I guess I’m going to have to address this issue at some point, so here we go.
Apparently one of the more controversial decisions we made with PocketBible for the iPhone was to follow the other major eBook reader software like Kindle and eReader and present the text a page at a time rather than continuously scrolling. That is, to move through the text of a PocketBible Bible or book, you swipe right to left (or just tap on the right side of the page) to “turn the page”. The new page enters from the right.
The alternative is to present Bibles and books as a long stream of continuously scrolling text and allow you to use drags and flicks to smoothly scroll the text. This method is followed (with some variations) by some other Bible software programs.
You Only Think You’ve Seen Continuously Scrolling Text Everywhere
People tend to point to applications like Safari, which lets you flick around on a Web page to scroll up, down, left and right, and claim that “all iPhone apps let you flick to scroll”. This is true when you have a limited amount of text, but not when the text is virtually unlimited. For example, a Web page is a finite amount of text (and images and whatever). It can be rendered once into an in-memory buffer, then portions of that buffer can be moved onto the screen as needed. More importantly, the overall dimensions of the page are easily determined. The programmer can tell the iPhone “I’ll be scrolling around on a 1391- by 3287- pixel image of this page.” That way, the iPhone knows when you’ve hit the “top” or “bottom” of the page and can do that cool “bounce” animation it does when you try to go past the edges.
Even large scrolling lists — like your list of contacts or PocketBible’s search results list — have bounds that are easily determined. It’s easy to count your contacts or your PocketBible search results, multiply by the height of one contact or search result entry in the list, and tell the iPhone the result. So 25,000 search results times 80 pixels is 2,000,000 pixels. If you go past 2,000,000 the iPhone knows you’re at the end and stops asking for more (in this case it actually stops because you’re looking at the 25,000th item, but down inside the code it’s animating the end-of-list behavior based on the y-coordinate being greater than or equal to 2,000,000).
The iPhone needs to know how tall your view is going to be. The problem with the text in PocketBible is that it’s practically infinite in length, and the time it would take to calculate the height needed is probably measured in hours (or at least in minutes), not the milliseconds you expect when you open a book or change the font/size you’re using to display text. The iPhone needs to know this height and we can’t calculate it in a timely fashion.
There are ways around this, but because we can’t calculate the height in advance we’re violating a built-in assumption the iPhone has about scrolling views. So that means we have to code our own scrolling view or at a minimum do some nasty jury-rigging to fake the iPhone into believing it has a finite-length view when in fact it doesn’t.
You’ve probably run into apps like Facebook which shows you 25-50 items in a list then allows you to press a button to load more. Again, you think you’re seeing a long, continuous list but in reality you’re seeing a short, finite-length list and you have an option to see a longer, finite-length list. You just think it’s an infinitely long list.
When To Load the Text?
Because the text of the Bible or a reference book is so long, it’s impractical to load the whole thing into memory at once (both to determine its size and to have it available for continuous scrolling). So we use techniques that allow us to load the text in pieces. (In our case, one paragraph at a time.) The problem, of course, is that it takes just as long to load the whole book one paragraph at a time as it does to simply load the whole book into memory. To get around this, we make use of idle moments (such as while the view is “coasting to a stop” after a flick) to load some more text. Normally the processor isn’t doing anything during this time, so you don’t notice that we’re loading text at that time.
The problem is that it can take longer than that time to load a paragraph. And you may be furiously flicking through text, not giving us time to do any loading. In these cases, we end up using time that is normally spent to recognize your input gestures. As a result, the system seems to be slow to recognize your gestures, and the motion of the text gets jerky.
At some point, we have to draw the text to the screen, which also takes time. One option is to launch a second thread to draw text that has been loaded and decompressed. But since the iPhone has only one processor with one core, this second thread is no more efficient than the method described above (using idle time on the main thread).
Furthermore, there are limits on what kind of drawing you can do in a second thread. Because the iPhone is a relatively new OS and doesn’t have the maturity of, say, Windows Mobile (which, like iPhone OS vs. Mac OS, is also a subset of its desktop counterpart), there are significant missing components for drawing text in anything but the main thread. Apple assumes you’re going to do all your text rendering with its built-in Web view component. But it, too, is an immature component and doesn’t have all the features we need to support everything we need to do with and to the text. So they give us one really nice why to draw text, but limit it to only being used in the main thread of the application. The text functions that can be accessed from other threads are more limited in their scope.
