If you want to think of this as a PocketBible 3 for Windows progress update, you wouldn’t be entirely wrong. You will surely be disappointed, but you won’t technically be wrong.
The Dingus
We’re experimenting with giving you access to AI-generated commentary and other tools in the Autostudy feature in PocketBible 3 using the ChatGPT API. You won’t have to have a ChatGPT account to use it; we’ll create the prompts and automatically submit them and get responses for you to include (if you’d like) in your Autostudy output.
ChatGPT uses Markdown in its responses. Markdown is an easy way to create formatted text with a plain text editor. PocketBible use HTML for this purpose, which is a very different and more difficult way to create formatted text. So we have to convert from Markdown to HTML to display ChatGPT results in PocketBible. This is not straightforward, as Markdown wasn’t “designed” so much as it was pieced together as needed.
When the nerds who power our tech economy were asked to come up with a “standard” for Markdown, they discovered that even its most formal definition was ambiguous. If someone asked, “What happens if you overlap bold and italic markers in the text?” the only way to find out was to try it and see what happened. In order to make it easy for users to experiment and deduce the rules, they produced what is known simply as “the CommonMark Dingus” — as in “that whatchamacallit on their website”. The Dingus lets you enter text using CommonMark syntax and it shows you how it will render and what HTML tags are required to get the same result.
The Laridian Dingus
After laughing about the CommonMark Dingus every time I used it, I realized the only way I was going to be able to interactively test my server-based Markdown to HTML converter was to write my own “dingus”. Turns out it’s actually not a bad idea. I see now why they created it.
The Gooberizer
While writing this, I (Craig) was reminded of some PocketBible code. Back around 2002, my programming partner, Jeff Wheeler, was working on the DailyReader app. At the time, daily devotional books and Bible reading plans were not a part of PocketBible, but rather, you needed a separate app called DailyReader.
Since DailyReader didn’t know how to read PocketBible books, and since Palm OS, the hot mobile operating system at the time, didn’t have a file system (!!!), we had to come up with a way to store the text of reading plans and devotionals in a way that would be compatible with a Palm OS database, would be quick and easy to decode, and wouldn’t be readable by humans.
Of the two of us, I was the guy who had experience with encryption. I had implemented a simple encryption algorithm that we were able to use on our website and in our apps when we needed something “secure enough” — not something you’d trust your credit card number to, but good enough to obscure other sensitive information that we don’t want you messing with. So Jeff came to me to figure out how to obfuscate his DailyReader data.
“I don’t need some kind of unbreakable encryption. I just want to goober up the text enough that it can’t be read by the average user,” he said. I picked up on Jeff’s goofy terminology and created the skeleton of code called “The Gooberizer“. I created a simple encryption algorithm with a symmetric key — as long as the producer of the encrypted file (his little program that created DailyReader books) and the consumer of it (the DailyReader app itself) use the same key, one can encrypt and the other can decrypt the data. In order to make it slightly more secure, the secret key is not something stored in the program, but rather is computed based on the data in the book. This made it harder for a nefarious (or curious) user to break the code and ungooberize the text for himself.
Jeff fleshed out the code from my design and DailyReader soon had fully gooberized text.
PocketBible and the Gooberizer
Three years later I was adding some code to PocketBible and needed a way to authenticate an LBK (Laridian Book) file. We had decided to release our BookBuilder app as a commercial product but didn’t want a rogue competitor to use it to reproduce our entire library and put us out of business. So we put information into the LBK file that tells us that the file was built by the consumer version of BookBuilder. We needed a way to verify that these imaginary rogue competitors (who were growing more vile and contemptible the more we thought about them) weren’t tampering with the info to convince PocketBible that their books came from Laridian.
Then I remembered the Gooberizer. I rejiggered the Gooberizer code so it could produce a one-way hash of any string you gave it. The idea is that BookBuilder would build a string based on critical values in the LBK file, then store the gooberized string in the LBK itself. When PocketBible opens the file, it builds its own copy of the critical-values string and produces its own gooberized representation of it. If the stored goober and the runtime goober match, you get to read the book.
