Working Without a Net

In 1988 we took our kids to Circus World in Baraboo, WI. We had the good fortune to see Enrico and Debbie Wallenda performing on the high wire. The crowd was small, so we had a chance to chat with them after the show.

I noticed that, while they performed without a safety net, they had laid out some tumbling mats under the wire, which was some 20-30 feet in the air. “Why bother with the mats?” I asked Debbie. “Our insurance company won’t let us perform without safety equipment,” she said.

2015-06-04 07.57.00Enrico and Debbie come from a family of circus performers that goes back to the 17th century. They grew up on the wire. They know what they’re doing. The safety net is unnecessary. It would just slow down their set-up and be one more thing they’d have to carry from show to show. And it would be an insult to them. Amateurs need and use safety nets. The Wallendas just don’t fall.

Well, they do, but no more than once each.

I’ve been programming since about 1974 and doing it professionally since 1982. I remember my ham radio buddies talking about these cool new things called “microprocessors” in 1972, and was actively programming for them through the entire history of the “personal computer revolution”. I wrote a machine language debugger for the Motorola 6502 just for fun back in the early 80’s. I was working with touch screens in 1982 while the company that would eventually put one on an iPhone was just beginning to experiment with mice and graphical user interfaces.  I wrote drivers that allowed CP/M systems to store data on “magnetic bubbles” that raced along a track driven by an electromagnet. I was writing code to calculate position using GPS when there were only about 8 GPS satellites in orbit and we had to calculate what ridiculous time of the morning we’d have to come in when we would be able to see the required minimum of three of them at the same time for testing our software.

Over the years I’ve programmed in assembly language, Pascal, PL/I, Modula 2, FORTRAN, COBOL, SNOBOL, LISP, BASIC, RATFOR, C, Forth, JOVIAL, Ada, C++, NewtonScript, PHP, Objective-C/C++, Perl, Java, JavaScript, C#, and VBScript. I’ve written a number of compilers and interpreters for lesser-known and proprietary languages. I’ve written programs for Atari, CP/M, MS-DOS, VMS, Windows (desktop and server), Mac OS and OS X, Newton OS, various flavors of Unix, Windows CE, Palm OS, Android, and iOS.

When I’m making updates to the scripts and pages on our Laridian website, I operate directly on the live server. From time to time that means if you happen to be on the page I’m on when I make a mistake, you’ll see an error message when you load the page. But that happens only rarely. When working on a critical part of e-commerce code, I might test on a private page before going public, but often that isn’t practical.

Running a beta testing program with outside testers, especially for a platform like iOS (which requires encrypting the app in a particular way that allows only selected devices to run the program), is difficult and time-consuming. So most of the updates I do for Mac and iOS programs are just tested by me before they are shipped. Often, I’m a better tester than real customers, because I know the scope of the changes I’ve made to the code, and I know where it is susceptible to error. For example, all the testing of synchronization of user data was done in-house. I was able to set up both common and unusual situations to verify how the system would handle the data without putting any real customer data at risk. When the time came to put that system online, it just went online without any beta testing.

So I sympathize with the Wallendas. That safety net takes a lot of time to set up. We know we’re not going to fall. And it takes away from the perception of professionalism — anybody can walk a tightrope when there is no harm in falling.

But when we fall, we fall hard.

Last weekend I shipped an update to PocketBible for iOS that was not tested by outside testers. The majority of the changes were to accommodate the larger screen of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. I have an iPhone 6, and I can emulate the 6 Plus in the development environment. Those changes were well-tested.

The other type of changes were related to what happens when you change the password on your Laridian account. Previous versions of the program assumed you were logging into a new account when you entered a different password, so they blocked you from sync’ing your notes, highlights, and bookmarks with the server (so as not to corrupt the “other” account’s existing data, nor corrupt the data on the device with data from the “other” user). Furthermore, they would delete all your books (assuming, again, that you are a different user with a different library of books). The new version of the program records the Laridian customer ID you’re using while sync’ing your database with the server, and only complains about your user data if, when changing your password, you log into a different customer account. Furthermore, it doesn’t delete your books. (I plan to handle that a different way in future releases.)