A Little History
Our initial implementation of PocketBible used continuous scrolling. We released an alpha version (a preliminary release that was nowhere near feature-complete) to a small group of testers in January 2009 with the goal of releasing the finished product in March. Because of all the problems described above (and more), the scrolling was a bit clunky. I actually thought it wasn’t horrible once you got used to it, but the alpha testers hated it and sent us back to the drawing board.
For the next six months I tried variations on when to load text, how much text to load, what thread to load text in, when to draw, what thread to draw in, etc., eventually writing at least four complete, from the ground-up, implementations of loading, rendering, and scrolling text. Late in the process I threw it all away and started again and had a relatively good implementation. We released beta 1 and the testers weren’t happy with the scrolling performance.
This was pretty disappointing. We were tempted to just go ahead with this implementation, but when we tested with the newly released OS 3.0 the performance was significantly worse. Something had changed with the new OS and would have required starting over again.
What do the Other Guys Do?
At this point I paused and did a survey of other similar software. I wanted to see what kind of performance they were getting during scrolling, and if there was anything I could divine from applying a programmer’s eye to the use of their software. I opted to look at general ebook software like Kindle, eReader, and Stanza. I chose not to look at other Bible software because the general ebook readers have larger user bases and well-funded, professional development teams.
What I found was a constant use of a “paging” metaphor as opposed to “scrolling”. This was interesting. If they were “getting away with this” with their enormous customer bases then potentially we could do likewise.
User Fatigue and Reading Comprehension
Within a couple days I had a paginated user interface up and running and for the most part, the beta testers liked it. Sure, there were those who really wanted to scroll. But there were others who actually preferred the paginated approach. They found it required a lot less concentration on manipulating the text and allowed them to focus on reading. Their fingers weren’t in the way all the time. And when they tapped the screen they knew it was going to move exactly one page instead of flicking and having to figure out when/if to stop it from scrolling too far, then having to find their place.
This was encouraging because it gave us some very real benefits to the new approach. Paging required less interaction and less concentration on navigating, thus allowing more concentration on reading and comprehension. And the performance was adequate and the implementation simple.
At about the same time my daughter was complaining about a college class that required them to read hundreds of pages of PDF files from the professor’s Web site. The school made the case that this was part of their “green” initiative, but my daughter found that in order to easily read and mark up the text it was necessary to first print it, thus negating the green argument and costing her a fortune in paper and ink. (Ironically, whereas the school could easily have printed this material on a two-sided printer, my daughter could only print on one side, thus costing TWICE as many trees as the “non-green” solution.)
This led me to do some research on online reading vs. reading in print. It seems to be a consistent conclusion that offline reading (from paper) results in better reading comprehension. One of the reasons that was cited was that the eyes can easily go from line to line and from page to page in print, but when reading from the screen the eyes have to constantly adjust for the motion caused by scrolling. The difficulty of moving the screen to the next full screen of text resulted in the eyes and brain having to continuously re-locate their position in the text. The resulting diminished comprehension negatively impacts test scores and was one more point against my daughter’s school’s “green” initiative.
Interestingly, the results of this research could easily be applied to what we were doing on PocketBible. When you flick the text you have to stop and figure out where you’re at. When you turn a page you know right where to continue reading. If you avoid this by slowly scrolling as you read, your eyes can’t move from line to line as easily as they can when those lines aren’t moving. And your fingers get in the way.
So Where do we Stand?
In summary, the reason PocketBible doesn’t have continuous scrolling isn’t because we haven’t thought of it. It’s because we’ve tried several ways of doing it and none has resulted in acceptable performance.
While pagination started as a second-choice user interface, it turns out it’s used by all the large, well-funded, popular ebook reader software for the iPhone. And it turns out it has documented benefits when it comes to user fatigue and reading comprehension.
It cannot be argued that pagination is “not the iPhone way”. The large, continuously scrolling text often cited as examples of “the iPhone way” isn’t actually as large as our text. And there are lots of similar applications that don’t use scrolling as their user interface for books. So while it can be said that continuous scrolling is an iPhone way to interact with books, it cannot be said that it is the iPhone way.