But seriously…
It can be embarrassing when the terminology you use around the office to describe something makes its way into public. You casually refer to your experimental test page on the website as “that dingus” and the next thing you know it becomes the most important part of your project.
Fortunately, we don’t foresee any need to give the public access to the Gooberizer. So for now it’s our little inside joke. Until somebody decides to write a blog article about it.
This is consistent with what we’ve come to know about our PocketBible users. I believe that our age (yes, I’m in that “over 55” group, too) puts us in a generation that trusts the authority of the Bible and therefore wants to know more about it. We also believe there are people smarter than us who have things to say about the Bible from whom we can learn. Younger people tend to value the experience of God. They learn about God through their community experiences with their fellow believers. As a result they have less dependence on the kind of commentary and research tools at which PocketBible excels. Not all of them, of course; we continue to add new users of all ages to the PocketBible family.
This is consistent with what we know from being in the Christian publishing business for over 30 years. People who purchase Bibles and Bible study materials tend to be on the more theologically “conservative” end of the spectrum and they tend to describe themselves as neither Catholic nor Protestant. That “Bible-believing” term sums up who they are. This has been true the entire time I’ve been in this business.
Most of you are still using Google for searches even though it puts your privacy at risk. The next most popular choice is arguably the right one: Duck Duck Go.
Most of you use PocketBible every day and almost 90% use it more than just in church on Sunday. 
94% of you are somewhat or very satisfied with PocketBible. You are most interested in the same kinds of resources that we are already producing — commentaries, dictionaries, Bibles, and atlases. You have some very specific recommendations in some cases, and we’ve made a note of those.
The WEB is an updated version of the 1901 ASV text. It doesn’t go out of its way to be overtly “modern” but rather just updates the language to sound more natural to today’s readers. I especially like that it uses “Yahweh” for the name of God in the Old Testament, which I believe “personalizes” God and makes him more of an active character in the narrative instead of a distant and disconnected force that meddles in human affairs in ways beyond our understanding.
When the 2020 NASB was introduced, I started in Genesis and read it cover-to-cover. I was expecting to be disappointed, as I had always been when trying to read the 1995 edition. While the latter was good for word studies, it didn’t read well. It was rather jarring to the ears. The 2020 edition seemed much smoother without resorting to paraphrase or functional equivalence.
As a new Christian, I attended churches that taught from the KJV for about 25 years. I’m one of a shrinking number of people that don’t find the KJV, which mixes a little Middle English grammar into its Early Modern English text, to be off-putting. When I remember a few words of a verse and need to do a search to find it, I tend to do that search in the KJV, betting that the dark corners of my memory are recalling its particular wording.
Dr. Tom Constable from Dallas Theological Seminary does an outstanding job of presenting a conservative, evangelical point of view while making room for alternative explanations. He backs up both his own opinions and alternative opinions with quotes from third parties who champion those points of view. Since these are literally just his own personal notes collected over the years, they don’t suffer from having been over-edited by a publisher and a marketing department.
This is an update to Vincent’s Word Studies in the New Testament, which is also a recommended book. You would think a book on word studies would be a dictionary in PocketBible, but Robertson presents his work verse-by-verse, which makes it easy to find what you’re looking for while reading.
I tend to keep the full edition of this commentary on my devices, but the abridged edition is an affordable alternative that doesn’t lose much in the abridgement. I like this commentary for its deep, scholarly treatment of the subject matter and its willingness to discuss alternative points of view.
This is not for the faint of heart. You don’t have to be able to read Hebrew, but it might help. This commentary isn’t for everyone, but it’s one place I look when sussing out nuance of meaning from Hebrew.
These dictionaries (OT and NT volumes) are ideal companions to any of our Bibles that contain Strong’s numbers. They provide significantly more detailed definitions than do the default dictionaries that come with those Bibles.