So while testing the screen-size changes on the iPhone 6, I also tested the new way of determining if you had logged into a different account. It worked great. What I didn’t count on was that Apple had completely changed the way certain user interface objects worked on the iPad sometime in the year since I had issued the last PocketBible revision. As a result, iPad users couldn’t update their data to support the new customer ID tracking method. My testing on the iPad consisted of bringing the program up and trying a few things to make sure it wasn’t completely broken. Since the bulk of my changes were related to laying out the user interface on the larger iPhones, my testing focussed on making sure I didn’t break any layout code on the iPad. I already knew the customer ID tracking worked from my tests on the iPhone.

I joked with one long-time PocketBible customer that I didn’t want to take time to do a beta because I knew he would find problems that I would have to fix. So I shipped version 3.2.0 without the benefit of his help.

Once Apple approved the new version and I installed it on my iPad and saw what was happening, I knew I was in trouble. I began thinking about how those tumbling mats were going to feel when struck from this height.

When Karl Wallenda fell to his death from 120 feet, the family went ahead with their show the following weekend. That’s what professionals do. In my case, I admitted to the mistake immediately, pulled the app from the App Store, posted prominent notices on our blog and on Facebook, and went to work to find the problem. By 2 AM I had the first round of fixes made to the code. After a short nap, I found and fixed the rest of the problems (which required examining about 300 places in the code) and was ready for beta testing by mid-afternoon. We went through three beta versions in 24 hours, and I didn’t upload the final build to Apple until I had a clean bill of health from the testers.

Apple cooperated by approving my request for expedited review, and accomplishing that review within an hour.

In the end I was able to stand up and walk off the mats under my own power. The fans were great; they encouraged me by applauding through the whole thing. I was concerned that some would want their money back, but I got not a single complaint.

While I probably won’t be shopping for a safety net, I may consider doubling the mats.

Advancing Technology by Lying to Developers

Mobile devices have been increasing in screen size, screen resolution, memory, and other capabilities on a continuous basis from the time I got my first Apple Newton MessagePad in 1993. Back then screens were about 336×240 pixels, and each pixel was either on or off — no color. There was a total of 4.625 MB (that’s MEGA bytes) of memory. My first Windows CE device was probably my HP 620 LX in 1998. It was a “clamshell” design with a 640×240 screen and 16 MB of memory.

The thing we knew intuitively from being involved in personal computing since there was such a thing as personal computing was that “change is the status quo”. Our programs never assumed how big the screen was, because we knew our program would need to run next week on a bigger screen, so we wrote our code so that it queried the operating system to ask how big the screen was before dynamically laying out its user interface to fill all available pixels. We never assumed that devices would always be monochromatic, so we wrote our compressed file format to accommodate “words of Christ in red” before they could even be displayed in anything but black on a greenish screen. And even though the entire Bible wouldn’t fit in memory of those first devices, we plowed ahead with the best compression we could manage and a user interface that supported displaying two Bibles simultaneously, knowing that very soon you’d be able to get not just one of our Bibles but two whole Bibles onto the device at the same time.

Fast forward to the iPhone in 2007. When you work for Apple you apparently get big-headed and begin to think you’re among the smartest programmers in the world. Nobody can match your brilliance. Each generation of device you work on is “magical”. It has capabilities and features that nobody could have imagined even six months ago. Features like a more memory and a bigger screen.

Since you couldn’t imagine those features last year, and since you’re God’s gift to technology, you’re positive that nobody else could have imagined those features. So what’s going to happen to all those apps written by people “too dumb to work at Apple” when your new device with a bigger screen comes out? Why, they’ll crash, of course.

Not PocketBible.