I’m aware of the fact that other Bible software uses scrolling instead of paging. I’ve heard conflicting reports on whether they do this successfully or just “acceptably” in the opinion of their users. I’ve also heard that some do continuous scrolling within a chapter (thus avoiding the problem of having a large amount of text) but then have another gesture that means “next chapter”. This is great for Bibles but doesn’t solve anything for other types of reference books. And it creates a weird concept of “sometimes you flick to scroll and sometimes you have to do something else” to see the next bit of text.
I don’t have any insight into the other guys’ code so I can’t comment on why they may get acceptable scrolling behavior when we don’t. Maybe their standards aren’t as high. Maybe their code isn’t as feature-rich. Maybe they’re better programmers than we are. In the end it’s irrelevant. We are all playing the cards we were dealt. Knowing someone else at another table has a better hand than I do doesn’t mean I can win at my table. To continue but convolute the metaphor, you can either stay in the game with us or you can go play with someone else. We can’t control your behavior.
We have not disclosed our plans for any future features of PocketBible, other than to say we’re continuously working on it, and that the features you see in other versions of PocketBible will find their way into the iPhone version in the future. We have a long list of must-have features in PocketBible and a long-list of suggestions from all of you. We consider the must-have list to be the more important one at this time. We’ve been implementing little things from the suggestion list as we work through big things on the must-have list, but are prioritizing useful new functionality over simply changing the way things work.
Pagination is a feature that is not broken and doesn’t need to be fixed. While we may look at wasting another six months on scrolling in the future, we’ll do that at a time when it won’t cause other very necessary features to be delayed.
Before You Comment…
This article is meant to be informative, not to launch discussion. We already know that some of you would prefer to scroll rather than page through the text. If you’re just writing to tell us that, then you must not have comprehended this article very well. Try paging through it instead of scrolling. 
Furthermore, this article summarizes some complicated programming issues into imprecise layperson’s terminology. Like a paraphrase of the Bible, there is a lot lost in the process. If you are not a programmer and think you have an idea for doing this in a way we haven’t tried, don’t bother to comment. Chances are good you don’t really understand the issues and I won’t be able to tell you that without insulting you. If you’re a programmer and are sure you know how to do this better than we do, I remind you you haven’t seen our code so don’t know what we’re working with, then ask you to send completed, working code to me by email instead of discussing it here where we’ll only confuse the masses.
Comments are moderated. I will remove references to other iPhone programs. I will remove feature requests and off-topic posts. I will remove links to other sites. I may remove other things I haven’t thought of.
Now, other than the above, feel free to comment.
As a programmer, I think it was a very clear explanation of the problems you face and the tradeoffs involved in coming to the decision you did. I’ve also learned from experience that convincing a user that a certain problem is _hard_, when to them it looks easy (and especially when x, y, and z already do it), is nearly impossible. So thanx for shipping the best solution you could find, and for being transparent about the process.
You’re basically saying, “We can’t make your 1-ton pickup get 35 mpg while towing a horse trailer”, and people reply, “But my subcompact hybrid gets 45 mpg! Why can’t you? And don’t give me a bunch of technobabble about power-to-weight ratios and aerodynamics!” Good luck with those people.
Hi Craig,
I appreciate you taking the time to explain this issue. My comment is not THAT I prefer scrolling, but WHY I think I (and maybe others) appreciate that capability for a Bible application where it might not be as important for an eReader application.
For an eReader, the typical use case is very linear; when I’m reading a news article or a novel, once I turn the page, I don’t turn it back. When I’m using my phone to view the Bible, I generally want to look at the context of a verse and appreciate the capability to flexibly get the portion of scripture on the screen intuitively.
Thanks again.
Marc: Thanks for getting it.
Josh: Of course, WHY you prefer scrolling is irrelevant, since THAT you prefer scrolling is irrelevant.
While respecting your opinion of why scrolling is better for your use case, I personally disagree with the basis of your case. I regularly re-start a paragraph in a Kindle book (which might be on a previous page) if I don’t understand it or if my mind is drifting while reading. In fact, I find that I go back and re-read a passage MORE often in Kindle books than in the Bible, because in the former case I’m “on autopilot” — just reading the text page after page for pleasure — and in the latter case I’m reading each word carefully for comprehension. My mind is more likely to drift while reading from the Kindle app than while studying in PocketBible because I’m generally more focussed while reading the Bible. And when my mind drifts I have to go back and re-read.
