Just before the start of the new year, Accordance for iOS 1.6 went live in the app store. This new version features a host of interface improvements and feature enhancements. Be sure to check out Dr. J's excellent video introduction below, and if you haven't yet updated to this latest version of our mobile app, what are you waiting for?

Almost one year to the day we announced the long-awaited release of the Accordance iOS app. It is exciting to look back and see the progress we’ve made in that time thanks to a devoted development team, and the enthusiastic support and recommendations of our users. In that time we’ve had a significant number of downloads from users all over the globe. Thank you for making our app a success!

For me this excitement came to a peak with the recent release of version 1.4. With this release our app has moved beyond being a simple reader and is now capable of functioning as an independent Bible study tool with extremely fast performance and an equally impressive feature set. But, we’re not stopping there. We have aggressive development plans for 2012 and are dedicated to investing in this platform.

Although an app should never be measured by what’s planned, I can say that development for version 1.5 is underway and will bring with it a more polished reading experience.

For those that may have missed the version 1.4 announcement here’s a recap of the new features (which you can also find on our Help Page):

1. Selection in a Pane

Press and hold in a pane brings up a magnifier to enable precise selection of a word or reference. When released, it opens either an Actions menu or an expanded Instant Details popover with the actions at the bottom.

2. Actions Menu

Always offers Copy and Highlight, and where appropriate offers Search and Amplify. For Key number texts, Search and Amplify then offer Word or Key Number options, whereas in tagged original texts you can search or amplify the Inflected Form, Lemma, or Root.

Search opens the current main text or tool and finds the selected word.

Amplify opens the appropriate text or tool to the selected word or entry. A two finger swipe to the right returns to the previous view. The previous module can also be selected in the Library.

3. Instant Details

Now displays black text on a Newsprint background.

For Key Number words the parsing and gloss are displayed if a tagged original text is also installed. The definition of the related Key dictionary is displayed and can be scrolled.

For tagged original texts the Syntax is shown, if installed, and the full article from the top lexicon of the same language.

Tool hyperlinks display the linked content.

The Actions menu buttons appear at the bottom.

4. Library View

Now organized hierarchically by module type with the first section for Recent Modules.

Search at top level searches all the sections.

Editing the order of modules, or removing them, is done within each section.

New Notes files are now created from the User Notes popover.

5. Devotionals

Modules with readings for each day now appear as Devotionals as well as General tools.

When opened from their section they appear in a new view with a parallel pane displaying the Bible text.

6. Main Text and Tool Views Changes

Press and hold on the Search button opens the History menu. The first item in the History is the Read mode which clears the current search results.

Wider side margins.

Parallel pane chooser uses a segmented control to select the list of modules of the desired type.

Most internal and external hyperlinks now work when a Reference tool is displayed in a parallel pane.

7. History Menu

Opens with a long tap on the Search icon in the main view, or a short tap on the History button in the Search view.

As needed, shows Read, New Search, and a list of past searches in that module.

8. Verse Selection Actions Menu

Adds the Amplify button which opens the first Reference tool with an entry for that verse.

The User Note action offers the option of creating a new User Note file.

9. Grid Style Verse Chooser

Available in Settings as an alternative to the Wheel and the List.

10. Other

The contents of both Recent Modules and the History menu are saved between sessions.

Basics of Biblical Greek Grammar: 3rd Edition is supported including the audio links.

iOS 5 will no longer purge modules for lack of space. However, only user content (Notes, Tools and Highlights) is backed up in iTunes or iCloud.

Yesterday I saw someone post the following to Twitter (edited slightly to make it more coherent):

Wanna get a babe in church?! Go to service without a Bible but with an ipad2 & bible software installed on it!

Since I've been "off the market" for some time now, I can't personally vouch for the effectiveness of this strategy. Still, assuming this gentleman is on to something, I figured I'd pass it on to you single guys out there as yet another way Accordance can help.

