We just heard from Apple saying that 2.0.3 has been approved. You should already be seeing the update in iTunes on your device. We recommend everyone grab this update, as it fixes a few little problems. It also adds a couple of small enhancements that should make the program more enjoyable to use.
If you’re still running 1.4.7 or an earlier version you need to follow the instructions here to get this new version. Version 2.0.3 is not an automatic update to 1.4.7 or any 1.x.x version of PocketBible.
Enhancements
Double-tap on any image to blow it up in a window where it can be zoomed and scrolled. This is handy for maps and some of the detailed charts that appear in some study Bibles and reference books. It works best to go into Settings and tell it to fit images to the screen, then just double-tap them when you want to view them in detail.
If an image has links in it, those links are “hot” in the zoom view. Most images do not have links, but the maps in our Laridian Maps product do.
Books and voices are now marked as “non-purgeable” as they are downloaded. We got some reports that iOS would delete your books if it needed space for another app. This can be disturbing when you discover that books you spent a long time downloading are suddenly gone. By marking these as non-purgeable, Apple promises us they won’t delete them.
Note that while we retroactively mark your existing books as non-purgeable, and that we mark books and voices as non-purgeable as they are downloaded, we do not mark existing voices as non-purgeable due to the complexity of the file structure for voices. If you operate on the edge of available memory and want to make sure your voice files get marked as non-purgeable, you should delete them with Add/Remove Books, then download them again.
If there’s only one book open in a tab, we use that book’s abbreviation as the title for the tab rather than using the book’s category (“Bibles”, “Commentaries”, etc.) as the tab title.
Fixes
On iOS versions prior to 3.2, there were controls to allow you to turn on the tabbed interface even if you didn’t own the Advanced Feature Set. Unfortunately this didn’t really give you the full features of the tabbed interface because the rest of the program would get confused by the fact that you had tabs turned on but did not own the Advanced Feature Set. This version fixes that by hiding those controls.
Printing, emailing, or texting the selected text could crash or do nothing. This has been fixed.
We believe we’ve fixed a problem in which the text window was offset right and up so you could see the gray background behind the text window. This only happened to some users and only under certain circumstances. We could only duplicate it on one of our iPhones. It wasn’t related to which version of iOS you were running or which type of device you had (though I think we only saw it on iPhones and iPod touch devices, not iPads). What it was related to was the version of the development tools we used.
Turns out Apple swapped out a portion of the compiler that converts our Objective-C programming code into the machine code that runs on the phone. The new compiler apparently generates flawed code. (Compare to what happens when an inexperienced translator flubs up the translation of a speech at the United Nations. The original speech is fine but the translation doesn’t say what the original speaker said. That’s what happened to our code. Our code was correct by Apple’s translation of it made the device do something different.) We fixed it by turning off all the special optimizations that the compiler can do for us. Hopefully another programmer will be able to demonstrate this bug in some simple way so Apple can fix it. We were never able to do it reliably, so we couldn’t report it.
As I said, everyone should install this update. You don’t need to re-download your books or voices, nor do you need to sync your personal data after you update. This is just a normal program update that won’t affect anything you’ve downloaded nor any of your notes, highlights, or bookmarks.
New for PocketBible: Cornerstone Biblical Commentary Series
We had previously released eleven volumes in this series. You can purchase each volume separately for $19.99 or all seventeen volumes in one money-saving bundle, Cornerstone Biblical Commentary Series, for $249.99 (26% savings over purchasing separately). The books are available for use with PocketBible for Windows, iOS, Android and Windows Mobile.
This commentary series offers some unique features:
Posted in New Books, News | 11 Comments »
Catching up on your Bible Reading Plan
53 days into my One Year Chronological Bible reading plan in PocketBible and I’m already significantly behind. I blame Leviticus. It gets me every year. Thankfully, PocketBible has those convenient “reschedule” options. If (or when) you find yourself in my position, PocketBible actually offers several scheduling options that can help. Here is the best way to use each one:
If you are a visual learner (or you just like videos), here is Laridian president, Craig Rairdin, explaining how the “catch up” feature is used on the iPhone.