Furthermore, with PocketBible I generally go directly to the passage I want to read. Last Sunday we were studying Hebrews 10:24-25. I went to Heb 10:24 and read both verses. I never had to go back a page to see part of the passage because I went there to begin with. If a person is in the habit, however, of turning to the start of the chapter then turning pages to get to verse 24, it could be that only part of verse 24 is visible on a page. That’s just a misuse of the program.
If the passage is longer than a page, then one might want to turn back a page or two to get to the beginning of the passage. Simply tapping a couple times does that for you. You don’t have to look for the starting verse of the passage — it will be at the top of the page when you get there.
What I’m saying is that the argument in favor of scrolling (that it’s easier to get the passage on the screen that you want) may indicate more of a problem with how the program is being used than the tools the program gives you to interact with the text. And the argument that you seldom go backwards in a novel while you do that frequently in a Bible is only arguably true.
And if you just want to go back in the text and get some context, there’s no difference between scrolling and paging. You can’t make the argument that “context” means N lines or pixels, and that the inability therefore to scroll exactly N lines or pixels means you can’t get context. “Context” is a general term, and being able to turn a page at a time in reverse is no better or worse for determining context than being able to scroll N lines or pixels at a time.
My point isn’t that you’re wrong, but that your argument isn’t sound. You can still prefer scrolling, but your argument doesn’t prove that scrolling is qualitatively better. Just that you prefer it.
I would encourage you to give paging the benefit of the doubt and try it for a while. You may find that you sometimes flick to scroll, even after using the program for a while, but I think you’ll find that there’s no real qualitative difference between scrolling and paging for most practical purposes and that such arguments are merely academic.
First, I agree that page turning is fine once you get used to it. It’s very rare when you can’t just bump a few verses one way or the other and set convenient page boundaries.
That being said, there is a certain element of consistency in a platform that users expect, and while experts learn to use and even appreciate exceptional features for unusual applications (reading the Bible is not like reading a web page or a novel), beginning users often think of different as bad.
As a developer, I wonder if it would be possible to pre-compute scrolling positions, either by full volume (e.g. the Bible, a dictionary, ete.) or by some smaller sub-division (book of the Bible, letter in the alphabet for a dictionary, etc.) for every line, and ship that data for all reasonable font sizes and all default iPhone fonts.
Note that I haven’t done any iPhone development. That being said, I know that relatively immature (
Great post, Craig. I thought that the initial part of it sounded familiar as it had come up with the WM team some time back.
Personally, I’m okay with the paging thing, especially if I turn off animations. It makes for a snappier experience on my WM device and lets me keep going w/out too much of an interruption. On a semi-related topic, I’ve found the concept of flick-scrolling to be a little painful at times – either the text scrolls too fast or I can’t actually stop it when I want to and flick past my desired stopping point too often.
Regardless, this was a great explanation of the problem and why you made the decisions that you made. I appreciate the work your team does and PB is one of the first things I load up when I upgrade or get a new device.
Hi Craig,
I cannot agree with you more. I started using another free Bible program for my iPhone while I waited for you to finish PocketBible and it uses the scrolling technique. At first it was “cool” using what many consider to be the iPhone way of scrolling text, but I quickly became less satisfied with it. I also noticed that both the Kindle app and the Stanza app (most consider this the best eBook reader for the iPhone) used the pagination method.
So, I agree with you that it’s the better way to read electronically. And, now that you’ve stated more of the research that backs my personal opinion, it sure seems that it doesn’t matter even whether or not you find a better way to programmatically load pages for scrolling, since pagination decreases User Fatigue and increases Reading Comprehension over scrolling.
Your customers greatly benefit from your due diligence, research, coding, etc. – even when we don’t know it.
Thank you for all that you and your team at Laridian do for us, your customers (and for God’s Kingdom)!
Hi Craig, Thanks for this post as it is informative about the issues involved. While it took me a little bit of time to get used to the iPhone app vs. the WinMobile version I think that the page by page implementation works well. I have used the Kindle app a lot on my iPod Touch as well as the Stanza app and the pagination works similarly so it all feels “right” (subjective but you get my point). I think that the toggle controls overlay is genius and makes it so easy if I want to back up a verse or a chapter and can’t remember which quadrant of the screen does what . . .
