With more PocketBible users making the move from Facebook to MeWe, we thought we should be there, too. We’re not leaving Facebook, just adding a MeWe page. You can click here or search for PocketBible on MeWe. When you find us, follow us.
For those of you who have never heard of MeWe, it’s like Facebook except without the ads and the censorship of certain points of view. It’s free like Facebook, but you can get access to premium features for a small fee. The free version seems to work great, though.
We’ve been happily posting on Facebook since March 2008 and have no plans to leave. We have, however, left Twitter and have no plans to return. It didn’t really fit our needs, nor, apparently, the needs of the majority of PocketBible users.
As you know, our crowd-funding campaign for PocketBible for Windows ended on September 15 so we’re about one month into the project. While I can’t demonstrate much for you at this point, I do want to fill you in on our progress and answer a few questions.
Over the last couple of years we’ve experimented with a number of programming languages, frameworks, and development tools to try to discover the best way forward for PocketBible for Windows. In the process, we’ve explored some proof-of-concept ideas, some of which will find their way into the finished product.
For example, we needed to be able to display and interact with books with complex layouts, like The NIV with Goodrick-Kohlenberger Numbers and our parsed interlinear Greek New Testaments. You would think that displaying formatted text would be trivial these days, given that it’s 2020 and even Web browser technology from the last century can do it fairly well. PocketBible for Android, iOS, and Mac OS uses HTML rendering built into those platforms that does a very good job. Unfortunately, the similar functionality built into Windows is significantly less capable. So as we explored alternative tool sets for implementing PocketBible for Windows, this is one of the areas we focused on. Our ability to successfully render these complex layouts during our experiments in the summer of 2019 is what led us to settle on our current solution. (We’ll have more to say about that in a future update).
Now that we’ve demonstrated that we can display and interact with the text, we need to be able to extract the text of a book or Bible from our Laridian Book (LBK) file format. The code that does that is fairly extensive and complicated and needs to be translated from its current implementation and thoroughly tested. We’re currently working on that task.
A major area of progress is what we call “user data management”, which is keeping track of your notes, highlights, bookmarks, and daily reading progress. In particular, we wanted to tackle synchronization of that data with Laridian Cloud. This would force us to fully implement the ability to read and write the data from and to the database, and would also require us to solve communication with our cloud-based sync provider — both of which are complex tasks that introduce risk into the schedule. Overcoming those challenges and dealing with that risk during the early part of the project avoids the possibility of unexpected delays right before our ship date, when it is least-practical and most-expensive to deal with it.
As of today, even though the PocketBible app for Windows doesn’t allow you to view or edit notes, it can sync its local notes database with the server. You can’t even see any verses, let alone select one to highlight, but you can correctly sync highlights to and from the cloud. This means we’re able to populate the local database from a customer account, make manual changes using a database editor tool, then request that the program sync again. The app accurately identifies what has changed and syncs those changes to the server. At the same time, it receives and records any modifications or new records sent to it from the server. That means that, at least internally, everything is working. There’s just no user interface to it yet. Sounds weird, but it’s very normal for a software project to be completely working but with no way to see that it’s doing so. That will come later.
It’s also worth noting that even though neither of the current versions of PocketBible for Windows (Windows Desktop or Windows Store versions) support Journal notes or renaming highlight colors (features of the Advanced Feature Set in PocketBible for iOS, Android, and Mac OS), the new version already supports those features. Or rather, the underlying support is there; there’s just no user interface to invoke it.
Until next time, thank you so much for your financial support, prayers, and words of encouragement for this project. We welcome your feedback and suggestions.
Frequently Asked Questions
What will be the effect of the Windows project on work being done on other platforms?
According to comments on a recent customer survey we did, some of you have expressed concern that our attention to the Windows project will take away from work on other platforms. I want to reassure you this is not the case. In fact, the very purpose of the crowd-funding campaign was to allow us to add staff for the Windows project in order to minimize the impact on other platforms. You may not realize it, but you’ve already seen the results — we shipped a new version of PocketBible for iOS coincident with the release of iOS 14, which introduced a number of major new features for PocketBible on that platform, all while work on PocketBible for Windows continued unabated.
When will I get my rewards?
When you get your rewards depends on what type of rewards you are entitled to.
Physical Rewards: Three contributors were entitled to some special rewards (a 1903 KJV New Testament and two framed, first-edition KJV pages from 1611). These were mailed within a week of the end of the fund-raising campaign.
2021 PocketBible Library Collections: Contributors at the $60, $120, $240, and $360 levels will get the 2021 Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum Edition PocketBible Library collections, respectively, when those products are released near the end of the year.
Special Diamond-Level Library Collections: Contributors at levels $720 and above will get the special collection we’re putting together just for those contributors. It will be released either at the same time as the regular 2021 Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum collections are released, or shortly thereafter. We’re aiming for having all of the collections distributed by the end of the year.
Advanced Feature Set Subscriptions: Some contribution levels included multiple years of either the AFS for the new Windows app or for all platforms. Those will be distributed when the new app ships. We haven’t announced a specific ship date but are aiming for late summer, 2021. Obviously, those who are entitled to a mention in the in-app credits will see that when the app ships.
Today Apple approved PocketBible 4.14.1 for distribution through the App Store. This version coincides with the release of iOS 14, and while it doesn’t necessarily take advantage of every new feature of this latest version of iOS, it should work better than the previous version did.
iOS 14 adds a number of new features that may or may not make sense for PocketBible to take advantage of, such as widgets and app clips. Because PocketBible needs to continue to work with older versions of iOS (we go back to iOS 12 with this release), it’s not always practical to implement the very latest new features. And we never know what’s going to survive until iOS 15 and what will be dropped. So don’t expect a PocketBible complication for WatchOS or a PocketBible widget for iPhone.
