I’ve uploaded a video preview of PocketBible for iPad to YouTube at www.youtube.com/user/laridianinc. Because the video resolution isn’t as good as the iPad screen resolution, I’ve reproduced some representative screen shots below. Click on the screen shot to see the full-resolution image.
We reserve the right to make changes to the user interface (UI) and to functionality before we ship. In fact, there are a few things still in flux and at least one major feature that hasn’t been plugged into the new UI yet. So expect changes from what you see here.
We’re especially excited about the flexibility the control panel gives us for new features and for giving you instant access to search results and bookmarks. We also have enjoyed just reading the Bible in full-screen mode.
While the iPad is faster than the iPhone, we’ve also made changes to the code that have really sped up the display of text, making scrolling by verses and even chapters significantly more useful. The nice thing is that the iPhone and iPad code is the same at this level so the improvements will spill over to the iPhone.
Having said that, it should be obvious that not all the features of PocketBible for iPad will find their way to the iPhone. We’ll probably add split-screen, but not more than two windows.
One thing we’re concerned about is app approval times on the App Store. We submitted Romans Road for release on the April 3 iPad release date. We followed Apple’s instructions for making sure our app was available on April 3, but then we never heard anything further from them so we’re not sure what the status of that app is. We’ve heard the same thing from other developers.
We don’t have a schedule for releasing this version of PocketBible yet. As you can see it’s very nearly complete but there are some big features that need to be plugged in.
David: Searching on the iPad uses the same functionality as you have on the iPhone, which is documented thoroughly in the built-in Help.
You can use AND, OR, XOR, and NOT operators in your searches. You can use parenthesis to group terms. You can search for occurrences of a word within so many verses of another word. You can search for Strong’s numbers in Bibles that have them, and find occurrences of English words only when translated from (or not translated from) a particular Strong’s number. You can use * and ? wildcard characters in words, and you can use letter ranges as wildcards (i.e. [sp]aul to find “Saul” or “Paul” but not “haul”). It’s more informative to read the help than for me to try to come up with examples of all these.
The iPad actually has two ways to search. There’s a “quick search” search bar on the Find panel in the control panel and an “advanced search” dialog that is identical to the search dialog on your iPhone. You can see that in the video.
We haven’t made any announcement with respect to a Mac version.
“I don’t mind giving you the option to turn off the margins and leading in order to make the page less readable. Maybe not in the initial iPad release but soon after.”
Okay, okay… I’ve finally purchased the Kindle App for my iPad along with some books for iBooks and now understand that the need for some margins around the border on the iPad is a necessity. So now in comparison to that “other iPad Bible app” which I had previously referred to which didn’t use any margins, it does make it less desirable to read. I do however like the way the Instapaper App allows the user to adjust the margins as well as leading to his/her satisfaction!