Thanks as well for the notes feature in 1.1! I used that this past Sunday and it was a welcome addition to the iPhone version. And lastly, the copy verse/passage implementation on the iPhone version is my favorite new addition. Very easy to use and set the begin and end verses.
OK – I’m off topic now but just wanted to express my thanks for a great product.
I was one of the beta testers who complained when they switched to scrolling. I think I might have even panned it in my review. But now that I have used it and after reading the info above about the research about reading pages v. scrolling text online, I am not as opposed. In fact I like it since the few times I actually use my iPhone in public speaking situations have a set amount of text that doesn’t move until I do something very consciences like tap or swipe the screen.
BTW Craig, hope you are healing well.
I’m not sure logic will convince anybody. It is like he verse picker approach. The “iPhone way” is to use the spin-wheel method. And when you indicated that you were going to give everybody the 3-tap or spin-wheel option I saw that many people expressed a strong preperence for the spin-wheel. In reality I bet almost all of those have switched to the 3-tap method. The page method you have chosen is faster for most reading and I think I would now prefer it over continuous scroll if I had the choice. Maybe this is where the “grass is always greener” metaphor applies. It seems for many that choice/familiar trumps logic. Remember New Coke?
Thanks Craig for all the info. I gather that this is a rather sensitive topic for yourself and a lot of users. I appreciate the months of pain that you went through looking for a nice solution…
However, I spent the first few weeks changing books when I really just wanted to read some of the following text. And everyone that I’ve shown it to and ask them to get to the next bit of text, does the same (both iPhone users and non iPhone users). I guess most users (well, a small selection of Australian users anyway
are accustomed to scrolling through text that is on an electronic display. Could it be that it’s not the ‘iPhone way’ but the intuitive way?
I’ve been a PocketBible user for at least a decade, so I’m not about to jump ship, I just need to retrain my thumb…
Thanks again Craig!
I agree with all your comments Craig! I too am a programmer and we too at my work have upgraded a heavily used program to a newer version and many of the normal usage tasks have changed. Most of the users are upset because it isn’t just like the old version. This basically boils down to “we humans don’t like change!” period.
Well, lets face it folks “life is nothing but change!”.
After using PocketBible on my iPod Touch since it was released, I actually prefer the way it does pages. It is easier on my eyes and with being able to toggle the screen menu, I can easily get to where I want to go with the minimal clicks and swipes.
I just went back to my old Palm and MyBible seems way cumbersome to use now that I am used to using PocketBible.
Craig and company, keep up the good work. Your explanation and research is evident enough for proceeding the direction you did. Now that I am used to it, I like it too.
God’s Peace,
-tom
The post and responses might suggest that users will ‘love the one and hate the other’, on the contrary I’ve found both systems quite satisfactory with slight pro and cons for both. However, Craig’s point on the issue of eye strain on a moving page is for me the deciding issue. I believe that the fixed page reads much easier. Although you get quite used to ‘tapping’ between pages, a possible future feature might include ’tilt’ to change pages.
Paging has problems: I know this because I use paper Bibles and I use chapter-oriented Bible software on the PC, and it does make it difficult to read context if it happens to be split over two pages/chapters.
However, I found your discussion of the problems with scrolling fascinating. I am not in a position to test scrolling vs. paging on the phone, but I imagine the differences could be quite interesting. Anyway, I agree with you that you should try to get the best balance between a competing budget of features and technological hurdles, rather than expending too much effort on one area of the UI.
One thing I’m not so sure about is whether it is wise to say someone is “misusing” your software. Surely doing something that it was not designed for and misusing it are different things?
Also, how do we judge something is better? Efficiency of use? Satisfaction? (which, I might add, is likely to allow you to focus on the scriptures rather than on the software, which must be a goal of all good Bible software). Familiarity? (I’m not quite sure how you “flexibly get the portion of scripture on the screen intuitively” except by analogy with something you are familiar with).
All up, an interesting article about an obviously very real problem.
