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Original Crowd-Source Funding Campaign for PocketBible 3 for Windows

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.
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Here We Go Again: Are Gay Satanists Rewriting the Bible?

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.

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Americans Lack Basic Understanding of the God of the Bible

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.

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To What Are You Blind?

Photo by Josh Calabrese on Unsplash

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?

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Laridian Account Security Updates

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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:

  1. Passwords are now case sensitive. If your password is PASSword, then you must enter PASSword or you don’t get in.
  2. 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.
  3. 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].

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Make Your Daily Bible Reading More Pleasant with “Autostudy Today”

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.

Take a look at the output so far: Autostudy January 1, 2019

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:

div.bibleref {margin:0px 1em 0px 0px; padding:0; display:inline; float:left; color:#00c; font-weight:bold; font-size:100%;}

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.

blockquote {margin:0.5em 1em 1em 2em; line-height:120%}

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.

Take a look at the final output: Autostudy January 1, 2019 – Formatted

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.

 

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What Americans Believe

Every other year, Ligonier Ministries conduct The State of Theology survey. In it, they question Americans about their religious beliefs. As you might expect, the results are generally disappointing.

While it’s easy to blame one’s neighbor for believing that humans are basically good, or blame the person sitting next to you at church for believing that religious belief is not about Truth but about personal opinion, the fact of the matter is that they’re often not getting good teaching.

I’ve spent the last 30 years helping pastors, teachers, and everyday Christians have everything they need to understand and apply what they read in the Bible. Whether it was QuickVerse for MS-DOS in 1988, PalmBible for Windows CE in 1998, or PocketBible for iOS and Mac OS in 2018, the goal has always been to put the tools in peoples’ hands to help them discover what the Bible has to say and to teach others what they’ve learned.

While the general philosophy of those around us drifts farther and farther from Truth, it’s important that we stay firmly grounded and that we share that Truth with others.

Read the complete survey results here. Read about our new Pastors and Teachers Library here.

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When the Bible Becomes an App

You would think by 2018 we would be well beyond 20th-century thinking about the relative merits of printed vs. digital Bibles. But apparently not. Recently, a PocketBible user sent me this link and suggested I send the author a copy of our PocketBible app.

The author (Trevin Wax, Bible and Reference Publisher at Lifeway Christian Resources) argues that the form in which we experience the Bible (print vs. digital) matters. How the words of Scripture are presented to us says something (or many things) about those words. The question Wax asks is, does a particular format (in this case, print or digital) take away from our experience of reading, comprehending, and internalizing the message of the text?

The conclusion Wax comes to is that one should continue to read and study their printed Bible because what is lost when going from print to screen is simply too great. I want to address those alleged losses from the perspective of one who doesn’t have the author’s vested interest in print publishing and who has been carrying a digital Bible in one form or another for over thirty years and has been exclusively digital for almost as long.

Wax states that a leather-bound Bible with gilded edges and single-column layout “says something about the value” of the words it contains. But remember that the words of the Bible were originally written by hand on common paper or animal skin. The words themselves carried the value, not the medium. It could thus be argued that wrapping the words of Scripture with fancy covers and printing them on expensive paper with handcrafted fonts and gilded edges takes away from the value of the words themselves and places the emphasis on the physical presentation of those words.

The very argument that “presentation matters” makes the case that the form in which the Bible is published adds to the words of Scripture. I’ve long argued that the benefit of an electronic presentation of the Bible is that it removes the text from its fancy wrapper and places it in a position of prominence. A couple years ago I acquired a KJV Bible from about 1908 that was literally falling apart in my hands. There was nothing special about this Bible except that it was the first “red letter” edition of the Bible. After a couple months of sweeping up the crumbs it left behind wherever I placed it, I sent it off to be rebound. I was stunned by the results. Even though I no longer read or study from the KJV as I once did, I wanted to carry this luscious Bible everywhere. I had developed an emotional attachment to the look and feel of this Bible that overwhelmed the fact that the archaic language of the KJV doesn’t speak to me as clearly as some of the newer translations do.

Even binding the books of the Bible together adds meaning and makes implications that some Christians have difficulty overcoming. While I believe the Scriptures were “God-breathed”, it’s a fact that the Bible wasn’t written by one person at one time. It was written by over 40 people over a period of some 4000 years. The copies of those documents that we have were transmitted and copied by hand over centuries. It has only been in very recent history that Christians have had a “Bible” that collects all these works into one convenient binding.