Why Have All My Books Been Updated?
I mentioned in a recent Android update that we were going to have to rebuild all our books to support some new search features in the Android version of PocketBible. That turned out to be a 6-8 week rather than a 1-2 week exercise. Part of the reason is that since we had to touch every book that we publish, we used that opportunity to fix all the reported errors that we had on file for each book.
Many of these errors are all but invisible to the user. As a result we tend to let them accumulate for a while rather than jumping on every typo and minor formatting error as soon as we hear about it. The problem is that those things add up after a while and frankly our list had gotten overwhelming. We had one BookBuilder customer who volunteered to help a while back. He did a few books but then gave up. So this seemed like a great opportunity to just clean that list out since we had to look at every single book anyway.
In order to minimize the load on the server from everyone being told all their books had been updated, we created a way we could update the files on the server without the server thinking they had been updated. So the only time we allowed the server to know a particular book had been updated was if it was on the list of books in which noticeable changes had been made. If all we did was change “Laridian Electronic Publishing” to “Laridian, Inc.” (because one is our name and one is not) in the book’s meta data, we didn’t bother to have the server tell you about the change. But if we fixed a number of links or typographical errors — something you would notice — we had the server tell you about it.
We were also a little concerned about the load on the server if everyone went out and started re-downloading all their books. So we didn’t make a big deal about it, and we uploaded the books a few at a time over the last couple of months.
So if PocketBible or our website is telling you that a book has been updated, it means we fixed something that you might notice if you were paying close attention. In reality all the books were updated, but none of our programs currently make use of the new features that necessitated the update. So it’s only necessary to update the ones that say they need to be updated, and then you really only need to update them if you’re picky about every little typo.
We’re not virtual anymore!
Well, times have changed and we’d like to officially announce that we have left our home-based, coffee shop, Skype’ing days behind us for a physical location where we all work together in one office in Cedar Rapids, IA. Yes, there are a few unhappy coffee shop owners in the area but for Laridian it has been a great move. We all loved the perks of working from home (i.e. optional showering, work in your pj’s) but now, having tried the alternative, we have to admit that there are some definite advantages to working together in the same building. We’ve already seen improvements in productivity in every area of the company. And as far as communication goes, we only have to get up and take a short walk to find out what is going on with a co-worker. We’ve replaced our “virtual” reality with a “new” reality that isn’t half bad and might just be worth having to take a daily shower.
Why the change? Until this summer we had used a number of outside contractors and companies to create the books and Bibles that go into PocketBible. When this process was working, it worked well. But recently, two of our best outside contractors had changes in their situations that robbed them of the free time they were devoting to tagging books. As a result it was taking longer and longer to get finished books. So we decided to bring this operation in-house. In addition to having more control over the schedule, we thought it would be easier to manage.
When putting together the budget for the new employees, we decided to include office space, office furniture, computers, internet connections, and everything else we’d need to operate a “real” office. It turned out the cost wasn’t really that bad, and the benefit of having the new people sitting right next to seasoned veterans made training a breeze. So we rented some office space close to Craig and Jeff’s house, then hired the editors. The result is that you saw more new titles from us in the last quarter of 2011 than in some previous entire years.
Just this month, the last of our home-based employees moved into the office with us. Yesterday, we made it official by putting a sign up on the door telling the world (and the FedEx driver) we’re here. So you won’t find us out in the virtual world any longer – we’ve come down to earth and we hope it will be for your benefit.
PocketBible for iPhone tip: Viewing images
In PocketBible 2.0.3 (and later), you can double-tap on an image to blow it up in a window where it can be zoomed and scrolled. It works best to go into Settings and mark it to “fit images to the screen,” then just double-tap the image when you want to view it in detail. If an image has links in it, those links are “hot” in the zoom view. Most images do not have links, but the maps in our Bible Maps product do.