You only have to be in this business a week to realize that you can’t hard-code your program to assume a particular screen size. But Apple does this with every single device. Up until iOS 8, we had to prepare a “splash image” to display when the program launched in every possible size and resolution. Currently, that means we have to create launch images in 13 different sizes, one for each iPhone screen size that has ever been shipped, in both portrait and landscape orientation.

Current iOS launch image requirements

Current iOS launch image requirements


If instead they allowed us to manipulate a single image at run-time, we could do all of these with one PNG. But they require us to know every size of every screen we might ever run on (by the way, the image above omits devices prior to the iPhone 4, which would add another half-dozen sizes if they hadn’t already been abandoned by Apple).

This isn’t about managing lots of images. It’s about a philosophy that can’t think past yesterday.

Because of this philosophy, when a bigger screen comes out, Apple either “letterboxes” old apps (putting black bars in the empty space that the program couldn’t possibly imagine would ever be there) or scales them (allowing them to believe the screen is no bigger than last year’s device, then scaling up everything they draw to fill the bigger screen). They believe they are saving developers from having to re-release their apps every time a new device comes out. But in reality, they are requiring every developer to re-release their app to jump through whatever hoop is required to get Apple to stop letterboxing or scaling their apps.

iPhone 6 scaling

Pre-iPhone 6 version of PocketBible on the left gets scaled up. Adding a “launch screen” (which is unrelated to drawing text) tells iOS not to lie to us about the screen size, producing the sharper image on the left with absolutely no changes to PocketBible code!


With iOS 7, there was a special checkbox we had to check to tell the OS that we understood their new semi-transparent user interface elements. With iOS 8, in order to convince iOS not to scale your app (producing blurry text), you have to provide a special, scalable launch image that works on any screen size. (Gee whiz, 2015 and we’re finally recognizing that screens might get bigger in the future! Thanks, Apple!) Until you do that (which requires re-releasing your app), iOS will lie to you about the size of the screen then scale your user interface up to the bigger physical size of the screen, producing blurry text.

Oh, and you still have to provide those 13 launch images for older devices.

The result of this policy of “technical advancement by lying to developers” is that instead of one guy at Apple having to write zero lines of new code, hundreds of thousands of developers have to update and re-release their apps. There would not have been a personal computing revolution in the 80’s and 90’s if Microsoft would have taken this approach. Back then, Microsoft would collect commercial software products and use them for regression testing of new versions of DOS and Windows. After all, you wouldn’t want to do something stupid and break every single app the way Apple does with every release of the iPhone.

This industry used to be exciting. I was like a kid in a candy shop. Technology was changing and we were riding the “bleeding edge”. Now I feel like the only grown up in the room. I want to slap some of these Apple and Google kids around and tell them to shape up.

Why I Don’t Care About Swift

Swift is a new programming language created by Apple for use on OS X and iOS devices. The programming world is agog. Apple’s fantastic new language apparently solves all their problems, as evidenced, they say, by the fact that some programmer ported Flappy Birds to it in a few hours.

I’ve been around long enough to see languages come and go. Each claimed to solve all the problems introduced by its predecessors, yet each was replaced by a language that solved all its problems. In some cases, the new language surpassed the success of the language it replaced (C++ and Java); in other cases, the new language faded into obscurity (Modula-2 and Ada).

Lately the motivations for new languages have been dubious. There is a big emphasis on making a language easy to learn and having it hide nasty issues related to memory management and type safety. One review of Swift I read stated, “Apple hopes to make the language more approachable, and hence encourage a new group of self-taught programmers”. While that sounds great, it means that those of us who have mastered our craft after 30 years or more of practice are saddled with the training wheels and water wings that are written into these languages for the noobs.

A classic example is the lack of unsigned integers in Java. The motivation for this was to simplify the language for “new and self-taught programmers” by avoiding errors caused by a lack of understanding of sign-extension. However, for those of us who showed up for class the day that sign extension was taught (that would be day two), we’re left with a language that unnecessarily limits the range of positive integers and requires us to actually have mastered sign extension in order to understand what is happening when we directly manipulate the bits in our integer variables.

