screen will appear that will show our icon as well as a text field for selecting the text associated with this icon. The text field has limited space, so I would suggest putting “iPocketBible” within the field.
6. Press return.

That should do it!! You should now see your home screen, complete with your new iPocketBible icon.

Enjoy!

If you’ve been waiting for the promised ability to synchronize your PocketBible Pocket PC data with your PocketBible Windows PC data, the wait is over. We have released Synchronization Providers for both programs which will allow you to synchronize user-created data (i.e. notes, bookmarks, highlights, devotional or reading plan progress) between the two PocketBible programs.
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Wow it’s been a month since my last article. Time flies. (more…)

PocketBible for Windows has been updated to version 1.003. This is a free update for registered PocketBible for Windows users.

For information on the corrections that have been made, click here to visit the PocketBible Revision History page. (more…)

I’m happy to announce that PocketBible for Windows is now available at our Web site.

We’ll be sending emails to existing customers over the next 2-3 days with a discounted price of $19.99. Regular retail price is $29.99. If you can’t wait we’d be happy to accept the extra $10.

Any books you’ve already purchased for MyBible or PocketBible will entitle you to download the same books for your Windows PC. The only exception is the Ancient Christian Commentary Series, which we’re prohibited from distributing on the desktop until some date in the future. We’re trying to remedy that because it’s a great commentary series and we’d like to see more people using it.

We’ve mentioned it before but one of the cool options you have for another $19.99 is receiving your entire PocketBible for Windows library on a USB flash memory drive. You can still download now for immediate satisfaction, but then we’ll send you everything in your download account (including existing purchases plus anything you purchase at the time you place your USB flash drive order) that is compatible with PocketBible for Windows on one USB drive, complete with custom Laridian lanyard.

Just a reminder: If you have technical questions, send them to Tech Support through the Help Desk at our Web site. Don’t post them here. There are several reasons: First, by going through the Help Desk you may find that your question is already answered. Second, your question will get directly to our tech support department without depending on one of them to wander in and read the blog comments. Finally, there are people who subscribe to these blog comments and you’re just clogging up the comments with issues that only pertain to you. Just so you know, even though all comments to this blog are moderated, we always approve the tech support questions that get posted here just so people can laugh at you behind your back.

OK one major new product down. Several more to go…

One of the many things we work at doing well at Laridian is to respond to customer support emails as quickly and accurately as possible. How quickly is determined by when we receive the message and how many other messages are pending. Email is responded to at different times throughout the day depending on who is working tech support that day. Messages left after normal business hours are often responded to in the evening, but may have to wait until the next day.

How accurate the response is determined by the information supplied. Just saying “it doesn’t work” doesn’t help us to help you. We need detailed information on what’s not working, how it’s not working, and what you’ve tried to resolve the problem before contating us. The make and model of your PDA is also helpful since some issues are PDA specific.

Sometimes, though, an unexpected breakdown can occur that befuddles our best laid plans. That’s really what this blog article is about. Yesterday (May 23), we discovered that the email replies being sent were not actually being received by our customers. It was discovered when we started receiving numerous messages from customers stating that they never received a reply to a message sent previously. Since I know they’ve been getting answered promptly (I handle the email replies), that was a concern and some further investigation was done. A problem was found and has been fixed.

If you sent us a message between May 14 - 23 and did not receive a reply, please accept our apologies. I will be working through all messages sent during that time frame and will be resending those replies. I expect to have it completed by the end of the business day, May 24th. If you had sent an email during that time frame and you still have not heard from us by May 25th, please resend your message and it will be answered during our normal business hours.

We do apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your understanding.

Because of the large number of products we have and the fact that everyone selects a different collection of products to purchase from us, it’s not possible to ship every product we sell on a CD. That seems simple but it throws some people for a loop.

Today I was asked: “If I can’t purchase this Bible on a CD but instead have to download it, how do I back it up in the event of hard drive or computer failure?” Seems like a good question but I have to say this user is thinking too hard.

First, it sounds like this person is concerned about keeping good back-ups of their hard drive. That’s a good practice. I use Connected Online Backup (www.connected.com) to back-up my files every night while I sleep. But if this person is doing regular back-ups, then the question is already answered: If you download the file from our site it will be backed up during your normal daily back-up procedure.

When I tell people this, I’m often met with stammering. “Well,” they say, “I don’t really do back-ups the way I should.” If that’s the case, then it’s worth pointing out that our failure to ship the product you want on a CD isn’t really the cause of your problem — the problem is that you’re not really backing up your data to begin with, hence your fear of losing our files.