Here’s what’s new in PocketBible 4.14.1:
FEATURES
Saved/named layouts on iPad. (AFS)
If you subscribe to the Advanced Feature Set, you’ll be able to save the current screen layout, which includes the number and position of open panes/tabs, the list of books open in each pane/tab, the position of each of those books, your navigation (back/forward) history, your recent searches, and your recently visited Bible verses (the latter itself being a new feature; see below).
Keyboard shortcut keys (customizable with AFS)
If you have an iPad Pro with an external keyboard, there are now key combinations that can be used to activate frequently used features like searching and navigating to a Bible verse. A list of these keyboard shortcuts can be viewed by pressing and holding the ⌘ (Command) key (this is true for any iOS app, not just PocketBible).
If you subscribe to the Advanced Feature Set, you can customize these commands. You’ll do that by selecting the function (such as “open a book”) then just press the key combination you want to use for that function.
Trackpad and mouse support in book panes
If you have an iPad Pro with an external mouse or keyboard with trackpad, you’ll find that 2-finger trackpad and scroll-wheel scrolling work better in PocketBible’s book panes than they did before.
New long-press functions of back, forward, search, and go-to toolbar buttons
Pressing and holding on the Back button will display the portion of your navigation history that is “behind” you. You can jump back more than one location by selecting an item from this list. If you have gone back at least one step on this list, a long-press on the Forward button will show you the locations that are “ahead” of you.
You’ve always been able to access a list of recent searches by selecting that option from the Search form. Now you can press and hold on the toolbar Search button to see that list.
A frequently requested feature was a modification of Back that would allow you to see a list of recently visited Bible verses so you could quickly jump back to a passage you had been reading. You can now access this list with a long press on the Go To button while a Bible is active.
Sync to current verse
PocketBible has long had the ability to keep all your Bibles and commentaries sync’ed up to the verse you are viewing in the active pane. That’s not always what you want to do, however. But when that feature is turned off, there wasn’t a way to easily sync your other Bibles and commentaries to the verse you’re reading. Now there are two.
When the automatic sync between Bibles and commentaries is turned off, you can choose Sync All to … from the PocketBible menu to cause all Bibles and commentaries to go to the topmost verse in the active pane (assuming the active pane is displaying a Bible).
You can also select a verse via pressing and holding, and choose the Sync button from the Selection tool bar. In that case, your other Bibles and commentaries will sync to the first selected verse.
ENHANCEMENTS
Customizable sorting of list of open books
When viewing the list of open books in the Library window, you can choose the Editbutton to drag the books into the order in which you’d prefer to see them. This is a frequently suggested feature that turned out to be a lot easier to implement than we feared, though it has an important caveat.
That is, the order of the books in each pane is saved as a part of recording your navigation history. So if you change the order of books in a pane, then use Back to go back to a time before you re-ordered the books, the order will revert to its earlier state. Going Forward will restore the new order.
In addition, the order of open books is saved when you save a layout using the new Saved Layouts feature on the iPad. So if you change the order of the books in one layout, it will not affect the order of the books in the same pane in another layout.
And more…
Choosing a range of verses for searching requires fewer button presses. Once you’ve selected a range you’re taken right back to the main Search window.
Autostudy Word and Autostudy Verse will start the study when Enter is pressed in input field (Advanced Feature Set subscription required for Autostudy).
Long-press link preview now works on the asterisks that mark footnotes in books and Bibles.
FIXES
The correct background color was not being chosen for certain menus.
After closing the current book using Close this Book on the Library screen, the wrong book was marked as being active.
The program was not checking your AFS subscription expiration date often enough, which kept the subscription active well passed its expiration until you performed a particular action that caused it to be checked. The program now checks the expiration date on launch and at convenient intervals while you’re using the program. There is a grace period to allow you time to renew and activate the renewed subscription.
Thanks to the kindness of 492 of our closest friends, we were able to reach our goal of raising $50,000 for the development of an all-new version of PocketBible for Windows! The final total came to exactly $53,000.
If you contributed to the project, you’ll get an email from us letting you know how we’re going to keep you updated on our progress. We’ll publish updates here on the blog. Some will be public like this one; others will be for supporters only.
To get things started, I met yesterday with the outside developer responsible mainly for user experience to bring him up to speed. And since the beginning of the crowd-funding campaign I’ve been working with another in-house developer to bring her up to speed on the development tools and the initial tasks we need to work on.
Even though we already have two different Windows versions of PocketBible, this version is going to be implemented a whole new way (more about that later). So we have to treat it as if we’re doing it for a whole new platform. When we launch into PocketBible for a new platform, I like to tackle the hard things first. That is, I try to identify what is going to be a challenge for us and do some prototyping or proof-of-concept tests to make sure we’re going to be able to solve those problems before they become hinderances to the schedule.
What that means is that we’re going to start kind of in the middle of the project, focusing on the note editor and user data synchronization, because those seem to always present problems on every platform. We’ve already done some experimenting with simply displaying and scrolling through text, as that’s another problem area. We’ve actually written and thrown away a few different attempts at some of those problems already.