Explicit vs. Implicit Typing

One of the simplifications Swift makes is that it infers the types of variables from the values assigned to them rather than requiring the programmer to explicitly type variables. If this was true “weak typing” like I’m familiar with in VBScript, it would be great (though it would come with its own set of problems). But all Swift does is infer the type of the variable from the first value you assign to it.

This actually introduces problems, because it’s not always possible to unequivocally determine the type of a literal value. So Swift gives you ways to force it to interpret a literal value as a given type. Rather than removing the necessity of the programmer understanding types, Swift thus requires “new and self-taught” programmers to have a mastery of types so that they can understand how Swift is working behind the scenes and make sure that their variables have the desired type.

Strings

Swift is said to improve string-handling over Objective-C (the current language used on OS X and iOS). There is certainly room for improvement there. When I first started programming in Objective-C, one of the first things I did was bring over my own C++ string class, as I found NSString to be overly complicated and muddled. Over the years I’ve gotten better with NSString.

I would argue, however, that some of the so-called “improvements” in Swift with respect to strings are differences without a distinction. So instead of this in Objective-C:

[NSString stringWithFormat:@"The value of num is %d", num]

you say this in Swift:

"The value of num is \(num)"

The Swift version is obviously more concise, but it is also less powerful. To add more complex format specifications to Swift you actually have to invoke the functionality of the underlying NSString class, which means the “new and self-taught” programmer, again, needs to understand the details of the implementation in order to do anything beyond the simplest strings.

One of the stated benefits of string handling in Swift is that “all strings are mutable”. One need not worry about whether the string is declared as an NSString (immutable) or NSMutableString (mutable). Well, you don’t have to worry unless you do have to worry — strings assigned to constants are immutable in Swift. So:

var myString1 = "Mutable string"
let myString2 = "Immutable string"
myString1 += myString2    // perfectly legal
myString2 += myString1    // compile-time error

Switch Statements

Swift eliminates the “fall-through” behavior of switch statements, which is said to eliminate bugs caused by omitting the break at the end of each case block. But, oops, sometimes the fall-through behavior is exactly what you want. So Swift adds the fallthrough keyword. It could be argued that Swift eliminates a line of code (the break) while giving the behavior one normally desires. But at the same time, it adds a keyword (fallthrough) that does the opposite. This requires “new and self-taught” programmers to have the same thorough understanding of switch behavior that Objective-C and C++ programmers do.

Single-line Blocks

The Swift compiler will warn you if you omit the braces in any block (such as after an if) and does not allow single-line blocks, thus avoiding this error:

if (x < 0)
    goto fail;
    goto fail;

The code above will always execute one or the other of the goto statements in Objective-C or C++. Even though the second goto is indented, it is not part of the if-block and will be executed if the condition is false.

Swift will warn you about the missing braces and force you to write this:

if (x < 0)
    {
    goto fail;
    }
goto fail;

Or, for those of you who don’t do your braces the right way, this…

if (x < 0) {
   goto fail;
}
goto fail;

This is fine, and hard to argue with. The supposition is that the programmer will immediately recognize the flaw or won’t make the mistake in the first place. On the other hand, I would argue that the same C++ programmer who wrote the erroneous code will write this in Swift:

if (x < 0) {
    goto fail; }
    goto fail;

I always put braces around my blocks, even if they are one-line, so this doesn’t affect me. It’s ironic, however, that while Swift prides itself in eliminating the unnecessary break statement at the end of a case block, it requires two to four additional lines (braces) in if, for, and while statements, which are more numerous.

PocketBible and Swift

I will be more than happy to learn and use Swift for programming on iOS and OS X. I just don’t believe the hype and won’t convert just for the sake of doing something new.

