Please note the date on this post. Read our more recent posts on the iPhone for more up-to-date information.
Pre-Launch Access for our Blog Readers
As promised, iPocketBible is now available to our blog readers. We wanted to give you first shot at it before we send out emails and press releases next week.
Complete details are at www.iPocketBible.com. From there you can read more about the subscription plans and link to the iPocketBible application itself.
Getting Started
Before going any further, let me remind you: Use two fingers to scroll the text in iPocketBible.
If you already have a collection of Laridian Bibles and books for PocketBible, MyBible, or one of our other readers, you’ll find all these Bibles and books available to you when you subscribe to iPocketBible.
If you don’t yet own any of our Bibles or reference books, you can purchase them when you subscribe to iPocketBible. You’ll also find several free Bibles and reference books on the order form that will help you get started.
iPocketBible is a subscription service. Monthly subscriptions are $1.99/month and are automatically charged to a credit card you provide when you purchase the product. Your first payment will be charged a month after you order, so you have until then to try the program out. If you don’t like it, simply contact us and cancel any time before you’re billed. Billed amounts are not refundable.
The annual subscription is $19.99 and has the benefit of being payable by check or money order if you don’t want to use a credit card. Because the service can be tried for up to a month using the monthly subscription, the annual subscription is not refundable.
About iPocketBible
iPocketBible is a Web application so it’s very easy for us to update it and add new features. As a result, we decided to make it available to you just as soon as a reasonable amount of functionality was present. This first version of iPocketBible has the following features:
- Access to your complete collection of Laridian Bibles and reference books
- Easy Bible navigation either by choosing book, then chapter, then verse, or by entering a reference like “John 3:16″
- Easy reference book navigation by hierarchical table of contents
- Easy daily devotional navigation by interactive calendar
- Search for words, phrases, or combinations of words
- Search for words matching all prefixes or all suffixes of a particular word
- Chose a passage from a list of search results to see it in context, then use “previous” and “next” functions to see other results in context.
- Set bookmarks on your favorite passages
- Words of Christ in red
- Extensive online help
Coming soon:
Highlight verses using several highlight colors– done 9/19/07Enter your personal notes on any verse– done 10/06/07Quick word look-up for dictionaries (rather than navigating the table of contents)– done 9/17/07Context-sensitive verse look-up for commentaries (again, rather than navigating the table of contents)– done 9/20/07Track your progress through daily devotionals and Bible reading plans– done 12/10/07Synchronize all your personal data with PocketBible for Windows. Notes, highlights and bookmarks entered on the desktop will show up on your iPhone, and vice versa.– done 2/20/08Strongs numbers in Bibles that contain them (they are currently there but not displayed)— done 9/21/07
One thing you’ll notice is that Greek and Hebrew characters don’t display correctly on the iPhone. This is due to the fact that the iPhone does not contain a standard Unicode font. If you view these reference books that contain Greek and Hebrew in your desktop browser you’ll see that the characters are there. They just can’t be displayed with the current iPhone operating system. We’ve left them in place so that if/when Apple releases an update containing a Unicode font, they will start working correctly.
You can expect to see some of the new features very, very soon and others will be a few weeks away. The program is very usable as-is. We’ve really enjoyed using it these last few weeks and we appreciate your patience as we get the new features rolled into the program.
In the last comment above I said when you log in from your Mac after running from the iPhone you’ll skip the login screen. That’s not true. You do have to log in. However, the program can’t tell that you’re logged in from two different machines so changes you make on the iPhone will affect what happens on your Mac. For example if you are looking at an article on Faith in the New Bible Dictionary on your iPhone, and you go to John 3 KJV on your Mac, when you hit “next page” on your iPhone, you’ll go to John 4 KJV even though you thought you were going to the next article in the New Bible Dictionary.
One more thing I’ll add to Craig’s comment…
If you are attempting to use iPocketBible.com on your Mac or your PC (via Safari), it does require Safari 3 or greater.
Keep in mind that the page formatting will have the height of the iPhone. I intend to change this as we get more features completed.
I loved my Laridian Bible on the Pocket PC… but when I switched to Mac two years ago, I kind of lost touch with it. I still used the Pcoket PC but had no way to reliably update things on it so did not keep up with Laridian’s updates. Now I have an iPod Touch, searched and found Laridian has made this product available… and sadly it is useless to me. As a missionary in the farmlands of Taiwan, I rarely have WiFi outside of my own home. I have found that using 3rd party Bibles (old texts as they are) through “exploited” software to make them run on the iPod are much more useful. PLEASE, please, please develop something that resides IN the iPod. I love the Laridian Bible and miss it DEARLY.
Odd that you would happen to write just now, Michael. I was just reading an article — maybe it was in Wired magazine — about the growing number of missionaries who are buying cutting-edge, expensive, connected, MP3/video players to use in the field and are upset — not at themselves for falling for the lure of hardware that is relatively useless in their corner of the world, nor at the poor Internet infrastructure of the Taiwanese farmland, nor at the lack of a software developers kit to permit third-party apps to be developed for the device, but rather at Bible software vendors for not creating products that run natively on the devices, despite the absence of an SDK for the creation of such programs.
This could be the next hot market for us. We’ll keep an eye on it.
Blessings to Laridian as you complete Pocket Bible to run natively on the iPhone. Hundreds of Thousands of us anticipate the day we will “have it all” in our pocket. What a Blessing! Since web access is not available everywhere, the installed version will be worth the wait.
In the Windows version, when I hoover an *, the ["footnote"] text needs moved just a tad so it is not covered up by the hand pointer.
Thanks a TON for the Complete Jewish Bible!! I really anticipate this going to the Palm as well as to iPhone [yes I still us Palm version too!]
Dr David
Wild Olive
Grafted into
The Vine
Hi,
I do not have the iphone but the touch ipod. Does it mean that the bibles are not resident on the ipod and that I need to be connected to read them. The problem with that is being in Africa I do not have Internet most of the time. Do you have Bibles that can be resident on a touch ipod. I have all the bibles I bought from you for my PDA but if I have to go on-line to read them they will be useless for people in most of the third world.
Roy Tibbit
With iPocketBible.com you need to be connected to read the Bible. Remember when this program was announced last year that was the only way to do it on the iPod Touch — you had to be connected. So there really wasn’t an issue.
Now that it’s possible to have native apps on the iPhone (the SDK was released 6-8 weeks ago) we’re working on putting the Bibles directly on the device. Read our later blog posts for more information.