This approach creates interesting paradoxes. We’ll be able to sync your notes, highlights, bookmarks, and daily reading progress to and from the server before the program can create or display a note, highlight a verse, or set or go to a bookmark. We’ll be able to scroll through Bible text before we can choose and open a Bible to read. But such is the world of software development, especially with a mature product like PocketBible. Even though the new version of PocketBible for Windows doesn’t exist, PocketBible itself exists both as an abstract concept and in several concrete implementations — not just the existing Android, iOS, and Mac OS apps, but our soon-to-be extinct Windows apps and our already-extinct Windows Mobile Smartphone, Pocket PC, Handheld PC, Palm-size PC, webOS, Blackberry, Palm OS, and browser-based versions. So this new Windows version already exists in our heads. Starting in the middle or at the end or the beginning is all the same to us. 🙂
This is the original campaign description that we did for the next version of PocketBible for Windows. Since the crowd-source funding campaign only lasted about 6 weeks, we’ve removed or edited the call for contributions, but the story about the motivations behind rewriting PocketBible for Windows is useful for understanding how we got here and what our goals are.
The PocketBible Story
We are working on a new version of PocketBible for Windows. The new version of PocketBible will replace both the older Windows Desktop and newer Windows Store versions of PocketBible. Books and Bibles you bought for those apps will work with the new app, and books that you previously could only use on Android, iOS, and macOS will be available for this new Windows version.
You can learn more about the motivation for the campaign by watching the short video above, or by reading further…
PocketBible for Windows
PocketBible is primarily a mobile Bible app. But we also make versions of PocketBible for macOS and Windows.
We actually have two versions of PocketBible that run on Windows. There’s an older one that was designed for Windows XP, and a newer one that isn’t an upgrade to the older one. It was designed for Windows 8 and is an entirely separate program. Both versions run just fine under Windows 11.
Laridian originally released PocketBible for Windows in 2007.
The Original PocketBible for Windows
It was a great little Bible app, based a lot on what we had learned writing QuickVerse back in the 1990’s at Parsons Technology. Like many apps of its day, it was rather complicated. There were a lot of tiny buttons around the book window, and dozens of configuration options. This version, while designed for Windows XP, ran great under the next two versions of Windows (Windows Vista and Windows 7).
But then came Windows 8.
PocketBible for Windows Store
With Windows 8, Microsoft completely changed the way you interact with Windows and its apps. They were attempting to merge the user experience on the desktop with the emerging market for tablets with touch screens.
FAQ from parallels.com explaining how to find apps in Windows 8
Windows 8 apps with what Microsoft called its “Modern User Interface” filled the screen with information (in our case, the text of your Bibles and reference books) and hid the menus, toolbars, and buttons that we had all grown accustomed to. Swipes and other gestures were required to reveal the hidden controls.
Apps that implemented this user interface were distributed exclusively through the new Windows Store. Older apps like PocketBible were now called “Windows Desktop” apps and were relegated to their own area of the Windows Start menu — that is, if you could find the Start menu at all.
PocketBible for Windows Store with “Modern User Interface”
This was a confusing time to be a Windows developer. It wasn’t clear in which direction the user experience for Windows was going. While we released a new version of PocketBible designed for the Modern User Interface, we hedged our bets by keeping the old version of PocketBible available and renaming it, “PocketBible for Windows Desktop”.
The Challenge
PocketBible itself has been evolving on other platforms while remaining static on Windows. We haven’t been able to update the older Windows Desktop version just because of its age and incompatibility with the newer development tools. The Windows Store version was actually written by a volunteer PocketBible user whose full-time job is as a contract Windows developer. His other work has kept him from spending as much time on PocketBible as we both would like, and as a result it hasn’t kept up with the changes.
This is further complicated by the fact that there are features we’ve implemented on the other platforms that simply can’t be done in the Windows environment.
One of the things we haven’t been able to implement is support for our newest Bibles, especially interlinear Bibles. It’s getting to the point where there are enough issues — the interlinear Bibles, the absence of a good WYSIWYG note editor, and the absence of a number of Advanced Feature Set features — that we really need to update PocketBible for Windows. And we don’t have a good way to do that.
It has become clear that we need to start over.
The Next Version of PocketBible for Windows
The plan is to build a brand new version of PocketBible for Windows. Because we’re more familiar with the code in the Windows Desktop version, and because it makes use of the shared “book reader engine” we also use in PocketBible for iOS and macOS (and thus has been kept up-to-date), we’ll start with that version of the code.
We’ll take what we’ve learned in the last 20 years about how you use our apps for Bible study, both on the desktop and on your mobile device, and apply it to a fresh, new user interface that draws from our iOS and macOS apps.
We’ll build this new version of PocketBible on a unique new technology stack that supports the innovative things that Microsoft makes it hard to do with the standard tool set, and gives us more options for the future than we’re ready to talk about at this point.
We’ll be able to implement the full range of features you see in the Advanced Feature Sets in PocketBible for Android, iOS, and macOS.
The PocketBible Jump-Start Campaign
We’re a mobile Bible software company. Because Windows is not a significant revenue source for us, it’s hard to justify investing in that platform. But we’re going to have costs that are a little out of the ordinary to get this done. In particular, we need to hire some temporary and contract developers to supplement what we can do in-house, and of course that costs money.
PocketBible Platform Distribution (March 2020)
[In 2020, we asked] that you consider participating financially in this project. Reaching the funding goal that we’ve set will allow us to hire the additional people we need. Any additional funds we receive will allow us to add resources to the project to enhance the feature list and ensure that we make our schedule.
Questions or Comments?
We invite your feedback during this campaign. You can contact Craig directly at [email protected] with any questions, comments, or suggestions you might have about PocketBible for Windows.