When a girl approaches you to ask what you're doing with an iPad in church, open the Greek or Hebrew in a parallel pane and tell her you're checking the pastor's sermon for accuracy. She'll either think you're smart and spiritual or she'll think you're an arrogant know-it-all. If the latter, do a quick search for "Berea" and show her that the Bereans were commended because they "examined the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so" (Acts 17:11 HCSB). With Accordance on your iPad and a little quick thinking, you could end up looking like a great catch.

While I doubt we'll start a new marketing campaign around the promise that Accordance can help you "get a babe in church," you never know how you'll meet the love of your life. Who knows? Maybe Accordance on your iPad will help you catch her eye.

When we first developed the Bible Lands PhotoGuide, we envisioned it as a reference work and teaching tool. If Accordance users wanted to find out more about a site, they could look it up in the PhotoGuide and get an in depth description and photos with detailed captions. If they wanted to put together a slide presentation, they could do so simply by dragging the image thumbnails onto a Keynote drop-zone. With the advent of the iPad, we've discovered a new use for the PhotoGuide: as a tourist guidebook.

If you travel in Israel, Turkey, Egypt, Greece, or other Bible lands, you're likely to pick up a tourist guidebook of some kind. These books are usually a convenient size and offer listings of the sites tourists typically visit. They give information about the things worth seeing at each site, along with brief descriptions of hotels, restaurants, and other attractions. The better ones may include photographs and illustrations to help prepare you for what you'll be seeing.

I relied heavily on tourist guidebooks in preparing the PhotoGuide. They were able to give me insight into what I was seeing in modern photos of various sites, but they were not necessarily good at giving information that would help illustrate the Bible. For that I had to turn to historical atlases, Bible dictionaries, and the like. The result is that the PhotoGuide combines the best of both worlds. Like our human guide on this trip, who is able to explain the features of the land today, yet who is also a scholar with expertise in biblical geography, the PhotoGuide helps you see the living world of the Bible behind the ancient ruins which remain.

One reason tourist guidebooks only seem to give cursory information about the Biblical significance of each site is that they simply don't have the space for it. A guidebook has to cover hundreds of sites in a volume small enough to be carried with you, and it has to include information about hotels and amenities as well as historical information. There's simply no way they can do all those things well. The PhotoGuide, on the other hand, is not limited by the constraints of a print volume, and so is able to provide the depth those resources cannot. Of course, it's not very convenient to carry a laptop with you while hiking up Herodium, so its effectiveness as a guidebook while touring biblical sites has always been limited.

Now, however, you can load Accordance and the PhotoGuide on your iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad. Which means, of course, that you can carry all that information with you to each site you visit. Where a print guidebook might offer a diagram of the Herodium which shows you the location of the synagogue or the round eastern tower, with the PhotoGuide you can find a photo which matches your current vantage point and read about what you're actually seeing.

Whether or not you ever get to travel to Israel or other Bible lands in person, the PhotoGuide can really help you appreciate the historical and geographical setting of the Bible. If you do get the opportunity to tour these places, remember to load the PhotoGuide on an iPhone or iPad so you can use it as a tourist guidebook: a tourist guidebook on steroids!

By the way, the PhotoGuide is currently on sale, along with two other collections of Holy Land photos.

As I mentioned a little over a week ago, my wife and I are currently touring Israel with some other members of the Accordance team. I've already described how I created custom maps of each day's itinerary to help my kids follow along with where we'll be each day. The maps include representative images from each site, together with a list of Scripture references. I printed each of those maps out and taped them to a wall in our home.

As soon as I finished those maps, I realized I would like to have quick access to them myself. So in addition to printing them to paper, I also printed them as a PDF which I could read on my iPad using GoodReader. I also downloaded the PhotoGuide and most of the Carta books to the iPad so I could travel light with the very best geographical resources available.

With my iPad thus equipped, I can view each day's map while riding on the tour bus. If I want to read the Scripture references on the map, I can simply select and Copy from GoodReader, then switch to Accordance and paste the string of references into a search view. If I want to find out more about a site, I can look it up in the PhotoGuide or one of the Carta books. For example, I knew the ancient port of Acco was associated with Joan of Arc in some way, but I couldn't remember how. A quick lookup in the PhotoGuide reminded me that Crusaders renamed it Saint Jean d’Acre in honor of her, and the town was subsequently referred to as Acre.