I am a strong proponent of platform-independent languages like C, C++, Java, and, to a lesser extent, Objective-C (the latter is primarily an Apple language, though it has its origins outside of Apple). Such languages allow me to develop code on one platform and re-use it on another. One of the promises of C++ and Java was that you could develop the code for one platform and use it on many others. Swift is an Apple language (the same way C# is a Microsoft language). It only works on Apple devices. While those are numerous, they’re not the only devices out there. So rather than moving toward the “write once, read everywhere” model promised by Java, we’re back to “write everywhere” as each platform requires its own language.

I don’t mind learning a new language. I already jump from C++ to C# to Java to VBScript to Javascript to MS-SQL on a daily basis. For those of us who write code for a living, being multilingual is a job requirement. This is precisely why I care so very little about the supposed advantages of Swift; this isn’t a religious war for me, it’s just a tool. When someone comes out with a new kind of screwdriver, I may or may not buy it until I need it. And then I’ll just buy one and use it — I won’t try to convert all my screwdriver-toting friends.

So will PocketBible for OS X and/or iOS be re-written in Swift? Probably not today, and probably not until Apple requires it. But Swift depends on Objective-C under the hood, so my guess is that Apple will continue to support Objective-C apps for a long time.

Symbolicating iOS and OS X Apps

Many of the errors that happen in Mac OS X and iOS apps don’t actually crash the app, they just dump a stack trace to the console. You can view these using the Console app — select the System Log and you’ll see all the messages the app sends to the console.

Unfortunately, these stack dumps can’t be directly used by the programmer to find the bug. With a little work, however, it’s possible to get right down to the line of code that caused the problem.

A stack trace will look like this:

Sep 13 19:04:32 Users-Mac.local PocketBible[727]: *** -[__NSCFString rangeOfString:options:range:locale:]: Range {3040, 18446744073709551600} out of bounds; string length 3504
Sep 13 19:04:32 Users-iMac.local PocketBible[727]: (
		0   CoreFoundation                      0x00007fff910e225c __exceptionPreprocess + 172
		1   libobjc.A.dylib                     0x00007fff96598e75 objc_exception_throw + 43
		2   CoreFoundation                      0x00007fff910e210c +[NSException raise:format:] + 204
		3   Foundation                          0x00007fff94074985 -[NSString rangeOfString:options:range:locale:] + 186
		4   Foundation                          0x00007fff940945b4 -[NSString rangeOfString:options:range:] + 29
		5   PocketBible                         0x00000001077cec78 PocketBible + 797816
		6   PocketBible                         0x000000010776c771 PocketBible + 395121
		7   PocketBible                         0x000000010776aa43 PocketBible + 387651
		8   AppKit                              0x00007fff92c84c38 -[NSTabView selectTabViewItem:] + 389
		9   AppKit                              0x00007fff92ff8b09 -[NSTabView mouseDown:] + 145
		10  AppKit                              0x00007fff92b76a58 -[NSWindow sendEvent:] + 11296
		11  AppKit                              0x00007fff92b155d4 -[NSApplication sendEvent:] + 2021
		12  AppKit                              0x00007fff929659f9 -[NSApplication run] + 646
		13  AppKit                              0x00007fff92950783 NSApplicationMain + 940
		14  PocketBible                         0x000000010770d244 PocketBible + 4676
		15  ???                                 0x0000000000000001 0x0 + 1
	)

The trick, of course, is to find the last bit of PocketBible code that was running when the error occurred. To do this, we need our symbol map. Fortunately, XCode archives that with our program and we can access those archives through the Organizer. So here’s what we need to do:

  1. Create a working folder somewhere
  2. Go into the Archive area of Organizer and select the archived version of the program from which the stack trace was created
  3. Right-click and select Show In Finder
  4. Right-click on the archive and select Show Package Contents
  5. Copy the .dSYM file from the dSYMs folder into the working folder
  6. Copy the application from Products/Applications into the working folder
  7. In Terminal, go to the working folder

Now enter this command:

atos -o PocketBible.app/Contents/MacOS/PocketBible -arch x86_64 -l [load address] [target address]

To calculate [load addresses], subtract the offset you see on any PocketBible line from the address to its left. So looking at line 5, you would subtract 797816 (decimal) from 0x1077cec78 (hex) and get 0x10770c000. [target_address] is the address you see in the stack trace for the line you’re interested in (for example, 0x1077cec78 for line 5).