Risks and Challenges
Every software project presents challenges that can’t be predicted in advance. Laridian is a small company with only a few employees, so it’s possible that development on one project might slow down or be halted for a time while we put out a fire on another project. Part of the purpose of this “jump-start” fund-raising campaign, though, is to help us fund the additional staff we will need to keep this project on track.
The technology we work with is constantly changing. New versions of tools and of Windows itself constantly introduce new challenges. But we’ve been doing this for a long time — over 20 years now — and feel we have a track record of being able to work through and around challenges like that.
In short, we feel confident that we have the skills, tools, people, plan, and expertise to complete the project. Delays should be minimal. We’ve used crowd-funding to fund development projects in the past. Regardless of the problems we encounter along the way, we’ll be keeping you up-to-date with regular progress reports so you won’t be left wondering what ever happened to PocketBible for Windows.
Terms and Conditions
All contributions made to the PocketBible for Windows Jump-Start Campaign [were] made subject to the following conditions:
Laridian is not a religious or 501(c)3 organization. Your contribution is not tax-deductible as a charitable donation.
While we promise “rewards” in return for contributions, you are not purchasing the reward. We are giving it to you.
You may request a refund of your contribution within 30 days of making it. Access to rewards that are downloadable will be revoked upon refund. Physical rewards that have been mailed to you are not returnable. In the event you wish a refund of a contribution that resulted in a physical reward, the retail value of the reward will be deducted from your contribution, and the balance refunded.
You are contributing toward a software development project. The results and schedules of such projects are widely known to be variable and unpredictable. While Laridian has every intention of completing the project and doing so according to the schedule that it from time to time will disclose to supporters, it does not guarantee that the project will be completed, or be completed by a certain date.
Translation is an art, not a science. It requires command of both the source and target languages. This is complicated by the fact that biblical Hebrew and Koine Greek are no longer spoken, so there are no native speakers from whom to learn the nuances of the language. Every translator differs in his or her choice of words and phrases to translate the original.
There is a contingent of Christians today who feel the newer translations are being manipulated to promote a particular agenda. These people would never consider that the older Bibles they prefer would have been subject to the same biases, but they were. For example, the Greek word βαπτίζω (baptizo) literally means “to dip or submerge”. But since the English-speaking church was no longer immersing believers in water but rather sprinkling them, the first translators of the Bible into English were in an awkward position. Rather than point out the error in practice by the church of the day, they invented the English word “baptize”, which is just a transliteration of the Greek word βαπτίζω (that is, it is a made-up English word which, when pronounced, sounds like the original Greek word). Errant sprinklers could claim to be “baptizing”, just like they did in the Bible, without having to explain the change in the mode of baptism compared to the New Testament examples.
It’s pretty easy to get a rise out of Christians who are ignorant of the nature of translating from one language to another by suggesting that nefarious forces (Satan himself being on the top of the list) are working to subvert the work of God by causing the Bible to be mistranslated. The Facebook post below is an example. I first saw a version of this post in 2015. It makes a number of false claims, urges the reader to try to find verses that don’t exist in most Bibles published in the last 40 years, then uses that to “prove” that publishers are actively promoting a gay and satanist agenda by altering the text. Altering it from what the post does not make clear, nor does it explain how Luke’s failure to mention that Pilate had a tradition of releasing a prisoner during the Passover celebration advances the gay or satanist agenda.
The new version of this post I saw today added the ESV to the Bibles owned by HarperCollins (which is false), and unnecessarily took a swipe at the Olive Tree Bible App that wasn’t there last time I saw it. Here’s the post:
VERY CRITICAL ALERT!!!
NIV was published by Zondervan but is now OWNED by Harper Collins, who also publishes the Satanic Bible and The Joy of Gay Sex.
The NIV and ESV has now removed 64,575 words from the Bible including Jehovah, Calvary, Holy Ghost and omnipotent to name but a few…
The NIV and ESV has also now removed 45 complete verses. Most of us have the Bible on our devices and phones especially “OLIVE TREE BIBLE STUDY APP.”
Try and find these scriptures in NIV and ESV on your computer, phone or device right now if you are in doubt
Matthew 17:21, 18:11, 23:14;
Mark 7:16, 9:44, 9:46;
Luke 17:36, 23:17;
John 5:4; Acts 8:37.
…you will not believe your eyes.
Refuse to be blinded by Satan, and do not act like you just don’t care. Let’s not forget what the Lord Jesus said in John 10:10 (King James Version).
There is a crusade geared towards altering the Bible as we know it; NIV, ESV and many more versions are affected.
THE SOLUTION:
If you must use the NIV and ESV, BUY and KEEP AN EARLIER VERSION OF the BIBLE. A Hard Copy cannot be updated. All these changes occur when they ask you to update the app. On your phone or laptop etc.
Laridian’s Response
A PocketBible user sent the above to Tech Support and asked if this horrific news was true. Here’s how we replied:
First, this post is old. It first circulated in 2015. Second, it represents a misunderstanding of everything it reports.
The NIV text was translated and is owned by Biblica (The International Bible Society), not Zondervan. Biblica is a 200-year-old organization that translates the Bible and distributes Bibles to various language groups around the world. The ESV is a revision of the Revised Standard Version (RSV), which itself is a revision of the American Standard Version (ASV), which is an americanized version of the Revised Version (RV), which was, in the 1880’s, a modern-language revision of the King James Version (KJV). The ESV is owned and distributed by Crossway Bibles, not Zondervan.