As you can imagine, with Dr. J and other members of the Accordance staff on this tour, we're getting deeper into each site than I assume the average tour group does. Add to that the fact that our tour guide is a biblical scholar in his own right, and it's hard to keep up. With Accordance on my iPad, I'm managing to look a little more knowledgeable than I am! ;-)

A couple weeks ago, I began telling you about our iOS app by showing some of its powerful search capabilities. Today I want to show you how to get instant information about the words or links under your cursor . . . I mean, finger.

In the desktop version of Accordance, you can get instant information about certain items simply by dragging the mouse cursor over them. For example, you can drag the mouse over a word in an English Bible with Strong's numbers to see the Greek or Hebrew word it translates. That information appears in the Instant Details box. On an iOS device, there is no cursor to hover over an item and not enough screen real estate for a dedicated Instant Details box, so to get instant information about an item, you simply tap and hold with your finger. When you do, a translucent box will appear showing the information for the item you tapped. In the first screenshot below, you can see that I tapped the word "image" in the ESV to see its Strong's number and the Hebrew word it represents.

You can dismiss this box by tapping the close icon or by performing some other action, such as swiping to scroll. You can also tap and hold text inside the box to select and copy it. So for example, you could copy the Hebrew word ‏צלם and paste it into the search field for the Hebrew Bible (see the second screenshot above).

In the screenshot below, you see what you'd get if you were to do that search for צלם. In a grammatically-tagged Greek or Hebrew text, a tap and hold on a word will bring up the parsing information and English gloss.

Now let's say I want to look up צלם in a Hebrew lexicon, like HALOT. The initial release of the iOS app does not include amplifying from one resource to another, so if you want to look a word up in HALOT you'll need to open HALOT and search for it. But since I already copied צלם from the Instant details of the English word "image," all I have to do is open HALOT, click the Find button, and paste the word into the entry box.

In tools such as HALOT, you can tap and hold on hypertexted Scripture references to see those verses, like so:

In the desktop version of Accordance, there is a special kind of hypertext link which gives you an instant preview of what you would see if you were to click it. Things like abbreviations are linked back to an abbreviation list, and clicking an abbreviation will take you to that list. But you can also see what that abbreviation means simply by hovering your cursor over the link and looking in the Instant Details box. In the initial version of the iOS app, this instant preview is not supported, so tapping an abbreviation will simply take you to the appropriate entry in the abbreviation list, and you'll need to click a back arrow to get back to the article you were reading.

As you can see, Accordance for iOS does not give you all of the instant detail capabilities of the desktop version, but the things you most want instant information about—key numbers, Greek and Hebrew parsing, and Scripture links—can be viewed with a simple tap and hold.

Accordance for iOS became available through the app store last Thursday, and by now thousands of you have downloaded it and played with it. Reaction has been overwhelmingly positive, especially from previous Accordance users who can now take their Accordance libraries with them. A few people, however, have expressed disappointment that it's not yet everything they hoped it would be. Because we do our best to release software "when it's ready," and because we took what appeared to be a long time to release the app, I think some people expected the initial release of Accordance to be the Bible app to end all Bible apps.

The reality is, of course, that Accordance for iOS is a 1.0 release which has lots of potential, some features found nowhere else, and some areas where we have plenty of catching up to do. We need to add syncing with your desktop Accordance, offer more control over how content is displayed, give you better ways to multi-task, and, of course, we want you to be able to amplify from one resource to another as easily as you can in the desktop application. The good news is that much of the groundwork for those improvements has already been laid and we're working hard to deliver them as soon as we can. In the meantime, we hope you enjoy being able to take Accordance with you wherever you go.

In upcoming posts, I'll be showing you in detail some of what you can do with this initial release of Accordance for iOS.

At the risk of making your New Year's Eve countdown anticlimactic, the countdown to the release of Accordance for iOS is now over. Accordance for iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch became available for download in the iTunes app store yesterday afternoon. It's a free app, and once installed, you can use Easy Install to download almost all of your existing Accordance modules. The exceptions are those modules which are only available on disk and not currently downloadable. In a future update, we'll add the ability to sync with your desktop Accordance to get those modules as well, but we decided not to hold up the release of the app for a handful of modules.

