By the time you read this, PocketBible 2 for iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch should be available in the App Store. It introduces several new features and a new pricing scheme.
Quick Summary for the Horribly Impatient
PocketBible 2 is called “PocketBible” in the App Store. It is a free download. PocketBible 1 (“PocketBible FREE” in the App Store) is no longer available in the App Store. YOU MUST DOWNLOAD THE NEW POCKETBIBLE FROM THE APP STORE IN ORDER TO GET THE ADVANCED FEATURES MENTIONED BELOW. Some of you are trying use the feature set upgrade on the old PocketBible FREE 1.4.7. That won’t work. You must download the new PocketBible from the App store in order to get the advanced features mentioned below. There’s a link to PocketBible 2 in the next paragraph.
Click here to download the new version of PocketBible. (NOTE: Do not skip this step!)
The free version of PocketBible 2 has pretty much the same features as PocketBible 1.4.7 (one exception is described below). To get the new features, you need to purchase the “Advanced Feature Set” either at our website ($4.99) or through In-App Purchase inside the app ($5.99).
After you purchase the upgrade at our website, go to “Buy/Apply Upgrade” inside the app to apply the upgrade and enable the advanced features. You must provide your Laridian login credentials during this step so the program can find your purchase on our website.
If you have notes, highlights, bookmarks, or devotional reading progress you want to preserve, you need to move that data to your new copy of PocketBible using the process described below (and also in the built-in help). To get your Bibles and books into the new version, you need to simply download them using Menu > Add/Remove Books.
All PocketBible users should switch to the new version even if you don’t upgrade to the Advanced Feature Set. The old version of PocketBible will not be updated and has been removed from the App Store.
New Features in Free Version
The free version of PocketBible 2 has essentially the same features as PocketBible 1.4.7. The only significant new feature in the free version is related to expanding the Toolbox. In version 1, the expanded toolbox covered the Bible text. When we first implemented the expanding Toolbox, we figured it would be a temporary action. However, we’ve found that we prefer to have the Toolbox expanded while entering notes, and it’s inconvenient to have to collapse it to view the BIble text. So now PocketBible moves the active pane to the empty space above/below/next to the expanded Toolbox. And if the keyboard obscures part of the pane, the pane is shrunk again to fit in the available space.
All PocketBible users should switch to PocketBible 2. Version 1 has been removed from the App Store and won’t be updated. To make sure you get the latest bug fixes and updates, you should make the switch now to version 2 even if you’re not planning to purchase the Advanced Feature Set. This unfortunate circumstance is the result of the way Apple has us sign and identify applications.
Advanced Features
To access the advanced features in PocketBible 2, you need to purchase the “Advanced Feature Set” — either inside the app for $5.99 or directly on our website for $4.99. Advanced features include:
- Automatic verse studies. Select a verse and PocketBible prepares an HTML or plain-text document chock full of information about that verse from your Library. This file can be viewed from within PocketBible, transferred to your Windows or Mac computer through iTunes, printed using AirPrint, or copied and pasted to an email. Each Verse Autostudy report includes:
- The text of the selected verse from all your Bibles (you choose which ones)
- The text of the selected verse with Strong’s numbers (if you own one of our Bibles with Strong’s numbers)
- The definition of each English word in the verse from all of your dictionaries (you choose which ones)
- The definition of each Strong’s word number from your Strong’s dictionaries (you choose which ones)
- Commentary on the verse from all your commentaries (you choose which ones)
- Cross references from the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge (if you have it installed)
- Automatic word studies. Select a word and PocketBible prepares a similar HTML document, this time with information about the selected word. Each Word Autostudy report includes:
- Definition of the selected word from all of your dictionaries (you choose which ones)
- A summary of search results from selected Bibles (you choose which ones)
- A list of related Strong’s numbers (original language words translated to the selected word)
- Definitions of the related Strong’s word numbers (you select which Strong’s dictionaries)
- Synthesized voices read any Bible or book to you. Purchase a voice from a selection of six English and three Spanish voices, and PocketBible will read to you! Works with any of your Bibles or other books, does not require an internet connection once the voice is installed, and takes only about 50MB-75MB (compared to
4000MB for a pre-recorded audio Bible). Start a playlist of hymns and have PocketBible read to you from the Psalms for an inspiring time of daily devotions. Or have PocketBible read while you do other tasks on your iPad. No other mobile Bible program can do all that. - New tabbed view. Both iPhone and iPad now support up to five panes (iPhone was previously only two panes) and you can choose to view five full-screen tabs instead of splitting the screen into panes. Just select a tab to view the books open in that tab.