The right to publish and sell the NIV in the US is held by Zondervan under license from Biblica. Zondervan and Thomas Nelson are both owned by HarperCollins. HarperCollins is the publisher of a wide variety of books including those mentioned in the post. But neither HarperCollins nor Zondervan are involved in the translation of the NIV. That started over 60 years ago by the New York Bible Society, which became the International Bible Society, then Biblica.
The right to publish and sell the NIV outside the US is held by Hodder and Stoughton, a secular publisher in the UK. The post doesn’t mention them for some reason, choosing instead to focus on HarperCollins, which it claims owns the NIV, which it does not. And neither company has any rights in the ESV.
Ironically, Thomas Nelson is famously the translator/editor of the New King James Version, which follows the versification and much of the wording of the KJV. If HarperCollins was going to toy with any translation of the Bible, it would be the NKJV — which tends to be (reluctantly, perhaps) loved by readers of the KJV.
Let’s look at the other claims:
The NIV and ESV has now removed 64,575 words from the Bible. The grammatical error (“has” instead of “have”) resulted from an illiterate person, perhaps the person who forwarded this to you, adding “and ESV” to the original post from 2015. That makes the claim even more questionable, since it would be odd that two entirely different translations had each removed exactly the same number of words.
What were these words removed from? “The Bible” is not a single document that you can point at or hold in your hands. It is a collection of writings, written over some 4000 years by 40 or more authors, in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. We have multiple copies of portions of it in the original languages, and they differ from each other. This is more true in the New Testament than the Old, but it is true to some degree throughout. The job of Bible translators is to choose the versions of the originals they want to work from or think are authoritative, then translate those into English. In doing so they do not remove words from the original text; they translate from one language to another. Translation is not a word-for-word, mechanical task. Just comparing the number of words used in one translation versus another does not tell us anything about the relative quality of either translation.
The author seems to be suggesting that the newer translations remove words from an older, more authoritative translation. Which one? The post doesn’t say. And why would that fact alone matter? For example, newer translations “remove” a number of words from the King James Version, including thee, thou, ye, comest, goest, conies, kine, and hundreds of others. Most have fallen out of use or changed their meaning over the centuries. This isn’t bad, it’s necessary if we who speak the English language are going to understand it.
The specific words cited as removed are not removed as much as they are replaced. In particular:
“Jehovah” is an inaccurate attempt to transliterate the Hebrew word יהוה (often called “the tetragrammaton” — the 4-letter Hebrew spelling of God’s name). Many newer Bibles more accurately transliterate it as “Yahweh”. I believe the NIV and ESV use the convention of translating it as the word “Lord” in all caps or small caps (LORD or Lord).
The word “Calvary” as a translation for the place where Jesus was crucified is completely wrong to begin with. The Greek word used in the Gospels is Κρανίον (kranion or “cranium” for the Hebrew golgotha “skull”). “Calvary” is a transliteration of the Latin Calvariae Locus, which is the term used in the Latin Vulgate to translate Κρανίον. To insist that we continue to use a made-up word based on Latin instead of a direct translation of the Greek or Hebrew term would be identical to insisting that we refer to God by the made-up name “El Senior” because it is an English transliteration of the Spanish El Señor, the name commonly used for God in Spanish Bibles.
The term “Holy Ghost” is translated “Holy Spirit” in newer Bibles because the meaning of the word “ghost” has shifted over the years.
“Omnipotent” is used only once in the KJV, in Revelation 19:6. It is used as a title for God: “…for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth.” The Greek word is παντοκράτωρ (pantokratoros) which comes from the Greek word for “all” and the Greek word for “strength or might”. The other 9 times this word is used, the KJV translates it “almighty” (which is and adjective meaning “all powerful”). So if the NIV and ESV are wrong for “changing” this word from “omnipotent” to “almighty”, then the KJV is wrong for doing the same thing in 9 different places.
I see they’ve added a mention of the Olive Tree Bible app in this version of the post. Interestingly, Olive Tree was owned for a time by Zondervan/HarperCollins. This fact is not mentioned.
The post claims the NIV and ESV have removed 45 complete verses (though it lists only 10). Again I ask, “removed from what?” The post doesn’t say. The specific verses cited are present in some older translations of the Bible because the Greek manuscripts from which they were translated are actually newer (that is, they date from a later time in history) than the more recently discovered and older manuscripts used by the NIV translators. Because the older manuscripts are closer to the originals in time — that is, they went through the copying process fewer times — they are believed by modern translators to be more accurate. So it is not the case that these verses have been removed from newer translations like the NIV, ESV and many others, but rather that they were added by the copyists of the manuscripts upon which older versions, like the KJV and ASV, are based. It could be accurately argued that the “removal” of these 45 (or 10?) verses makes the NIV and ESV more accurate translations than the older ones the author prefers.
The post concludes by recommending that you buy and keep an earlier version of the Bible without saying which one. Most posts like this come from people who prefer the KJV. The KJV can be shown to contain thousands of errors in printing and translation, including one edition that said “thou shalt commit adultery”, and another that transgendered Ruth, referring to her as “he”. The KJV is where we get the phrase “strain at a gnat” where the Greek is more accurately translated “strain out a gnat” (“You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.”)
There is no perfect translation of the Bible, and there is no single original-language source from which to translate. Posts like this one come from people who are ignorant of the history of transmission of the Bible, the process of translation, and the business of Bible publishing. Please don’t give these people a bigger platform by reposting their nonsense.
