Please note the date on this post. Read our more recent posts on the iPhone for more up-to-date information.
Since the whole idea for this product kind of grew out of these blog articles and comments, it seems only fair that we post some kind of a progress report. So…
We’ve posted a short video of me demonstrating iPocketBible on the iPhone. It’s at www.iPocketBible.com. Choose either the WMV version or the QuickTime version. If your browser is set up right it should start playing without waiting to download the entire file. Otherwise you’re in for a short wait.
The screen shot to the left was actually done using Safari on a PC. It looks similar, but not exactly like, the program running on an iPhone. For one thing, on the PC there is a scrollbar on the right. Actually I thought I photoshopped that scrollbar out of there but I see now it’s still there. Oh, well. Pretend it’s not.
This product has been interesting to work on. When you sit back and think about it you think, “This shouldn’t take more than a week.” Then you start in on it and there seems to be no shortage of obstacles. Perhaps the biggest is maintaining some kind of login and subscription management system. The idea is that you’ll pay a nominal fee for access to the program and you’ll have access to all the content (Bibles and reference books) you already own for PocketBible, MyBible, or our other readers. And if you want to add a Bible or a commentary you just purchase it and it shows up on your iPhone. That’s taking some effort to put together.
None of the content actually resides on your phone. But when running iPocketBible, especially in a WiFi environment, you won’t notice much of a difference in speed as compared to, say, MyBible running on your Treo.
I’m working on notes, bookmarks, and highlights right now. That’s another harder-than-expected effort. We have to store all your user-created data somewhere on our server and not get it mixed up with everyone else’s.
So enjoy the preview; I’ll try to shoot another video soon with even more features, then hopefully have the product up for you to check out Real Soon Now. Hopefully the preview will keep you entertained for a while. And perhaps keep your mind off asking what else is coming from Laridian in the near future. Stay tuned!
I can’t give you a specific date for notes and highlights. That doesn’t mean they’re a long way off; it means I haven’t thought past getting this thing out the door.
I’m trying to figure out how to characterize the “delay” getting all the features out. The best I can do is this: I originally thought this project was only going to take a couple of weeks. I underestimated the time involved in all the back-end database work (subscription support in the e-commerce system, permissions and library management coordination between the customer/transaction database and the iPocketBible site, and all the other infrastructure issues). I also didn’t count on that crippling bug which I’m sure I spent somewhere around 2-3 weeks working on.
On top of underestimating the work involved, I also didn’t originally plan to have to put extra people on the desktop product to get it out. I was going to use three of us on iPhone that I ended up using for desktop stuff. That delayed the release of iPocketBible but really made a huge difference in getting PocketBible for Windows out the door. (Jeff Wheeler spent a month writing a fantastic help system for PocketBible, for example.)
So now that we’re back on the iPhone task, I feel like we need to deliver on this thing pretty soon, as we’ve been talking about it so much all summer. So we decided to release it as soon as it was in good enough shape that it could be argued it was usable. That point was probably earlier this week, but we spent a couple days on two tasks that I think will really improve the user experience. One was reducing the amount of time it takes to select a new book or Bible to open, and the second was providing some kind of “back” function to go back to where you came from when following a hyperlink.
So it’s not the case that we don’t know how to do notes and highlights, nor that there was some particular problem that kept us from getting those done. It rather is the case that we’re shipping what could be called version 0.9 instead of 1.0. I wouldn’t call it a “beta” version because I don’t think you’ll find a lot of bugs in it. I’d just say it’s a “lite” version of what will eventually be the final product.
We can’t normally do this with a product but we can with this one because it’s so easy to issue updates. So say I get highlights implemented next week. All I have to do is copy the dev code to the public site and voila, you guys have a new feature. We can’t do that with our downloadable software.
Anyway… I gotta go write some code. We’re going to try to release this yet this weekend. Keep your eye on the blog.