4 New Devotional Titles for PocketBible
Each volume contains 365 daily devotionals/readings. These new One Year devotionals sell for $9.99 each and are available for use with PocketBible for iPhone/iPad/iPod touch, Windows PC, and Windows Mobile.
New for PocketBible: Synopsis of the Books of the Bible by John Nelson Darby
Often regarded as the father of Dispensationalism, John Darby’s influence has been felt throughout the generations. His teachings and works have changed the thinking of clergy and layman alike. The Synopsis was originally published in print form in five volumes:
The Synopsis of the Books of the Bible sells for $14.99 and is available for use with PocketBible for iPhone/iPad/iPod touch, Windows PC, and Windows Mobile.
PocketBible 2.0.3 Now Available on the App Store
If you’re still running 1.4.7 or an earlier version you need to follow the instructions here to get this new version. Version 2.0.3 is not an automatic update to 1.4.7 or any 1.x.x version of PocketBible.
Enhancements
Double-tap on any image to blow it up in a window where it can be zoomed and scrolled. This is handy for maps and some of the detailed charts that appear in some study Bibles and reference books. It works best to go into Settings and tell it to fit images to the screen, then just double-tap them when you want to view them in detail.
If an image has links in it, those links are “hot” in the zoom view. Most images do not have links, but the maps in our Laridian Maps product do.
Books and voices are now marked as “non-purgeable” as they are downloaded. We got some reports that iOS would delete your books if it needed space for another app. This can be disturbing when you discover that books you spent a long time downloading are suddenly gone. By marking these as non-purgeable, Apple promises us they won’t delete them.
Note that while we retroactively mark your existing books as non-purgeable, and that we mark books and voices as non-purgeable as they are downloaded, we do not mark existing voices as non-purgeable due to the complexity of the file structure for voices. If you operate on the edge of available memory and want to make sure your voice files get marked as non-purgeable, you should delete them with Add/Remove Books, then download them again.
If there’s only one book open in a tab, we use that book’s abbreviation as the title for the tab rather than using the book’s category (“Bibles”, “Commentaries”, etc.) as the tab title.
Fixes
On iOS versions prior to 3.2, there were controls to allow you to turn on the tabbed interface even if you didn’t own the Advanced Feature Set. Unfortunately this didn’t really give you the full features of the tabbed interface because the rest of the program would get confused by the fact that you had tabs turned on but did not own the Advanced Feature Set. This version fixes that by hiding those controls.
Printing, emailing, or texting the selected text could crash or do nothing. This has been fixed.
We believe we’ve fixed a problem in which the text window was offset right and up so you could see the gray background behind the text window. This only happened to some users and only under certain circumstances. We could only duplicate it on one of our iPhones. It wasn’t related to which version of iOS you were running or which type of device you had (though I think we only saw it on iPhones and iPod touch devices, not iPads). What it was related to was the version of the development tools we used.
Turns out Apple swapped out a portion of the compiler that converts our Objective-C programming code into the machine code that runs on the phone. The new compiler apparently generates flawed code. (Compare to what happens when an inexperienced translator flubs up the translation of a speech at the United Nations. The original speech is fine but the translation doesn’t say what the original speaker said. That’s what happened to our code. Our code was correct by Apple’s translation of it made the device do something different.) We fixed it by turning off all the special optimizations that the compiler can do for us. Hopefully another programmer will be able to demonstrate this bug in some simple way so Apple can fix it. We were never able to do it reliably, so we couldn’t report it.
As I said, everyone should install this update. You don’t need to re-download your books or voices, nor do you need to sync your personal data after you update. This is just a normal program update that won’t affect anything you’ve downloaded nor any of your notes, highlights, or bookmarks.
New for PocketBible: Dictionary of New Testament Background
Written by acknowledged experts in their fields, this wealth of knowledge of the New Testament era is carefully aimed at the needs of contemporary students of the New Testament.
The InterVarsity Press Dictionary of New Testament Background sells for $39.99 and is available for use with PocketBible for iPhone/iPad/iPod touch, Windows PC, and Windows Mobile.
©2013 Laridian Bible Software