Image courtesy of ChatGPT. It’s hard to get ChatGPT to create an image of Satan and some very obviously LGBTQ individuals rewriting the Bible, but somehow I managed to do it. Trust me, my prompt was significantly less offensive than the result.
The Cultural Research Center (CRC) at Arizona Christian University released a study last week showing that Americans demonstrate an increasing ignorance of God and in some cases hold self-contradicting views of God’s attributes and actions.
The survey of 2000 adults was conducted in January, 2020 to determine the percentage of the country that holds a biblical worldview. It found that only 51% of Americans believe that God is the “all-powerful, all-knowing, perfect and just creator of the universe who still rules the world today.” This is down from 73% who agreed with that statement in 1991.
The largest drops are among the youngest (under 30) and the oldest (over 75) among us. There is also a clear divide along political lines, with self-described liberals and Democrats holding the least biblical worldview and conservatives/Republicans, the most. Agnostic (“there may be a God, but we can’t know for sure”) and atheistic (“there is no God”) views have grown substantially in the last 30 year.s
Some contradictory views also come out in the survey. 45% who claim God exists also say they can’t be sure. This would actually seem to be more consistent with an agnostic view. One-third of those who old a biblical view of God way that he has no reason behind what he causes or allows to happen to them. One could argue that an irrational God is little better than (and certainly more frightening than) no God at all. Only 1/3 of those who believe in the God of the Bible say that he is involved in their lives. Again, a God who doesn’t care about us seems little better than no God at all.
Slightly more people believe in the biblical person of Satan than in the biblical person of God. Think about that for a while.
PocketBible can’t fix a person’s ignorance of God or of God’s character on its own, but it can give you the tools you need to repair your own understanding of God and help you share a biblical worldview with the people you live and work with. And this survey reflects only the opinions of Americans, where Christianity allegedly has its best foothold. There is no lack of work to be done, starting here and throughout the world.
I used to spend two or three days per week working from various coffee shops around town. Most of them open at 6AM. I’d be there right as the doors open and stay through the entire day. It wasn’t unusual to have to wait in line at 6AM as everyone stopped by to get a coffee and pastry on their way to work.
There’s a coffee shop right next door to my office. It opens at 7AM. I asked the owner why she didn’t open earlier. After all, her competitors are already open. She’s giving up a lot of business. “I don’t want to get up that early,” she said. One time I asked if they had anything for lunch. She said they do lunch but only on Thursdays. She makes some quiche and when it runs out, there’s no more lunch until next Thursday.
There’s another coffee shop farther away that opens at 6AM according to their sign, but when I showed up early one day I was surprised to find the lights on and the door open. The owner told me, “I get here about 4:45 and the first thing I do is unlock the door and put coffee on. So if you get here early and the doors are open, you’ll probably be able to get a cup.”
I looked around and noticed there was nothing for lunch. I asked if they served sandwiches. He pointed to the door on the wall across from the counter and said, “That door takes you to the restaurant next door. You can get food there and bring it here, or take your coffee with you over there when you want some lunch.”
I would argue that the lazy lady next door doesn’t know what business she’s in nor who her customers are. The guy who opens early and sends people to the restaurant next door has transcended the coffee shop business and is operating at a state of consciousness that the lady next door can’t even imagine, let alone perceive.
We have a publisher with whom we’d like to do business. They have a Bible translation that we get a lot of requests for. They refuse to license it because they want to protect their own internal sales. They don’t have a software version of this Bible; they just have print. But they worry that an electronic version will cannibalize their print sales.
Electronic publishing costs traditional print publishers nothing. It only generates royalty revenue. It is money applied directly to the bottom line. People purchase electronic books that they would never buy in print, and people who are still buying print in 2020 are not buying electronic Bibles. There are exceptions and the two worlds definitely intersect, but it’s difficult to argue that one robs from the other when you’re looking at a particular title. I would argue that in an effort not to lose the revenue stream with which they are familiar, this publisher is blind to no-cost, revenue-only opportunities. These opportunities are knocking directly on his door, coming to him. He doesn’t even have to work hard to take advantage of them.
I spend a lot of time thinking about what I’m blind to in my business. The coffee shop next door doesn’t realize they’re a coffee shop, and that people want a cup of coffee on their way to work. They aren’t going to her shop. They didn’t realize that serving lunch only one day a week is like not serving lunch. Publishers come out of marketing and sales meetings where they struggle with how to increase revenue, then tell a no-cost revenue stream that they’re not interested in taking money from them. I worry that I’m doing some outrageously silly thing. Other than wasting my time writing blog articles that no one will read, what am I blind to?
We don’t talk much about security issues at our website for obvious reasons – any information we provide could inform a hacker and provide them a shortcut to circumventing security on our site. We’ve recently made some changes that we want you to be aware of for a couple of reasons: First, the changes are comprehensive and as a result, could affect you in ways we haven’t anticipated. Second, we want to reassure you that your information is and always has been secure.
Let’s take that last point first: Laridian doesn’t store your PayPal username or password, nor do we store your credit card number on our servers. When you make a payment, you are interacting directly with either PayPal or our payment processor, Authorize.Net. Your financial information does not even pass through our server on its way to those companies. So we have no opportunity to store it even if we wanted to.
This is important. It means that your financial information isn’t here, even if someone did break in looking for it. It is being handled by companies that are significantly more sophisticated and more security-conscious than we are. The data breaches you read about don’t generally happen at banks and credit card processors. They are almost always the result of a retail store or online shopping site with lax security. Laridian avoids these attacks by simply not being in possession of any of that information.