- Automatically open all your books into tabs. PocketBible will open Bibles, commentaries, dictionaries, devotionals, and “other” books each into their own tabs for easy access to your entire library.
- AirPrint support (iOS 4.2 or later). Print Autostudy reports, passages, or selected text to your AirPrint-capable printer.
- Improved text selection. Drag through any text to select it. Copy, print, speak, or perform other operations on the selected text. Uses familiar iOS interface components (such as the magnifying glass and lollipop-shaped “drag handles”). (This seems obvious but we had to implement them from scratch as Apple doesn’t expose those components to developers, so it seems worth mentioning.)
- Highlight selected verses. Highlight more than one verse at a time by dragging through any portion of the verses, then select “Highlight selected verses”. You can’t highlight portions of a verse, but you can highlight more than one verse at a time.
Apple Changed the Rules
As many of you know, Apple now requires that ebook apps like ours must not link to a website for add-on book sales, but must use Apple’s In-App Purchasing (IAP) capability and pay Apple 30% of each sale for doing little more than processing a credit card (which costs them about 3%). Amazon responded to this by entirely removing all links to their website from their Kindle app. We opted to implement Apple’s IAP but at a slightly higher price to offset Apple’s fee. (You’ll pay on average about 17.6% more for a book you buy using IAP vs. purchasing direct on our site, which results in us splitting the 30% fee 50/50. The proof is left for the reader.)
This would have very little consequence except that PocketBible 1.4.7 was created in a way that prevented it from ever using IAP. As a result, version 2 could not simply be a new version of the existing “PocketBible FREE” application. Instead it had to be a separate product. This is confusing for those of you upgrading from version 1, but should not be a problem in the future.
Moving Your Notes, Highlights, Bookmarks and Daily Reading Progress to the New Program
Since PocketBible 2 is a different program than PocketBIble 1, you will need to move any notes, highlights, bookmarks, and daily reading progress that you want to keep from PocketBible 1. Again, this is only necessary if you have data you want to preserve. To do that:
- Launch the old version of PocketBible. Verify it’s the old one by looking at the version number at the bottom of the menu. Next to “About PocketBible” it should say “1.x.x” (the latest version is 1.4.7).
- Choose Menu > Manage My Data.
- Enter your Laridian login credentials and select either “Sync My Data With Server” (if you’ve been sync’ing your data with the server in the past) or “Back Up My Data To Server”. Note that if you have been keeping your data in sync with the server and you know it is up to date, you can skip this step.
- When that is complete, exit PocketBible and launch the new PocketBible program.
- Verify you are in the new PocketBible program by going to the bottom of the menu. Next to “About PocketBible” it should say “2.0.0″ (or later).
- If you have not yet registered, do so now. (You’ll see “Register PocketBible” near the top of the menu if you haven’t registered.)
- Choose Menu > Manage My Data.
- Enter your Laridian login credentials and select either “Sync My Data With Server” (if that’s what you did in version 1) or Restore From a Backup (if you used “Back Up My Data To Server” above). If you are restoring from a back up, you’ll be presented with a list of backup sets. Find the section labelled with the name of your device followed by “com.laridian.PocketBible” and choose the top item from that list (the most recent backup).
- When that is complete, you have transferred your personal notes, highlights, etc. to PocketBible 2. You can remove the old PocketBible program from your device and download Bibles and reference books into PocketBIble 2.
