Let me start this posting with the instruction that I try to mention everytime I talk about iPocketBible:
Use Two Fingers to Scroll
Having dispensed with that, I’ve got information about a couple recent updates to iPocketBible and some iPocketBible-related news.
Recent Updates
On Monday we uploaded changes to support the Lookup button. Selecting the Lookup button allows you to look up a word either in the current dictionary (if you have a dictionary open) or your preferred dictionary (from the Options page).
Related to this feature is support of certain links in some of our dictionaries (especially the Strong’s dictionaries) to other words in the dictionary. Those links weren’t working. They are now.
Today we added the highlight feature. Just select a verse number to go to the verse context menu and select a highlight color. iPocketBible supports the same palette of highlight colors as PocketBible on the desktop and Pocket PC.
We’ve also added the latest release date to the About screen, and a link to “What’s New” so you can see the history of revisions. To make sure you’re running with the latest version of the program, either reload www.ipocketbible/go or select the button on revision history page that loads the current version.
Staying Informed About Updates
To make sure you’re up-to-date on the latest updates to the program we’ve created an email list at lists.laridian.com for iPhone users. We’ll use this list to announce program updates. Since these can be frequent and contain only minor changes to the site, we won’t necessarily send an email out to our entire customer base. But we will send these announcements to members of the iPhone email list. This is the best way to make sure you know when new features have been added. Updates will be relatively frequent over the next couple of weeks but will likely slow down as we get our full feature set implemented.
What’s Next?
I’ll probably go after the commentary feature next. This will allow you to quickly jump to the commentary on a passage without having to open a commentary and navigate the table of contents to find the correct section.
Enabling Strong’s number links in the KJV and NASB needs to be tackled soon. This is a trivial exercise for the most part, but I’m concerned about the hit we’ll take on page loading speed because of the huge number of links on each page. I’m trying to think about ways to minimize that.
I’m anxious to get to the notes feature. That one might take some time depending on how fancy we get with note editing.
We’re also looking at some user interface changes that we think you’re really going to like. I’ll probably get in trouble if I say any more than that because I don’t want to make more promises than we can deliver. I’m just looking forward to not having to start every iPocketBible blog post with an admonition about using two fingers to scroll. Yeah, I probably shouldn’t reveal too much.
Just curious as to when the next update will occur and what we might expect? Thank you!!
Hopefully tonight. I have an issue I want to look at related to page-loading speed before it goes out and there are some other tiny details we’re resolving.
The main thing you can expect is one-finger scrolling and a new floating toolbar.
Buried in the code is most of the support for notes. I’m going to disable it in this release, though, until we get a chance to clean it up a little bit.
I think the next big task will be devotional tracking — changing start dates, reading progress, and other tasks related to devotionals.
By the time we get that done we should be ready to roll in synchronization with the desktop version of PocketBible. This will have the dual benefit of giving you an off-site backup of your user-created data (notes, bookmarks, highlights, and devotional reading progress).
We’ve been playing with one-finger scrolling and I think it’s pretty nice. There’s some reasons the two-finger mode is better in some cases, but I think you’ll like on-finger mode. The picture shows a shot taken in the Safari browser on the desktop but gives you an idea what the pop-up toolbar looks like. Click on the picture to see a larger image.
Also note the bigger font. This is now user-selectable.
FYI: A new version of the iPhone operating system software was released today and will get downloaded to your phone when you sync. It contains some changes that caused many iPhone apps to break. If you use iPocketBible this isn’t a problem. Jim was on it and fixed it very quickly. The problem for many of the other Bible programs for iPhone is that they’re using an open-source product called iUI to create their apps, and don’t really understand how it works. So when their apps blow up, they don’t know how to fix them. The author of iUI hasn’t been heard from for a while (welcome to the world of free software), so they could be waiting.
I opened a defect at the iUI project tracking page, and a person posted a fix the same day (this was all the day that 1.1.1 came out for the iPhone. Now, to get the author to implement the fix on his page…
Joe (iUI author) just announced he’s dropping his support for iUI so developers who built on that platform are either on their own or at the mercy of the cadre of open-source developers that take on maintenance of that platform. I think there were a few iUI users who knew a little HTML and that’s about it. They could be wishing they knew a little javascript and CSS.
I should clarify Craig’s comment a little… Joe didn’t say the actual phrase “dropping support”, but he did tell the iUI crowd that he just doesn’t see time in the near future to do much work with it and gave his blessing in having the open-source community take over the project.
That’s pretty interesting that you saw a fix posted for the breakage of iUI apps the day that 1.1.1 came out. It just so happens that I posted a fix to the iPhoneWebDev group that same day (*grin*).