The first point, that the changes are extensive and at least in some small degree affect all users, is addressed below.
What Changed
The changes we’ve made are fairly comprehensive and as a result it’s possible that you’ll have trouble signing into your account if you have inadvertently been taking advantage of a shortcoming in our previous account security methods.
Prior to about January 4, 2020, your Laridian account password was stored in our database in plain text. That’s a little unusual (and arguably unsafe), but it’s the result of the fact that our original website and database implementation was done by an outside company over 20 years ago when security standards for the Internet were very different. While standards have changed, making changes to security protocols while allowing thousands of users acquired over more than 20 years to continue to access their accounts is very challenging. So addressing this issue is something we have avoided for a long time.
Even though passwords were stored in plain text, they were (and are) encrypted when transmitted from PocketBible, and the database itself is behind a firewall. The encryption makes it unlikely that someone could grab your password by monitoring your Internet traffic, and the firewall isolates the database from the Web. Both the database and the server it is hosted on require secure account login, so it would be relatively difficult for someone to access it and view user passwords. Since we weren’t protecting any financial information, we weren’t strongly motivated to make this change.
There were three main problems in the old implementation:
Passwords used to be case insensitive. If your password was PASSword, you could log in with password, Password, or PaSsWoRd. This was apparently caused by the original programmer not understanding that the database was configured to do case-insensitive searches. When we discovered it later, we already had users who were inadvertently taking advantage of this misbehavior, so it became at least difficult, if not impossible, to easily change.
We used to truncate all passwords to 10 characters even if you entered more than that. If your password was password1234, you could log in with password12, password12#$, or password1234567890. The original programmer allowed for longer passwords in the database and in his code, but accidentally limited the length of password fields by the way pages on our website were written. Again, once we figured this out we already had thousands of users who were taking advantage of this without realizing it, so we couldn’t easily change it.
As mentioned before, passwords were stored in plain text in the database. This was the result of the naïve belief by the original implementor that password-protecting the database and the server was sufficient to secure this information. This turned out to be true, but we felt we could do better.
The new method addresses all of the above issues:
Passwords are now case sensitive. If your password is PASSword, then you must enter PASSword or you don’t get in.
The new method does not put a practical limit on the length of passwords. There is a limit, but you won’t encounter it unless you want to type for a long, long time. You could create a 1,000,000-character password if you want. It just wouldn’t be practical.
Your password isn’t stored anywhere.
Wait, what? If the password isn’t stored, how are you able to log in?
The way the new system works is that your password is run through what’s called a hash algorithm. This algorithm calculates a unique value that represents your password. So even if a hacker were able to gain access to the database, they would only have indecipherable numbers, not your password.
The has algorithm is one-way. That is, it’s trivial to calculate the hash value from your password, but it is theoretically impossible to generate your password given the hash value. Again, if our theoretical hacker had a list of hash values, they could not reverse-engineer those values and figure out the passwords that generated them.
When you log into your account, we run the password you give us through the same algorithm to produce a hash value, then we compare that number to the number in the database. If they match, you get in. If not, you don’t.
How You Are Affected
Because of the way we phased in the changes, you shouldn’t notice anything different unless you were accidentally using upper/lower case in a way that didn’t match your original password. If your password is longer than 10 characters, we’ll still use just the first 10 characters to log you in. If you create a new password that is longer than 10 characters, we’ll use the full password.
As mentioned before, changing the way passwords are stored and used on our site and in our apps affects virtually everything we do:
Obviously, logging into your account on our website is affected.
Viewing the list of books you own from inside one of our apps depends on PocketBible being able to log into your account.
Synchronizing your notes/highlights/bookmarks with the Laridian Cloud depends on PocketBible being able to log into your account.
PocketBible for Windows Desktop uses an older version of synchronization with our iPocketBible.com server, which is different than the other apps use and takes a different path to log into your account.
Requesting a password-reset link from our site works the same way as before but internally is significantly different.
As a result, there could be problems in some remote corner of one of our apps or on our website that we haven’t discovered yet. If you run into any problems, contact us at [email protected].
I have used the devotional features of PocketBible off and on over the last 20 years in my personal Bible reading. This year I’m using our free Old Testament in a Year and New Testament in a Year reading plans simultaneously to create a custom plan that will give me readings from both the Old and New Testaments each day.
One of the challenges of this approach is that I have to open the Old Testament plan, select the link to the passage, read the passage in the Bible (which may or may not default to the version I want to read from, depending on what else I’ve been doing in PocketBible since I last did my reading), then open the New Testament plan, select the link for the day’s reading, then read the New Testament passage from my preferred Bible. That’s a lot of jumping around just to read 3-4 chapters.
I’m going to take a slightly different approach to it to make the viewing of the text more pleasant and to make it easier to simply read the OT and NT passages without any jumping back and forth between the two devotionals and my Bible. I’ll have two-click access to each day’s text in my desired Bible regardless of what Bibles are open or active in PocketBible at the time. To accomplish this, I’m taking advantage of the “Autostudy Today” feature of the Advanced Feature Set.
Autostudy Today lets you collect the Bible passages and devotional passages you want to read for the day in an HTML or PDF file that can be viewed either within PocketBible or externally. It also lets you customize the styles that are used in the Autostudy output according to your preferences. Most people don’t bother with this, but I’m not most people. 🙂
If you don’t already own the Advanced Feature Set, it can be purchased as a subscription for $9.99/year. This particular feature is only available in the iOS, Android, and Mac OS versions of PocketBible. I’ll be using the Mac OS version to read from and to demonstrate these features, but the iOS and Android versions are similar.