Some Screen Shots
Here are some quick screen shots to give you an idea of some of the new and improved features.
I am a big fan of your work. It is amazing that I purchased some of these bibles years ago, but can still use them on my updated devices. I will gladly pay for the upgrade and I hope it will help to keep developing this wonderful product.
Does this mean you will have more time to work on a desktop version for macs?
Andy,
No, it means I have more time to work on Android.
Craig, Thanks for the update and the hard work you have put into it. I do have an issue I can’t seem to solve. While experimenting with the settings I selected “Open all books”. Now the tabs display “Bibles, Commentary, Dict. etc”. I would rather have the tabs display individual books but I can’t seem to get back there.
If all the books that are open in a particular tab are of a particular type (say, Bibles) then the tab assumes you are using your tabs to organize your display by book type and tells you the book type instead of the name of the book. If you want a tab to contain the name of the book rather than its type, open a different type of book in that tab. This and other good questions are answered in the built-in help. If you have further tech support questions after reading the information there, contact support at support@laridian.com.
Great job on this upgrade to my favorite app since my Palm days (does that date me?). I scanned through the replies and did not see this discussed. I have gotten a response to my concerns and the problem will be addressed…sometime…but I wanted to make sure that it was posted in this blog for the rest of the users.
I participate on the leadership team for a city-wide Bible study. I use the copy (out of PB) and paste (into GoodReader and MS Word) function on a regular basis. This function is now copying the “code” in addition to the text. This is definitely not going to change my attitude toward PB but it is very inconvenient. I don’t know if there are many foks who have realized the value of this capability for teaching and lecturing but the sooner this can be successfully addressed the better.
KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK!
Steve,
This is a bug in iOS 5 that we’ve had to work around. We’ll be posting an update to the App Store today or tomorrow that will include a fix for the HTML tags you see when you copy/paste. I’ll have more to say about this once we get it uploaded.
Thank you very much, Craig. I will be looking for that soon. =) Again, thanks for the hard work and the fantastic product that has resulted. God Bless.
Steve
Thank you for continuing to make improvements to Bible Reader. I have owned some version of this from back in the Palm days. It is the most important app on my phone.
I have an iPhone 3g (pre-retinal display) and also had difficulty with 2.0′s readability and reverted to 1.4.7. When I saw the update for 2.0.2 I reloaded everything and the readability greatly improved. Thank you. Unfortunately, now when I first open the app the text window is shifted to the upper right area of the window and part of the text is cut off. It only does this with open books, not the any of the menu windows. I also noticed that if I rotate the device the text shifts back into its proper position. But if I open a menu item and then close it again, the text again reverts to its upper left shift position. Sounds like there are still bugs, at least for us older iPhone owners.
Marty,
“Bible Reader” is not our product. PocketBible is.
There’s no differences between 1.4.7 and 2.0 with respect to “readability”. We’ve seen some other comments with respect to clarity of the fonts, and we’ve seen those same comments from users of other iPhone software. I have not seen any answers as to why some people see the text as “blurry”. Some have speculated that it’s differences in each person’s eyes’ response to the smoothing techniques used by the operating system to display text, but that doesn’t explain why you’d see a difference from one version of the same program to the next. This is an operating system issue and should be reported to Apple.
The problem with the text being shifted up and to the right is one that we have not been able to duplicate in-house except on one employee’s device. We are running some tests today to see if we can get more information from that device as to why it’s happening. We spent several hours yesterday reviewing the code and have concluded it’s a flaw in the latest version of the XCode development environment or the iOS 5 SDK from Apple, but we haven’t figured out exactly where it is nor how to work around it.
Lest Android users think we’re wasting time on iOS, I spent the last couple days recovering from a similar bug in Google’s development tools. After the most recent “Ice Cream Sandwich” update the compiler would not build PocketBible at all. It did not indicate any errors, but simply said that a task that IT is supposed to do for me had apparently not been done. After re-installing the tools I was able to get it to report why it was refusing to do its job, and work around that problem.
