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The KJV Exhaustive Concordance and the NAS Exhaustive Concordance have been released for use with MyBible 4. Both concordances include the complete Bible text with Strong’s numbers and Hebrew and Greek Dictionaries. The KJV Exhaustive Concordance is listed at $14.99. The NAS Exhaustive Concordance is listed at $29.99.
MyBible 4 users will need to download the latest update to the program from their account to use these new titles.
MyBible for Palm OS has been updated to version 4.100 and the book reader engine 1.058. This is a free update for registered MyBible 4 owners. (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…)
Memorize! for Pocket PC has been updated to version 1.501 and the book reader engine 1.058. This is a free update for registered Memorize! 1.5 for Pocket PC owners. (more…)
PocketBible for Pocket PC has been updated to version 3.040 and the book reader engine 1.058. This is a free update for registered PocketBible 3 for Pocket PC owners. (more…)
As we mentioned a while back we’re about to release the New American Bible (NAB), one of the more popular Catholic editions of the Bible. While most people understand that Catholic and “protestant” Bibles differ in the number of books they include in the canon, few realize some of the other differences and how this affects Bible software. (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.
PocketBible for Windows Mobile Smartphone has been updated to version 1.006 and the book reader engine 1.057. This is a free update for registered PocketBible for Windows Mobile Smartphone owners. (more…)
In the latest PC Magazine, Michael Miller writes about the cool new things happening on mobile phones and opines that “consumers should be able to pick applications regardless of phone or carrier.” This is a wonderful idea, but is idealistic to such a degree as to be laughable.
This fact doesn’t escape Miller’s attention. He adds: “There are multiple impediments: a bunch of different platforms that developers write for, a bunch of different phone makers, and four big national wireless carriers that want to control the applications on your phone.”
But the scope of these impediments is wider than one might imagine. To illustrate, I looked at the only the phones offered by Nokia, and only those Nokia phones available in North America, then specifically only those offered in the United States.
Nokia phones come with one of three different operating systems. Each of these operating systems has had more than one edition. Some editions break compatibility with prior editions. That is, programs written for edition 2 may not run on edition 3. Between the three current major operating systems supported by Nokia (Series 40, 60, and 80) there are eight editions. Software written for one Series does not run on the other Series’. In some cases the programming languages supported on one Series are not supported on the other Series’.
Within a Series there are variations on the services available to programmers, and as I mentioned before, between editions there can be major changes that make it so programs written for one edition will not run on the next. This is equivalent to Microsoft making it so that no program written for Windows 98 would run on Windows XP. There are already enough apps that break for some reason even though Microsoft tries to maintain compatibility between versions. Imagine if they intentionally broke all apps when they released a new version. This is unimaginable on the desktop, yet it happens all the time on mobile phones.
Continuing with the Nokia illustration, Nokia offers 123 models of phone in the United States. They have a huge market share and hundreds of millions of customers. However, only about 1/4th of those phones are programmable. The vast majority offer limited capability for third-party additions beyond ringtones.
Of the 30 or so phones that are possible targets for programmers, half are running an older version of the Series 60 operating system that is incompatible with programs written for the latest version. And of the 15 models that are thus targetable for software developers, only one or two have been picked up by any carriers here in the US. As a result, even though hundreds of millions of people are carrying Nokia phones, only thousands are carrying phones that are potential targets for current developers.
I don’t want to give the impression that I’m picking on Nokia. I’m just using them as an illustration. The rest of the industry is similar: There are thousands of models of phones each running some highly customized version of some proprietary operating system, making it impossible for the sharing of programs or even data beyond a very limited subset of particular models of phones.
So the dream of running any cell phone software on any cell phone is a long way off — unless Microsoft or Palm comes to dominate the cell phone market and establishes their OS as the standard. And furthermore, the dream of seeing a big uptick in a broad range of software applications for these devices is severely hampered by the inability of the cell phone manufacturers to adopt a standard operating system (or even two or three). Without that, it’s difficult for developers to commit resources to the mobile phone market.
This should not be interpreted as a position statement from Laridian with respect to the direction of its development. We were developing for Windows CE long before it had a measurable fraction of market share, and it could be argued that the BlackBerry is an inhospitable platform for Bible software because so many of them are controlled by corporate IT departments which restrict the installation of third-party apps on the devices. This is merely a commentary on the sad state of the mobile phone market from the perspective of independant software developers.
Procrastinators: Now is the time to buy a Pocket PC
If you’re in the market for a new Pocket PC device, be sure to check out Craig Rairdin’s article on this subject published in the latest edition of Christian Computing Magazine (links to PDF file). He offers some tips on getting a good deal on used Pocket PCs on eBay.