If you do it right, atos will tell you the object and method, plus the file and line number in the file corresponding to the line in the stack trace:

got symbolicator for PocketBible.app/Contents/MacOS/PocketBible, base address 100000000
-[NSString(HTMLTags) rangeOfHtmlTagInRange:] (in PocketBible) (NSString+HTMLTags.m:67)

Which sends us to NSString+HTMLTags.m, line 67.

If you want to enter several addresses, press enter after [load address]. You are then in “interactive mode” and can enter addresses and get results without leaving atos or re-entering all the other parameters. Press ^C to exit this mode.

Why iOS 7 is Objectively Bad

A discussion on Facebook with an Apple employee resulted in some comments that I thought would be better presented here. The response to my general complaint about iOS 7 was that it was new, and with anything new it just takes time to learn the differences. I disagree. iOS 7 is demonstrably and objectively wrong. Here are just a few observations.

My problem with iOS 7 isn’t “how do I remove an app from memory?” or “how do I do a search?”, but rather with the overall appearance (and therefore usability).

  1. There is less difference between the container and the content. Look at the Contacts app, where the screen is all white except for small blue labels and small black values. I just tapped a blue label (“home”) to change my daughter’s home phone number and it called her instead. It’s hard to tell whether something is touchable or editable. And what is editable (the captions in this case are, in fact, changeable) and what is fixed (like the navigation bar text at the top of the screen).
  2. There is inconsistent use of color. The Contacts app uses a blue “tint color” (which is what the SDK calls the color that is used for buttons, captions, etc. throughout an app). The Calendar app uses orange. The Notes app uses yellow except (and this is true of all apps) when a system-defined UI element pops up (like the confirmation dialog you get when you select the trash can), in which case you get blue as the accent color (except for the Delete Note button, which uses red, even though the trash can itself was yellow).

    What the system seems to be communicating is that color is irrelevant and that I shouldn’t count on color to tell me anything. But at the same time, red is consistently used for “danger” — like delete confirmations. And blue is always used for alert boxes. And the tap-and-hold menu is always white text on black (even if the text itself that you’re selecting is white on black, making the menu impossible to see). So is color important or not? iOS 7 would say “no” out of one side of its mouth and “yes” out of the other.

  3. Fonts and icons are thin, making them blend into the background. Fonts are sans serif, making them harder to read.
  4. There is a lot of gray-on-gray and white-on-white. Low contrast is hard to see. In an effort to de-accent the container and focus on the content, we’ve made the control elements (buttons and captions) harder to see and read.

There are not “how do I do this in iOS 7” observations. These are objective criticisms of the design of the user interface. I don’t need instructions on how to read a sans serif font or how to see low contrast text on a similarly colored background. You can’t educate your users past the unarguable flaws in the design of the operating system.

Ironically, it’s not “ugly”. It looks very clean. But even though white road signs with white lettering would look “clean”, we make road signs with high-contrast white-on-blue or black-on-yellow to make them easy to read. iOS 7 fails the readability and therefore usability test.

How NOT to Stream Live Video from your iPhone

Today I thought it would be cool to stream video of my run to the Internet. I was sure there was an app out there that would do it, and sure enough there is: UStream.

I installed the app and went through the process to set up an account. At the end of entering my data, it said there was already an account for my email address. That was weird; I had never downloaded this app before. I suppose it’s possible I’ve tried installing this program in the past, so I figured I’d ask it to send my password to me and I’d log in to this mysterious, already-existing account.

When I clicked the “forgot my password” link, it asked for my account ID, not my email address. I entered the most likely account ID I may have used in the past, and it told me there was no account for that ID. So I entered a second account ID I sometimes use and sure enough, it said it was sending password reset instructions to me by email.