The solution of course is to simply write a CD or DVD containing the files you download from our site. It can’t get much simpler than that. It’s way cheaper than buying a CD from us (if we sold such a thing). By the time you paid for shipping it would be significantly less expensive to just make your own CD.

I’m sorry if this article seems obvious. We get this question surprisingly often so I thought it would be worth addressing here.

One of the great favors we do for our customers is try to minimize the amount of time I spend responding to tech support emails. You’d think as a programmer and president of the company I’d be the ideal person to tackle your technical questions. You’d be wrong.

While I’m sympathetic to the challenges of technology, especially when it is in the hands of a person whose life doesn’t revolve around it, I have a tendency to stray toward sarcasm. To fight this problem, I try to be rather brief in my answers. Brief and to the point seldom gets me in trouble. It’s when I get wordy that I sometimes wander. Unfortunately, “brief” isn’t always what you want when asking for technical assistance.

The other problem with me replying to your tech support questions is that I don’t do it every day so I don’t know the little details of the reasons behind some of the problems you all run into. People here like Patty who listen day in and day out to stories about PDA idiosyncrasies quickly get to where they recognize the solution to a problem even before you’ve adequately described it. For example, if you start an email with “I’m having trouble downloading…” and you’re sending it from an AOL email address, Patty knows just what to tell you. Meanwhile I may never notice your return email address let alone come to the conclusion that it implies.

Regardless of the myriad reasons why I should never be allowed to reply to tech support questions, I’m sometimes put in that position by circumstances beyond my control (everybody has to take vacation sometime). It turns out that the secret I know about giving good tech support is one that will do you some good, too:

Read the Knowledgebase

That’s my secret. When you ask me a question, I open another browser window and start searching the Knowledgebase. If your question is a technical one, chances are extremely good — probably 9 times out of 10 — it’s already been answered in the Knowledgebase. Of course if you’re asking about a charge to your credit card or about the status of a CD-ROM order, I have to look elsewhere for that information. But for technical information, the Knowledgebase rules.

The irony, of course, is that this same information is available to everyone. It’s a shame to ask a question on a Friday night and wait until Monday morning for an answer when the answer is right there in the Knowledgebase the whole time.

I know everyone always says, “Read the FAQ”. In a lot of cases when you go to the trouble to read the FAQ (or the manual, as the case may be) you don’t find any answers. But in this case I’m telling you that even the person you’re talking to in Tech Support — if it is me — is depending on the FAQ for an answer. You can reduce your tech support stress by cutting out the middle-man and reading through the Knowledgebase articles that sound like they might be about your problem.

To get to the Knowledgebase: Go to our site and select your platform. Select Help Desk from the menu at the top. The Knowledgebase is one of the options on the Help Desk page. You can browse by topic or you can search for words and phrases.

Last week I talked about using DailyReader for the Palm operating system. Click here if you’re a Palm OS user who would like more information on using DailyReader.  This week I’m covering the use of devotionals and reading plans with PocketBible 3 on a Pocket PC.  Understanding how to use the various tools available to you in PocketBible 3 can enhance the time you spend working with your devotional or reading plan. (more…)

As the year is coming to a close we start to look back on what we’ve accomplished or learned in the past year and we begin to think about what we can do better in the future.  One of the areas that we should analyze is our spiritual life.  Am I growing spiritually?  Have I digressed?  Am I just “going with the flow”?  Where am I currently and where do I want to be?  What improvements do I need to make? (more…)

This is the forth article in a series on how to effectively use your Bible resources.  If you missed the first one, I’d like to recommend that you click here to be taken to an article on how to use your Study Bibles and Commentaries.  It provides a base for the rest of the articles in this series and I don’t want you to miss out on some of the important tips that were provided.  Click here for the second article. It covers how to use the Strong’s Concordance and click here for the article on how to use Bible dictionaries. (more…)

This is the third article in a series on how to effectively use your Bible resources.  If you missed the first one, I’d like to recommend that you click here to be taken to an article on how to use your Study Bibles and Commentaries.  Click here for the article on how to use the Strong’s Concordance. (more…)

This is the second article in a series on how to effectively use your Bible resources.  If you missed the first one, I’d like to recommend that you click here to be taken to an article on how to use your Study Bibles and Commentaries.  It provides a base for the rest of the articles in this series and I don’t want you to miss out on some of the important tips that were provided. (more…)

We all know how important it is to regularly back up our PCs to prevent data loss in the event of unexpected circumstances. The data on your Pocket PC is no less subject to program errors and hardware crashes that could cause you to lose important PocketBible notes, bookmarks, or highlights.