To make it easier to do this every day, I right-click on the toolbar, choose Customize Toolbar, then drag the Today Study button onto the toolbar. That will give me one-touch access to my reading each day.
Drag Today Study to the toolbar.
On the Autostudy Today screen I can select which books to include in the Autostudy report each day. Since the particular devotional book I’m using is just a reading plan and doesn’t itself contain any text I need to read, I’m going to un-check the Devotionals checkbox and make sure Bibles is checked.
Deselect Devotionals; select Bibles.
Then I click on Devotionals (not the checkbox, but on the word “Devotionals” so that it is selected. This causes a list of all my installed devotionals to be displayed on the right. I choose the None button under that list to deselect all the devotionals, then find my Old Testament in 1 Year and New Testament in 1 Year reading plans and select their check boxes to include them in the Autostudy output.
Since I want my Old Testament reading to come first each day, I drag the Old Testement in 1 Year plan up above the New Testament in 1 Year plan. It doesn’t matter if there are other books in between, since they won’t be included. I just want to make sure the OT comes before the NT.
Drag the Old Testament devotional to a position above the New Testament devotional.
Now I select Bibles from the list on the left, causing my list of installed Bibles to be displayed on the right. Again I choose None to deselect all Bibles, then find the Bible I want to read from and select its checkbox. I’ll be reading from the Christian Standard Bible this year, so I select that one.
Select the Bible from which you want to read and deselect all others.
At this point I can test my output by selecting View. I’ll get the scheduled readings for whatever day happened to be selected on the calendar. The output looks just as I would expect, but I’m not entirely happy with it. I’m going to make a few changes to enhance the appearance of the text.
Back on the Autostudy Today screen, I have an option to edit the “style sheet” for the Autostudy report. Don’t be embarrassed if this looks intimidating. Most people don’t know anything about editing Cascading Style Sheets. At the same time, don’t be afraid to try this at home. You can always reset it to defaults and start over if you mess something up.
The style sheet controls how every element of the Autostudy report is formatted. I want to make a number of changes to what my text looks like:
Change the color of the Bible reference headings above each passage, and put them on a line of their own above the text instead of inline with the text.
Add some additional leading between the lines of text.
Make adjustments to how poetry is displayed.
Suppress verse numbers in the Bible text.
To change the color of the Bible reference headings, I need to locate the line that looks like this:
This line controls the Bible reference headings. By default, the text in a div element appears on its own line. PocketBible overrides this behavior by including display:inline in the style definition for Bible references. So I want to delete display:inline and the semicolon that follows it. I also delete float:left and the semicolon that follows that.
I’m not fond of the light shade of blue that PocketBible uses for Bible reference headings, so I change color:00c to color:008. This is a slightly darker shade of blue. I could instead change it to color:000 (or remove the color:00c attribute entirely) to make it black.
Next, I want to add some additional space between the lines (sometimes referred to as line leading). This is done by editing the entry that looks like this:
p {margin:0px 0px 0.5em 0px}
CSS style sheets use the line-height attribute to control line leading. A value of 100% is supposed to be “normal height”, and back in 2003 when I wrote my own HTML rendering engine, I made it work that way. But because the programmers who created the Web are not as smart as I, you actually need to set it to about 120% to get natural spacing for most fonts. I want a little extra space, so I’m going to set it to 150% by changing this line to read as follows:
p {margin:0px 0px 0.5em 0px; line-height:150%}
The p element is used for normal paragraphs in the Bible text. We also have poetry sections, for which PocketBible (arguably incorrectly) uses the blockquote tag to create extra margin on the left and right. There is no style specified for the blockquote tag in the default Autostudy style sheet (don’t ask me why; I don’t have an answer), so we just add the following line anywhere in the style sheet. I added it below the line for the p element, above.
This tightens up the line spacing a little bit in the poetry sections, and indents it a little more than normal paragraphs (about the width of one character).
Finally, we want to suppress verse numbers in the text. I happen to know that PocketBible uses the sup and small tags to superscript the verse numbers. Adding the following line to the CSS file (I added it below blockquote) causes superscripted text to be ignored:
sup {display:none}
That’s it! Once I save my changes to the CSS I’m ready to view the output.
All I need to do each day is choose the Today Study button from the toolbar, then press View to view my text for the day. I like to choose Print, then PDF, then Open in Preview to get a full-screen, PDF view of the text to read.
When I’m done reading, I mark today’s reading as complete in each of the OT and NT devotional books in PocketBible.
Today Apple approved PocketBible 4.14.1 for distribution through the App Store. This version coincides with the release of iOS 14, and while it doesn’t necessarily take advantage of every new feature of this latest version of iOS, it should work better than the previous version did.
We’ll take what we’ve learned in the last 20 years about how you use our apps for Bible study, both on the desktop and on your mobile device, and apply it to a fresh, new user interface that draws from our iOS and macOS apps.
We don’t talk much about security issues at our website for obvious reasons – any information we provide could inform a hacker and provide them a shortcut to circumventing security on our site. We’ve recently made some changes that we want you to be aware of for a couple of reasons: First, the changes are comprehensive and as a result, could affect you in ways we haven’t anticipated. Second, we want to reassure you that your information is and always has been secure.
The changes we’ve made are fairly comprehensive and as a result it’s possible that you’ll have trouble signing into your account if you have inadvertently been taking advantage of a shortcoming in our previous account security methods.