Craig, I just wanted to say that I have been a fan of the page turn from the very beginning. Yes, scrolling occasionally would be nice, but when I read my paper Bibles, I somehow manage to turn pages back and forth when I need to
When I am in study mode on the iPhone and have multiple versions, dictionaries and commentaries open, the left /right page turn through the book, up/down “page turn” through open resources and corners for jumps just seems to work for me. This way of doing things is much better for study and serious reading.
By the way, I love the quick access to open resources by tapping on the top menu and I’m slowly getting the hang of the search functions. Keep up the good work.
Michael Werle wrote:
Scrolling positions is a small part of the problem, but rendering an entire book, for whatever reason, in all fonts and at all sizes is impractical for reasons that become obvious when you consider there are 8 fonts in the current OS release (dozens more could be added with any point-upgrade of the operating system) and 65 supported sizes. Images can be at one of 2 zoom levels in the current implementation, and that will change in a future update. The phone can be in two orientations, each with 8 possible heights depending on the settings of the status bar, title bar, and tool bar. There are 3 variations of the footnote settings to be taken into consideration with each book, and if a footnote is displayed it potentially throws of subsequent pre-calculated values (one would have to render all the text to the next pre-calculated point to determine if and by how much — every time a note is displayed). Strong’s numbers can be on or off in some books. Poetry indenting can be on or off. Every user note that is added to a Bible throws off subsequent pre-calculated positions. Verse numbers can be turned on in Bibles like The Message that don’t support them. Search results, when highlighted in the text, change the width of the text.
So at a minimum you have to calculate 199,680 sets of scroll positions for each book and you still have a bunch of cases where you can’t use them. For a Bible you have a minimum of 1189 chapters. If you store a 4-byte integer for each chapter you’re adding over 900 MB to each Bible (they are currently about 3-5 MB each. Reference books would require even more.
I’m not trying to make you look dumb for suggestion something like this, but rather pointing out that it’s easy to “solve” someone else’s problem. We live, breath, and eat this program every single day. It’s difficult for someone not in that position to say anything useful; hence my comments about what to think about before posting comments.
Jayson wrote:
Remember you probably read the “Welcome” document that explains how to move through the text on page 1. Your friends to whom you hand the program did not. Bring up Stanza or Kindle and do the same test. You’ll have the same results.
Then go to your “recents” list and ask your friends to get the mailing address of the last person who called you. Try to do it without calling the person.
Then tap and hold on a program icon on the Home screen until the icons start to wiggle. Panic because you don’t know what that means. Hand your phone to a friend and ask them to make the icons stop wiggling without deleting any programs.
Hand them your stock iPhone and ask them to create a to-do list.
I was at a convention recently where a celebrity (70′s rock star) was speaking to a small crowd. Afterwards we all had a chance to meet him personally and get our picture taken (I wasn’t a fan so I was just hanging around). A guy handed me his BlackBerry and said, “Would you take a picture of me?” I’m both a reasonably experienced photographer and a mobile phone fanatic, so I didn’t think it would be a problem. Well, nothing I did resulted in the stupid thing taking a picture.
I’m sure once someone showed me which button to push or whatever that it would be “intuitive”. My point in each of these cases is that it’s unreasonable to hand a phone to a complete neophyte and expect them to be able to use a particular program as well as someone who has read the documentation and/or played with the phone for a while.
Jonathan Morgan wrote:
“Misusing” just means to use in the wrong way. We regularly have people who say it’s too hard to get to the middle of a chapter from the beginning. We find out they’re using “next book” and “next chapter” functions to navigate through the Bible (easier in some of our other apps than in the iPhone app). So they back-back-back their way from Matthew to Psalms, then forward-forward-forward to Psalm 119, then complain about how long it is taking them to get to Ps 119:150. Yeah. No kidding. They always have some reason that they don’t like the direct go-to feature (or they haven’t found it).
When you’re studying a particular passage, use the Go-To feature to go right to it even if you’re already pretty close. This does a number of things. First, it positions the text on the page so that the majority of the passage is readable on one screen. Second, it puts it in the navigation history so that “back” and “forward” operations work as expected. In our Windows Mobile app it makes it be the default first verse in “copy passage”.
What I often find is that people complaining about verses being split across page boundaries are not going directly to the verse they’re looking for to begin with. And if all they’re complaining about is that some verses are split across pages, well, that’s just complaining for the sake of complaining. Of course there are verses that don’t completely fit on the screen.