We have just been made aware of a problem in PocketBible 3 that has the potential of causing some of your highlights to be lost. One employee here has seen this happen, but we haven’t been able to duplicate it on anyone else’s Pocket PC. Because of this, we suspect (but haven’t confirmed) that the problem may be limited to Windows Mobile 5 devices or to certain hardware configurations. We know for a fact that it can’t be reliably duplicated by simply following the same steps on two different devices. And we know that if this problem was frequently occuring we would have heard from a large number of customers about it, but we haven’t.

Until we figure out what’s going on, we would encourage you to make regular back-ups of your PocketBible highlight data, which is stored in a file called Laridian Data.db in \My Documents\Laridian Books on your Pocket PC.

Complete details on backing up this data file can be found in our Knowledgebase. Click here to go directly to the article, or do the following:

• Go to http://www.laridian.com
• Select the Windows Mobile Pocket PC link
• Select Knowledgebase from the Help Desk menu at the top of the page
• Select “CE Navigation of Application”
• Select “CE PocketBible”
• Select “PocketBible 3″
• Select “How do I backup and restore my PocketBible data?”

We will be sending an email to all PocketBible 3 owners to let them know about this potential problem. Again, we don’t think it’s a widespread or common issue, but since it has the potential of causing user-created data to be lost, we feel obligated to keep you informed about it even if you may never encounter the problem.

When we fix this problem and release an update, we’ll inform you in two ways: First, we’ll post a message here in the blog to let you know. Second, we’ll send an email to everyone on our Pocket PC Email List. This email list is separate from our list of PocketBible customers. It is a list we use to announce product updates and critical tech support issues. To subscribe to the list, go to lists.laridian.com and choose PPCList.

If you’re one who has just purchased a new study Bible, commentary, Bible dictionary,  Strong’s Concordance or other Laridian book, you may be wondering how to use those resources effectively.  Although they each work in a similar fashion, I am going to take one type of resource each week and provide tips on how you can get the most out of the product you purchased.  This week it’s study Bibles and commentaries. (more…)

Craig recently wrote an article about the complexities of the New American Bible in comparison with other Bible translations (see The Challenges of the New American Bible from August 15th).  Although the article I am including today is not nearly as complex, it does provide some interesting information for those of us who are not Bible scholars. (more…)

One of the issues that we frequently run into with customers is that some customers are not receiving the emails we send to them. Here are a couple of examples:

1. Suzie orders new software. At the completion of the order we state that an email has been sent with instructions. Suzie checks her email. No email from Laridian. She doesn’t have the instructions nor does she have a receipt for her records.

2. Suzie forgot her password. She goes to the Login page and clicks the link for “Have You Forgotten Your Password?”. She enters the email address that is in her Laridian account. She clicks the send button. It states “We’ve sent your Customer ID and Password to you at [susie’s email address]”. This indicates that Suzie has entered a valid email address that matches our records. Suzie checks her email. No email from Laridian. She tries again (and again, and again), same thing. Suzie gets frustrated and calls or sends us an email asking why we aren’t responding to her request.

In both of these circumstances our automated system has immediately sent out the email. So why isn’t Suzie receiving them?

The most common cause is due to a spam filter.

Now if Suzie is running a spam filter that has blocked us, that’s ok. Suzie may determine what email messages she does and does not want to receive. Once Suzie recognizes that Laridian is being blocked as a result of her settings, the local spam filter can be adjusted to allow Laridian email. Suzie can add us to her email address book or “Safe List” to ensure that our messages are received in the future. The following link is one that I’ve recently run into that provides good information on doing this with several of the major email providers. http://images.ed4.net/images/htdocs/addressbook/

But what if Suzie isn’t running a spam filter or Laridian has been added to her safe list and she still doesn’t get our messages? The next most likely cause is that Suzie’s ISP (Internet Service Provider) is blocking our messages to her. This is like Suzie’s mailman going through her mail and deciding what Suzie does and does not want. It’s a form of censorship. If you don’t want your postal service to do that then why would you want your ISP to do this?

If you find that your ISP is blocking legitimate messages (for instance, if you’ve requested information from a company but never receive it), the best thing you can do is contact the ISP. Find out what can be done to let the messages through that you want to receive. Be ready with some type of proof that you are not getting all of your email. Examples like I provided above in not receiving confirmation emails from a specific company can help you.

To be fair to the ISPs, this problem is due to people like you and me complaining to their ISPs (or the government) about getting too much spam. As a result, some ISPs have been forced to add these measures to their system. Until a perfect system is found, these types of issues will continue to occur. Educating yourself on such issues can help you continue receiving the e-mail messages that are important to you.

A recent blog comment brought this subject to mind. The comment was actually a tech support question. This caused me to think about all the different ways people try to communicate with us, and made me think I should let you know what works best. (more…)