The implications of presenting the sixty-six books of the Bible as one continuous book can include the idea that the worldview, culture, and understanding of God experienced by a person reading an original autograph of the book of Job (considered to be the earliest-written book of the Bible) would be the same as or similar to that of one reading an original account of John’s vision on Patmos as recorded in Revelation (probably the latest-written book of the Bible). We’ve all heard Christians refer to “how they did things in Bible times” – as if the customs of antediluvian nomadic hunter-gatherers were “basically the same” as those of a freed Roman slave living in Corinth when Paul wrote his epistles to the believers in that city. It could be argued that this misunderstanding is exacerbated by our practice of collecting the biblical books of history, law, prophets, poetry, gospels, and epistles all into one book.

But even this “benefit” – that is, that printed Bibles bind the disparate books of the Bible together, presenting a message of unity of message, thought, and ultimate authorship – is not a unique property of printed Bibles. Digital Bibles “bind” the same content together in the same way; they just present it differently.

The author cites research that indicates that screens are best for “surface reading” and that books are best for “deep and meditative reading”. I’ve seen those studies. They conclude that reading comprehension is higher when reading books vs. reading text on a screen. But it isn’t clear whether the medium itself is the cause of this difference. Other studies indicated that reading paginated text results in better comprehension than reading scrolling text. For years, our PocketBible app for iPhone presented the Bible in a paginated format for exactly this reason. While many PocketBible users appreciated this format, most objected to it, as it was so different from their customary experience with interacting with text on their device. We could have continued to ignore their pleas for change – arguing that it is for their own good – but in late 2017 we relented and now present text with both scrolling and paginated interfaces.

The point is that the medium (print vs. digital) may not be the cause of the difference in reading comprehension, but rather the way that text is presented in that medium (paginated vs. scrolling). Interestingly, while it’s difficult to change the way text is presented in a printed book, it’s easy to do it with a digital book. In PocketBible, the user can simply choose to interact differently with the text to regain the benefit of pagination vs. scrolling.

Wax further states that when the Bible is presented digitally, we lose the “geography” of the text – just as we do when using GPS to navigate in an unfamiliar city as compared to using printed maps and our own innate sense of location and direction. Digital Bible readers can simply type “John 3:16” to get to that verse; they don’t have to have a concept of where the Gospel of John lies physically within the text. They may lose the idea that the book of Psalms, which, according to its order, lies right in the middle of the Old Testament, actually lies right in the middle of the entire Bible. They may not realize that the “second half” of the Bible – the New Testament – isn’t “half” the Bible at all — it’s more like one-fourth or even one-fifth of it.

But I would argue that this sense of geography is only “important” because printed Bibles are so difficult to navigate. Small books like Obadiah and Jude are invisible in printed Bibles unless you have a really good idea where to begin looking. But they are just as “big” and “visible” in an electronic Bible as Jonah and Revelation, their larger and more familiar neighbors. In other words, the idea that the geography of the Bible is important is only true if knowledge of that geography is important to accessing the text, which is the important part.

Wax goes on to make a bizarre claim – that we more easily submit to the text when we read it in print than when we read it on the screen, because we have less control over print and are forced to “become more attuned to the complexities of family life, the vicissitudes of social institutions, and the lasting truths of human nature” when reading words on a printed page. This claim is questionable if not outright false just on its face. But if “complexities, vicissitudes, and truths” are what is important, it can be argued that an electronic Bible is better able to convey them because of the depth of resources it places at one’s fingertips.

On a recent Sunday, I was listening to a sermon on 1 Peter 2:1-3. Verse 1 tells us to “put aside all slander” (NASB). Having myself been falsely accused of slander (by a sociopath as part of her request for a restraining order against me – but that’s another story), I’m very familiar with the nuances of the term. I was intrigued by the fact that other translations of the same verse used “evil speaking” instead of the very specific term “slander”. I noticed this because my digital Bible, unlike my printed Bible, allows me to simultaneously view multiple English translations, multiple Greek New Testaments, and multiple Greek dictionaries.

The word used in 1 Peter 2:1 is καταλαλιας, which literally means “to speak against”. This includes more types of speech than simply slander (making statements about a person that are provably false), including gossip (which is often true statements being told out of context). The proscription of καταλαλιας includes more than slander, a fact I may not have realized if I did not have access to Bibles other than the one most people in my church carry on Sunday.

Wax concludes with an admonition against relying solely on digital Bibles and an encouragement to depend primarily on a printed Bible so as not to lose the benefits of reading the Bible the way God intended it. I believe I’ve shown that the perceived detriments of reading a digital Bible are not negatives as much as they are simply differences between reading words from a screen vs. reading words from a page, and that in some cases, the same positive (or negative) characteristics apply to both screens and pages.

