Tag Archive for "iOS" - Laridian Bible Software

Subscribe to Updates

Click here to subscribe to new posts by email. We use Google FeedBurner to send these notifications.

Posts Tagged ‘iOS’

What is your ideal size for a mobile device?

Posted on: January 24th, 2013 by Michelle Stramel 33 Comments

The other day I got in an unexpected discussion with my 14-year old nephew about iPad minis. Like most 14-year old boys, he is an expert on all things electronic. He informed me that when he heads to high school next year, they will each be given an iPad by the school. He then mentioned he was glad it was not an iPad mini because he finds them to be worthless devices with no purpose for existence. He feels the mini is the wrong size for anything meaningful. Too small to replace a laptop. Too big to carry around. And definitely the wrong size to play games on.

I own an iPad and iPhone. I haven’t even held the mini let alone considered purchasing one. However, I have been drooling over the Galaxy Note to replace my iPhone for many months (so long in fact that the Note I wanted has become the Note II). Bottom line, I want a bigger phone. From Twitter to PocketBible, I like the bigger screen size of my iPad yet I don’t want to lug it around everywhere. So the solution in my mind has been to get a bigger phone like the Note.

Today I came across this article on ZDNET by Matt Baxter-Reynolds, “Has Apple redefined the tablet as an 8-inch device?” where he explains how he fell in love with the iPad mini and ditched his iPad. He makes a case for this middle size device becoming the new norm with the popularity of devices like the iPad mini, Google’s Nexus 7 and the Kindle Fire. He’s got me thinking about getting a mini to replace everything!

What do you think? Could you live with one device for everything? What is your ideal mobile device size?

PocketBible 2.0.6 Available on the App Store

Posted on: October 31st, 2012 by Craig Rairdin 14 Comments

We’ve just been notified that our latest update to PocketBible (version 2.0.6) has been approved by Apple. It should become available in the App Store over the next 24 hours.

We apologize for the delay getting our iOS6-compatibility fixes into PocketBible. We ran into a couple of issues getting our update past the Apple approval process. In the end, being forced to address those issues caused us to find a couple tricky bugs that wouldn’t have turned up otherwise. But the whole process ended up taking longer than we wanted.

The complete list of new features and bug fixes is below, but a couple are worth highlighting. First, this version adds support for the Greek New Testament. You should find the SBL Greek New Testament in your list of downloadable books in “Add/Remove Books”. There are instructions in the built-in Help for enabling the Greek keyboard so that you can do searches in Greek.

Several bugs introduced in iOS 6 have been circumvented. In particular, you may have noticed PocketBible would only read the first verse on the screen to you when you asked it to start reading. This has been fixed. And it’s not really a bug, but PocketBible will now take advantage of the full height of the screen on the iPhone 5. (This wouldn’t have been a problem except that Apple “lies” to our app when we request the size of the iPhone 5 screen, apparently to maintain compatibility with apps that aren’t as clever as PocketBible by making them think they’re running on an older device.)

I believe we’ve finally fixed the problem of books and voices disappearing when memory runs low. Apple changed the way they do this a couple of times over the last year or so and kept defeating our efforts to preserve our files. We think we have it figured out now.

Finally, PocketBible now requires at least iOS 5. The latest version of the development tools only produces ARMv7 binaries and there are no ARMv7 devices that don’t support iOS 5. We’d like to support older versions of the operating system, but we’re limited by what the development tools support.

What’s new in this version?

Support for the SBL Greek New Testament including display, searching and copy/paste.
Added “Find Selection” to the Selection menu. Rearranged the Selection and Context menus to put more frequently used items closer to the top.
iOS 6 compatiblity including:
- Fixed a bug where PocketBible would stop after one verse when speaking the text
- Addressed rotation issues
- Added 4″ Retina launch image and support for the full height of the new iPhone 5 screen
Bug fixes including
- Fixed a bug in certain books with images where they did not appear when “shrink to fit” was selected
- Changed the way text is selected to address sluggishness on devices with Retina displays
- Fixed a problem that manifested in ZIBBCNT and HBH where images in tables were not shown if “shrink images to fit” was selected.
- Made sure the built-in KJV, Help, and Welcome documents plus downloaded voices all get marked as “do not back up to iCloud”.
- Related to the above, downloaded books and voices were moved to a folder that should not be purged under low memory conditions.
Set the minimum iOS version supported to 5.0.

PocketBible for iOS users: What can Advanced Features do for you?

Posted on: September 11th, 2012 by Michelle Stramel 8 Comments

If you are using PocketBible 2 or later for iOS, here are some good reasons to upgrade to Advanced Features and how to do it.

Why upgrade?

The Advanced Features available for PocketBible 2 on the iPhone, iPad or iPod touch can be summed up in 5 words: Tabs, Autostudy, Voices, Copy, Print.

Tabs (or tabbed panes) are especially wonderful on the iPad. I keep 5 tabs open on my iPad and each tab contains a specific type of book so the headings display category of book (i.e. Bibles, Commentaries) rather than book abbreviation. When you mix different types of books within a pane, PocketBible shows the abbreviation for the top book instead of the category. Tabs make it fast and easy to move from my Bible to a commentary or other type of book and get the information I need to understand what the Bible is saying.