While we’re responsible for a large percentage of our bugs, we spend a lot of time working around issues from Apple and Google. The bugs in our code are easy to find and fix. The bugs in Apple and Google’s code can be impossible to find and impossible to fix.
Thanks Doug and sorry for the “Bible Reader.” I haven’t used that app in about a decade! Must not have had enough coffee when I wrote that.
Hello, the new version is great. Any chance of adding auto syncing (maybe via iCloud) to keep multiple versions in sync without having to manually sync them. I’d certainly pay for the advanced version if auto sync was included.
Great job again, Craig, Jeff, and others, for another great product! I’ve been using your software since the Parsons days. The quality keeps getting better and better. Thanks for your example of Christ and doing your work with excellence.
Okay, having upgraded to PocketBible 2, I cannot figure out the Autostudy features (word and verse). I’ve searched Laridian’s Web site, the PocketBible user guide and every where I can think of, but nowhere do I find a description of how to actually make Autostudy work.
A little help?
There’s insufficient information in your comment to determine what your problem is. If you’re not finding information in the Users Guide, then I suspect you’re actually still using version 1. If you have version 2 you can get to Autostudy through the Context Menu. Your best bet is to contact tech support. Make sure you tell them what your actual problem is. That is, can you not find the feature at all, or is it just not doing what you expect?
Tech support is always your best bet for tech support.
No, I’m using version 2. And yes, I could not find the feature at all. It’s the words “context menu” in your response to me that finally allowed me to figure out how to access the autostudy features. As far as I can tell, those words appeared nowhere in any of your documentation/help or on your Web site. Maybe it’s there somewhere and I just missed it, but you might want to have someone verify that autostudy is plainly explained for your users.
Thanks,
Keith
The documentation for PocketBible for iPhone is available in the program and since it’s a PocketBible book, it can be searched. Search for “autostudy” and you’ll find it occurs 26 times. Or go to the “How To” section and scan for the Autostudy Word and Autostudy Verse sections. There you’ll find:
How to automatically study a verse (Advanced Feature)
PocketBible can generate a report on any verse in the Bible, including related information from your installed books in the report. The information to included in the report is highly customizable, and the report can be copied to the pasteboard, saved to a file, or printed.
To start an automated study on a verse:
Tap-and-hold on the verse of interest.
In the resulting menu bar, select Menu.
Select Autostudy [verse] from the resulting Context menu.
How to automatically study a word (Advanced Feature)
PocketBible can generate a report on any word, including related information from your installed books in the report. The information to included in the report is highly customizable, and the report can be copied to the pasteboard, saved to a file, or printed.
To start an automated study on a word:
Tap-and-hold on the word of interest.
In the resulting menu bar, select Menu.
Select Autostudy “[word]” from the resulting Context menu.
In each of those you’ll find links to more details than I can go into here.
The User’s Guide is also available on the Help page of the website.
Thanks for clearing this up as to your documentation. I see the HelpDesk documentation now, but no matter what I do, the version of the PocketBible User Guide I get even after I remove book and then add book from within PocketBible 2 on my iOS device is copyrighted 2009 and does not include any references to “autostudy”. If I continue to be stumped on this, I’ll submit a tech support ticket. Just thought you ought to know though.
Keith,
It looks like the version of the User’s Guide that was on the server was old. The version that ships with the program is correct, but if you ever delete it it will not be reinstalled from the program bundle. Instead you have to download it. That’s how you ended up with an old one. I uploaded the latest help file to the server this morning so if you update your User’s Guide in Add/Remove Books, that should take care of it.
Thanks, Craig. Yes, I was able to update to the latest version via the Add/Remove Books screen last evening. I appreciate you looking into this and correcting the problem.
Now I’m really set to go. Thanks for all your hard work and diligence to make Laridian such a valuable partner to Bible students everywhere.
Keith
While updating to the new iPod version and trying to follow your instructions I failed. I must have synced incorrectly because I lost all my bookmarks, highlights, etc. How can I retreive my old information. The first sync/backup for Jan 19th is what I need to load to mu iPod.
Thanks.