I waited and waited for an email but it never arrived. So somewhere out there, the person with the account ID “craigr” got a mysterious email asking him to reset his password.

In the meantime I decided to log in with a different email address and was able to set up a new account. I proceeded to the next step, which was to connect my account to Facebook so it could notify my friends when I was broadcasting live video. I got the familiar “connect to Facebook” dialog and entered my Facebook login credentials. Facebook asked for my permission to share all my personal data with UStream, and I agreed. This led to a screen that said, simply, “Success”. There was one and only one button for me to push. It said “Cancel”. I waited and waited but nothing happened. I finally decided to push the Cancel button, and sure enough, it canceled my login.

After trying a couple more times I decided to do an end-run around this stupid process. I went to my iPad and logged into their website using my newly established account. Going into my settings page on the website, I enabled the option to connect to Facebook. Facebook seemed to remember I had given it permission to interact with UStream, so that all went well.

Returning to the iPhone, I exited the application and re-launched it. I tried connecting to Facebook but with no luck. The program simply doesn’t work.

I still think it would be cool to broadcast live during my run and somehow interact with people. UStream is definitely NOT the way to do it.

PocketBible 2 for iOS

We’re just about to release an update to PocketBible for the iPhone/iPad. This version adds some often-requested enhancements and some new features that you probably didn’t even know you needed.

First, we’ve added the ability to select any text and copy it to the clipboard (what the iPhone calls the “pasteboard”). You’d think this would’ve been a standard feature of the program from a long time ago, but since we wrote our own HTML rendering code, it all had to be implemented by hand — including the cool magnifying glass that shows you what you’re touching as you select text and the lollipop-shaped “drag handles” that let you expand the selection.

Next, the multi-paned user interface was enhanced to allow you to represent each pane as a tab. This lets you easily jump from a Bible to a commentary and back by just selecting a tab. This feature was further augmented with the ability to open all your books in one operation. Your books will open in five tabs/panes labelled “Bibles”, “Commentaries”, “Dictionaries”, “Devotionals”, and “Other”. If you don’t have any books in a particular category, that tab/pane is not shown.

For those who take notes in the expanded toolbox, you’ve been frustrated by the fact that expanding the toolbox covers any open books beneath it. As a result it can be hard to both follow the Bible text and take notes (or preach from your notes). We’ve modified the behavior of the toolbox so that it switches you into tabbed mode if you’re not already there, then moves the current book out of the way of the toolbox. Now your Bible can be displayed in a narrow column above, below, or to either side of your notes. Very nice.

Two major new features are introduced in version 2. First is what we call “Autostudy”. By simply selecting a verse (or a word), you can quickly get a report showing everything your library has to say about that verse/word. While Autostudying a verse, you’ll see that verse in all your selected Bibles, the verse with Strong’s numbers if you have one of our Bibles that contains Strong’s numbers, definitions of every word in the verse from your selected dictionaries, definitions of all the Strong’s numbers in the verse from your selected Strong’s dictionaries, and all the cross-references for the verse from the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge. You can select which books and Bibles are used by this feature and in what order the material appears.

When Autostudying a word, you’ll see how many times it occurs in each of your Bibles, what Greek or Hebrew Strong’s words are translated to that word, and the definition of those Strong’s words and the selected word from your dictionaries.

Autostudy reports can be browsed in PocketBible, saved to PocketBible’s public folder (and from there transferred to your desktop computer through iTunes), copied to the clipboard, or printed to an AirPrint-compatible printer.

Finally, PocketBible now has the ability to speak any Bible or reference book you own. Simply purchase a voice (eight voices in two languages are available) using In-App Purchasing in PocketBible or at our website, then select the text you want to read. You control the volume and can even have PocketBible read while your iPod music plays in the background. You can set PocketBible to start reading at a particular verse and just keep going until you tell it to stop, or give it a specific passage to read.

The basic PocketBible program with the same features as the current version (1.4.7) will be free. The advanced features described above will be available for a nominal fee, either as an In-App Purchase or at a lower price at our website.