Those who are new to Accordance can, of course, enjoy the app with a handful of free modules, including the English Standard Version courtesy of Crossway. This special iOS edition of the ESV includes Strong's numbers so anyone who uses our app will have access to the Greek and Hebrew behind a modern English Bible.

Those who create a free online account with Accordance will also be able to download additional free modules. And as previously mentioned, those of you who sign in with your existing Accordance account will be able to download any purchased modules available through Easy Install.

To learn the ins and outs of Accordance for iOS, you can check out these Help pages. There is also a new section of our forums dedicated to discussions of Accordance for iOS.

We're very excited to finally get this initial release into your hands, and we know that our work on this app is only just beginning. There are lots of important features to add and room for refinement, but we hope you'll find this initial foray into iOS well worth the wait.

Happy New Year!

Here at Accordance, we tend to be reticent about announcing new products until they're very nearly ready for release. The reason is simple: software development, like most creative enterprises, does not often lend itself to a clearly defined timetable. There are always unanticipated challenges and occasional design changes along the way, which means that any planned release date may need to be pushed back. We therefore try not to make promises we may not be able to keep.

I'm sure you iPhone and iPad users who were hoping for an Accordance app by Christmas already know where I'm going with this: we didn't quite make the "hopefully by Christmas" estimate we've been giving for the past couple months. I could give revised estimates at this point (New Year's? Epiphany? Elvis' Birthday?), but I think I'll just stick with my intentionally vague statement that "the release of Accordance for iOS should be just around the corner."

Rest assured that we'll be shouting the news from the rooftops the minute Accordance appears in the app store, and I'll be giving you more previews of the app later this week. In the meantime, if the cash you received for Christmas is burning a hole in your pocket, be sure to check out the newly released Archaeological Study Bible.

How do you take a full-featured, mature Mac program that has been in active development for nearly two decades and bring it to handheld devices like the iPhone and iPad? That's the question we've been wrestling with as we developed Accordance for iOS.

First, we realized there was no way we could do everything at once, so we had to decide which Accordance features were must-haves for the initial release. Second, we were determined to port and use as much of our existing Accordance code as possible. Third, we knew whatever features made it into the iOS app would have to be reimagined to accommodate a touch interface and a smaller screen. Nevertheless, we wanted the interface to feel like Accordance. In other words, we wanted it to be as consistent as possible with the interface philosophy behind Accordance for Mac.

Our original plan for the first release of our iOS app was relatively modest: it had to let you read your existing Accordance modules and support some basic searching and note-taking. During the course of development, however, we found that we were able to utilize far more of our existing code than we had originally hoped. Incorporating that code took time, but it meant that we were able to bring over Accordance features we never dreamed would make it into the initial release.

You'll see this most clearly in the search capabilities of Accordance for iOS. You can search using all of the wildcard symbols and any search commands which don't involve linking two separate windows. In other words, the LINK, CONTENTS, HITS, INFER, MERGE, and STYLE commands are not in the initial release of Accordance for iOS, but all of the other commands, including the powerful FUZZY and COUNT commands, are there. You can search key numbered Bibles by key number, and grammatically tagged texts by lexical form, inflected form, root, and grammatical tag. The following screenshot shows a search for all geminate verbs in Hebrew. The results are instantaneous on my iPhone.

Here is a search for all the hapax legomena (words appearing only once) in the Greek New Testament. This search actually takes about twenty seconds to complete on my iPhone, but then again, it's an iPhone!

Imagine sitting in a seminary class where the professor begins talking about hapax legomena. With a few taps you surreptitiously perform this search with your iPhone. By the time he's finished defining the term, you raise your hand and announce that there are 1942 such words in the Greek New Testament. From that moment on, you'll be a legend on your campus! ;-)

The ability to create complex searches via a simple interface is a hallmark of Accordance for the Mac, and you can expect the same thing from Accordance for iOS. In future posts, I'll tell you more of what you can expect from the Accordance app.