And the question about “how do we judge something ‘better’?” is exactly my point. The scrollers argue that scrolling is is “better” for a variety of reasons (related to them not reading the Welcome document), such as “more intuitive” and “it’s the iPhone way”. My article is trying to make the case that there are arguments for paging that suggest it is “better”. Among them are improved reading comprehension, reduced eye strain and fatigue, analogous behavior to a book, compatibility with the behavior of very popular apps in our category (ebook readers), etc.
“Better” is in the eye of the beholder. What I get disappointed with is the number of people for whom “better” is whatever they determine is better, and we’re bad/wrong/incompetent if we don’t agree.
“Better” is in the eye of the beholder. What I get disappointed with is the number of people for whom “better” is whatever they determine is better, and we’re bad/wrong/incompetent if we don’t agree.
Craig, you can’t state it any clearer or more concise.
Bottom line here folks… We are complaining about FREE, (let me say that again) FREE software here. Laridian is working many hours and continuing to work additional features into this software. AND DOING IT ALL FOR FREE. Honestly folks, how many of you if you asked a fellow Christian to help you do a project at your house, then you complain that they aren’t doing it right — would expect then to stick around? No you don’t do that. You simply are extremely grateful that they are there helping you in the first place.
So let’s do that with Laridian too. We are getting their time and energy and research for FREE. Please just be extremely grateful.
Peace and Joy,
-tom
I was originaly a WM PocketBible user, very happy one. I then purchased an iPhone 3GS six months ago and waited for the Pocketbible app to be released. Once released I wasn’t completely sold on the paging vs. scrolling, but that has changed. I think it works really well and have no problems in using it.
Is there a possibility of this feature being used in the WM version, being that we now have capacitive touch screens being released? As the WM devices have higher resolution screens than iPhone I can understand how some wouldn’t want this feature as it would alter the way they look at multiple books on screen (same time), but the option would be nice.
For those who wonder why I got an iPhone, I try every mobile device before commenting on it, both a hobby and work related. I am happy to say my new HTC HD2 arrives tomorrow, my preferred device.
David: PocketBible/WM already does paging. The animation is different and the text layout is slightly different — the WM version may show a partial line at the bottom of the screen, which becomes the top line when you page down. The iPhone version does not show partial lines.
PocketBible/iPhone uses a modified version of the PocketBible/WM touch handling. The latter has just four touch areas (top/bottom/right/left) where the former has nine.
I do appreciate your arguments for paging. And I think the discussion about misusing is more a discussion about how words are used than a disagreement. I’m still not convinced that a software developer is entitled to say that a user is using software in the “wrong” way. However, I’m quite happy to agree with you that if they don’t use it as it was designed to be used then it might not work as well, or just plain badly. If by “wrong” you mean “not as designed” then that’s fine. If you mean it is the software developer’s job to dictate to users exactly how they should use software, then we strongly disagree.
Also, in fairness to users, a lot of free software for the PC (particularly e-Sword) does seem to encourage going to a chapter and then finding a verse (though it can go straight to the verse). Because of the different screen size that doesn’t translate well to a phone, but I can’t fault them too much for starting by doing what they are used to. Also, you don’t always know what verses your going to in a chapter (though if that’s the case you are always going to have to skim through the chapter content up to where you want to go, whatever method you use).
Another, probably crazy idea I wondered about was allowing some form of half paging, which has many of the problems of scrolling in that the text you are looking at moves, but should allow you to keep what you are looking at on the screen while removing the arbitrary boundary which is my biggest problem with any paging model. As you say, you know the software better than I do, and it is probably not worth it, but I just throw it out as an idea.
And I can sympathise with people who don’t want to read introduction and welcome documents (I’m sure I’m one of them). Yes, if well written they can give valuable information that I would find hard to find out myself (obviously it’s not “intuitive”), but at the start I just want to have a play. If it strikes me as useful software then it is time to go back and read the manual to find how to use it better.
How about LiveScribe, why can’t I write a note in my paper bible and have it show up in PB? What about Nintendo DS or PSP? How about the Wii? I heard that one company is working on developing that one platform that’ll work on that one device and perform that one cool function…why haven’t you released PB’s version for that yet? Get with the program guys! I mean, come on, EVERY single app ever developed in the history of computers worked with Windows 7 prior to it’s release, right???