Autostudy is very useful to me because I often compare Bible translations when I read the Bible. If I particularly like or, conversely, don’t understand a verse, I want to see how it is translated elsewhere. Autostudy will put that together in seconds–all on one page. It will do the same for information from other types of books as well – commentaries, dictionaries, etc.. You can get more details on this feature in our article: Have you discovered Autostudy?

Would you like to have the program read the Bible to you? The Advanced Feature Set adds the ability to do this but you will need to make one more purchase of a voice (at $1.99 each) to take advantage of that ability. PocketBible voices are synthesized which means they are electronic but I have found this feature extremely handy for keeping up with my Bible reading in the car, as I clean the house, on a run — time that might otherwise be wasted can be reclaimed for a good purpose.

If you like to copy passages from your reference or other type books, you’ll want the Advanced Features as they allow you to do just that. And if your printer supports AirPrint, you’ll be able to print from the program.

You can watch a quick overview of the upgrade process and how to use the new features at the video link below:

How to upgrade

If you are already using PocketBible 2 on your iOS device, adding these new features is straight-forward:

Purchase the Advanced Features at our web site for $4.99 (it is also available in-app for $1.00 more). Add a Voice at the same time if you think you want to use that feature. I prefer Tracy but our best-selling voices are Heather and Ryan.
Go into PocketBible on your iOS device and choose the Menu button and Buy/Apply Upgrade (if you’ve already purchased at our website, you’ll just be applying). Choose Add/Remove Voices to download a Voice if you’ve purchased one.

You’re all set!

If you are still using PocketBible 1.4.7 (or earlier) for iOS, follow our 3 Steps to Move from PocketBible 1 to PocketBible 2 on your iOS device.

3 Steps to Move from PocketBible 1 to PocketBible 2 on your iOS device

Posted on: August 7th, 2012 by Michelle Stramel 5 Comments

Are you still using the first version of PocketBible on your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch? If so, we highly recommend moving to PocketBible 2 so you can apply program updates as they are released; we won’t be updating PocketBible 1.4.7 further.

Before we explain how to make the move, check your version number in PocketBible by tapping on the Menu button and selecting About PocketBible. If it says anything less than PocketBible 2.0.X, keep reading.

Step One: Go to the App Store on your device and search for PocketBible (all one word). Download the program. You’ll notice that the new program has the same icon as your old PocketBible program. If you get confused, follow the tip above to check which version of the program you are in.
Step Two: Delete the old program…wait! Don’t do that yet if you have been adding notes, highlights, bookmarks or tracking reading progress that you want to save. First, read the instructions (click link and scroll to the section Moving Your Notes, Highlights, Bookmarks and Daily Reading Progress to the New Program) to transfer your data. Then delete the old program.
Step Three: Re-download your books. Go into the new program and register if you haven’t already encountered that. Be sure to use the email (or Laridian ID number) and password associated with your existing Laridian account. After registration, tap on the Menu button and choose Add/Remove Books to re-download your past purchases. All your books can be downloaded in one fell swoop if you tap on each book you want to download and then tap on Update at the top of the page.

Why the extra steps? Normally, when you update a program, you just go into the App store and it tells you an update is available. PocketBible will work that way again once you download the new version. If you want to know the “why” you can get it from our initial post on this new version.

Anything else to know? Yes (but it is optional). Once you install PocketBible 2, you can also purchase and install an Advanced Feature Set for $4.99. If you purchase the Advanced Feature Set, you can add a Voice or two to the program and listen to the Bible or any book. Voices are synthesized and sell for $1.99 each.

PocketBible for iOS users: Have you discovered Autostudy?

Posted on: July 1st, 2012 by Michelle Stramel 9 Comments

Sometimes a verse hits you right in the heart and you want to know everything about it. That is what Autostudy does for you. It tells you everything there is to know about any one verse (or word) in your PocketBible library…in just a few seconds.

What do you need to accomplish an Autostudy?

Currently this feature is available exclusively for those who have downloaded the free version of PocketBible 2 for iOS (iPhone, iPad, iPod touch) and purchased the Advanced Feature Set ($4.99 at our website). We hope to roll it into other versions of PocketBible as we go along because it is such a useful tool.

How do you produce an Autostudy?

It couldn’t be simpler. With PocketBible open and a Bible translation onscreen, hold down your finger on a verse and a menu will pop-up. Choose menu and then Autostudy verse. You can do the same with any word in the Bible.

What does Autostudy give you?

As mentioned previously, Autostudy tells you everything there is to know about a verse or word based on your personal PocketBible library. When you pick a verse to Autostudy, PocketBible will provide information regarding that verse based on other Bibles, commentary, dictionaries, etc. that you have installed. You can choose to see everything in your library or just items of a specific category (i.e. Other Translations, Exhaustive Concordances, Commentary). Under the Settings you can choose to exclude specific Bibles or books from results.

For example, if you chose to Autostudy John 3:16 and chose Other Translations in the options, you would see how John 3:16 reads in all your Bible translations.

Your results will vary with a word or verse Autostudy. The word Autostudy is going to offer information from word-based resources such as dictionaries. The verse Autostudy will offer information from verse-based resources such as Bibles and commentary.

You can take your Autostudy results and copy them to another program, save as HTML or plain text or print with or without the formatting (printing requires a printer with AirPrint support). If you don’t like the formatting, you can change this on the Autostudy menu by choosing to Customize CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). If you need a primer on CSS, check out this Guide to Cascading Style Sheets.

Questions about this PocketBible feature, let us know in the comments.