Deluxe Bible Maps is a thorough atlas of every region, battle, time period, people group, etc. The maps themselves are pretty simple, but the place names are linked to short descriptions in the accompanying dictionary of Bible places.
This is a hidden gem in our catalog. It’s actually two books. The Dictionary of Bible Themes is like Nave’s Topical Bible. The topics are organized like a systematic theology. Each contains links to verses and other related topics. Also included is the Dictionary of Bible Themes Scripture Index, which functions like the Thompson Chain Reference Bible and is organized like a commentary in PocketBible so that it follows along with verses as you read them and links you to topics appropriate to that verse.
Yeah, I know — this is my book so of course I picked it. Think of it this way instead: This is how I prefer to read through the Bible in the morning, so I wrote it. The 7-Minute Bible is the text of the World English Bible (WEB) organized chronologically, harmonized where appropriate (i.e. Kings/Chronicles and the Gospels), the edited to remove the things that are going to cause you to stop reading through the Bible (like 9 full chapters of names at the beginning of 1 Chronicles). I find I can read through the entire 7-Minute Bible in 4 months if I read just 15 minutes per day.
This is a recently published series of books that takes a fresh look at the Old Testament in the light of our best understanding of the Hebrew language and the literature of the Ancient Near East. The goal is to read the text from the perspective of the people to whom it was originally written.
I’m not a fan of the Psalms. It’s an interesting little book of song lyrics but I find it hard to identify with. I’m not pursued by my sworn enemies into caves and crevices on a regular basis. I’m not a song-writer looking for lyrics. But — if I have to read a song book, I need it to rhyme and I need it to be singable in standard meter. This little book translates the book of Psalms into truly singable works. I thought about modernizing the language and using this for my 7-Minute Bible, it’s that good. Maybe in version 2. 
This is a fascinating little pamphlet that makes the case that there has always been one true, biblical church fashioned on the principles of the New Testament and not falling under the hierarchy of any denomination. It argues that Catholicism (and subsequently Ortodoxy and Protestantism) split from this true version of the Church and went off in their own direction but that there still exists pockets of real New Testament churches today. Whether you believe that or not, it’s a fascinating hypothesis that happens to be correct. Like I said — my article, my rules. 🙂
This 22-volume collection provides a wealth of historical, cultural, and geographic background on what we read in the Bible. 
What we didn’t realize is that we had been lying to ourselves about no longer needing to update the code in PocketBible when a new Bible was released. There were conditions under which that lie was definitely true. But there were still small, special cases scattered throughout the code and not handled by a data table in the LBK file. For example, some Bibles contain verses with suffixes, like Isaiah 14:25b and Psalm 68:12a, 12b, 13a, 13b, 14a, 14b, and 14c. In the apocrypha, Sirach has a chapter called “Prologue” that is called “Forward” in some Bibles. Esther has chapters A-F in addition to its numbered chapters. While we could map all of these verses to their corresponding verses in other Bibles using the tables that we had moved into the LBK file, when we wanted to print out the Bible reference “Psalm 68:12b” there was a piece of code that got called to look at the stored verse number (which was 14 in this case — 12a was 12, 13a was 13, and 12b was 14) and return the correct “spelling” of that verse number (the 14th verse in Psalm 68 is “12b”).
The original logo of Apple Computer Co. was this woodcut. In it, we see Sir Isaac Newton about to “discover” gravity when an apple falls on his head. The story is undoubtedly apocryphal, but, just like we imagine naked Adam and Eve gorging themselves on apples behind conveniently arranged foliage, the image of Sir Isaac Newton sitting under an apple tree in his Sunday best while reading a book is how we imagine gravity being discovered.
“Aha!” you might exclaim. “That’s the bite by which Eve disobeyed God!” You would exclaim that right before I smacked you upside the head and reminded you that the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was not an apple, but rather was the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