Since we’re making arguable arguments, I’ll make this one. Do a study sometime on occurrences of the phrase “the word of God” or “the word of the Lord” and similar phrases throughout the Bible. (Needless to say, this is easier with a digital Bible.) You will find that the word of God is “received”, “heard”, “given”, and “spoken” but not “written” or “read”. This is not to say that written words are not the Word of God, but rather than there is more to the “word” than its form on a page. The Word of God is the message itself, as communicated to humans by God. It is not constrained to shapes made with ink on pages made of dead trees. It is God’s Word that is “sharper than any two-edged sword”, not your leather-bound Christian Standard Bible. The pages of your printed Bible do not convict of sin or judge the thoughts or intents of your heart, but the Word of God does.

The point is that God’s Word transcends medium, language, and typographical style. The Law was no less authoritative because it was printed on stone instead of paper. Paul’s letters convict believers of sin whether they were the original autographs written on papyrus or parchment, or a modern translation printed on paper or illuminated on a screen. The Spirit of God conveys the Word of God to people through their hearts and minds. Always has. Always will.

Photo byAaron Burden

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Shhh! The Blog is Sleeping

We don’t really make use of this blog anymore. There are a few articles here for historical reference but that’s about it. Comments are disabled and/or ignored.

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King James Version: Red Letters and Paragraphs

Title_PageBack in October, 2014 we updated our King James Version text. We had taken some criticism for publishing a low-quality edition of the text which couldn’t seem to be traced back to any known edition of the KJV.

Red Letters

When we published that version, we intentionally left out the “words of Christ in red” feature, because the whole goal was to get to a pedigreed version of the text and red letters were not a part of the KJV text until relatively recently.

This didn’t go over well with folks who rely on red ink to know when Jesus is speaking. So we did more research to see if we could come up with an “authoritative” red-letter edition of the KJV on which to base our editorial decisions. To our surprise, we found one.

In 1899, Louis Klopsch (1852-1910), editor of The Christian Herald, was writing an editorial for his magazine when he read Luke 22:20: “This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you.” It struck him that a New Testament with Christ’s words written in “blood” would be both useful and highly symbolic. He approached his mentor, Rev. T DeWitt Talmage with the idea, and the men agreed, “It could do no harm and it most certainly could do much good.”

Klopsch Red Letter BibleRight away they discovered that the KJV contains no quotation marks to delineate those words spoken by Jesus and separate them from those of the narrator or other characters in the story. It also occurred to them that there are instances in the Old Testament where it is believed that Jesus appeared to the Old Testament saints and spoke to them. Should those words be in red? What about the words of Jesus when spoken by others in the book of Acts or the epistles?

Klopsch had to make a few choices (such as in John 3:16ff) about where Jesus’ words end and the narrator’s begin. He opted to omit Old Testament christophanies, but to include New Testament quotes in red. The first red-letter New Testament was published in 1899, and an entire Bible, containing the red-letter New Testament, was published in 1901.

Laridian was able to obtain a 1903 New Testament and a 1913 whole Bible, each with Klopsch’s original red-letter text. The New Testament claims an 1899 copyright and the whole Bible, 1901. From these well-used pages we manually marked up our electronic text to indicate the words of Christ.

Paragraphs

Soon after publishing our updated KJV last year we realized that the text we had worked from did not contain paragraph indicators of any kind. With a little effort we were able to find a source of that information that is consistent with the age and quality of the text itself, and have integrated that information into our text.

The King James Version has historically been printed with each verse starting on a new line, and a pilcrow (¶) marking the start of a new paragraph. We have followed that tradition, which means that in versions of PocketBible that allow you to display the text in paragraph form or one verse per line, you will always see the KJV text presented with each verse starting on a new line.

While some might argue that this format is jarring to the modern reader, we would point out that that KJV itself is “jarring” to the modern reader. We think there is great value in upholding the publishing traditions that add to the unique character of the King James Version of the Bible, and are very happy with the results of this effort to update our version of the text.

Most PocketBible users will see a note on the “Add/Remove Books”, “Cloud Library”, or “Download Books” screen in PocketBible to the effect that the KJV and KJV with Strong’s Numbers texts have been updated. Select the updated product to download it to PocketBible. Windows Desktop users will have to download the setup program for the KJV or KJVEC from the Downloads area of our website.