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Rod Decker

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Thanks for this new release. The appearance is much better. It still won't be called "pretty"--but it's better and more functional. (Delaying "pretty" is fine with me until you've added more functionality.) Here are a few observations from my initial use (which obviously isn't very long since it was just released overnight). All these based on iPad, BTW. (I opened it on my iPhone to make sure it loaded OK, but haven't tried using it there yet.)

 

(Despite my giving a list of 11 things to fix, don't think your work isn't appreciated! Thanks for the improvements already made. I'm looking forward to v. 1.3.1 --- and even more to 1.4. :) )

 

1. What is the official purpose of the book icon in top left? I can tell that at least one thing it does is hide the search bar--but it doesn't toggle, so you can't get the search bar back after it's hidden. Why would you use a book icon to indicate hiding a search bar?! At the least, this isn't intuitive. I must be missing something here...

 

2. When entering a GNT-T search with an English version in the top pane and GNT-T in bottom pane, running the search changes the tip pane to GNT-T. That leaves BOTH panes Greek! Grrr! :angry: Should either run the search in the bottom pane (as Mac app would) or at the least reverse the two panes and put Eng in bottom. (At least it's now easier to change the versions/texts displayed.)

 

3. Tag button sometimes left grayed out and non-functioning; have to tap Commands button 2x to get Tag button to be usable.

 

4. Ought to be a Search button in the Search bar instead of only the default keyboard search button. (That's where your finger often is when you're entering search commands...)

 

5. When an invalid search criteria is entered the error msg. is "No results found." That's not helpful; it should say there is an invalid criteria entered as in Mac version. Even if you can't give as many specifics as the desktop app, at least tell the user it's an error, not a valid search with no results.

 

6. Greek font doesn't appear in search bar when typing.

 

7. No word lists for lexical or inflected forms. That would be very helpful if for some reason you can't display mixed languages in the search field (#6).

 

8. Font size buttons are sorely missed, esp. on iPhone, but even iPad would make work flow much simpler.

 

9. Need navigation controls other than just finger scroll. Next hit/verse/chapter/book, etc. (At one point I saw some grayed arrow heads in bottom margin that I hoped were these sort of controls, but they didn't do anything.)

 

10. Entry of search criteria is much faster if typed manually for those who know the search syntax. For those who don't, there is no way to enter related criteria, e.g., you can use Tags to enter [verb], but then you can't specify, say, [verb aorist middle indicative]. There ought to be either a dialog or popup to specify this.

 

11. When typing in search criteria manually, the keyboard requires going 3 levels deep to access the square bracket keys--which are used constantly in grammatical searches! Grrr! :angry: There must be a better way to do this, ideally with a specialized keyboard for at least iPad version that would put the most commonly used keys on main keyboard (like browser keyboards do with slash and suffixes, etc.), ideally on iPad with a numerical keypad too! (even if accessing that were only possible in landscape mode). If for some reason that isn't possible technically (I didn't say "easily! :) ) then at least give us pop-ups with the needed symbols.

 

I'm leaving shortly for a day of travel, so may not be able to respond to this thread except when I'm passing through a terminal with free wireless.

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Rod, many of your requests are direct feature requests that are on the roadmap for the future. However, I do want to respond to some of your points:

 

1. The book icon returns to displaying [All Text], but centered at the top verse being displayed. Its a way to see the context of one of your hits.

 

6. The search bar does not support custom fonts (due to being a special Apple control) unlike the mac entry box. If you type english characters, they will be treated in our font, but render in English. Alternatively, you can just enter using a true greek unicode keyboard and that will work as well. You can enable this in Settings: General: Keyboard: International Keyboards.

 

9. The Goto wheels are great for navigating by chapter or verse, perhaps this will work well for you?

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I seem to remember that a comparable "triple click" to lexicon function was planned for this release. Was this delayed?

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I seem to remember that a comparable "triple click" to lexicon function was planned for this release. Was this delayed?

Yes.

 

Scott.

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I'm liking all the updates too. Great work!

 

I'm on an iphone, so my suggestions are screen space related:

 

1. Make the top and bottom menu bars disappear while reading, and reappear on a single screen tap. The ESV Bible app does this well.

 

2. When a secondary resource is added to the bottom half of the screen, the name appears under the divider line. This could be moved up to the right side of the top menu bar since there is space there (or it could replace the icon with the plus sign and look more like the primary resource label on the left), and it would disappear if number one above is implemented.

 

3. Very picky here:) The double-lined bar used to move the split screen up and down might not be necessary. It uses too much space. One could still move the divider line around without the bar, and just grab the divider line itself.

 

Thanks for the great products!

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I'm liking all the updates too. Great work!

 

I'm on an iphone, so my suggestions are screen space related:

 

1. Make the top and bottom menu bars disappear while reading, and reappear on a single screen tap. The ESV Bible app does this well.

 

2. When a secondary resource is added to the bottom half of the screen, the name appears under the divider line. This could be moved up to the right side of the top menu bar since there is space there (or it could replace the icon with the plus sign and look more like the primary resource label on the left), and it would disappear if number one above is implemented.

 

3. Very picky here:) The double-lined bar used to move the split screen up and down might not be necessary. It uses too much space. One could still move the divider line around without the bar, and just grab the divider line itself.

 

Thanks for the great products!

 

Thanks for the feedback. With regards to your suggestions:

 

1. We are still considering this idea and how we want to implement it.

 

2. This is a deliberate decision when viewing a parallel pane in portrait mode. In our testing there are too many instances where there is not enough room to display both module names on the iPhone. Particularly after a search is performed including a named range. You'll note that we do move the parallel module name to the top toolbar when the device is held in landscape.

 

3. That would be fairly non-intuitive and won't really save any effective space. Because a "touch" does not have the precision of a mouse, you still need lots of area around the position of where a user would grab the line. We are already around the minimum vertical space that Apple recommends for such an area. Drawing the "grabber" lines is really just a visual enhancement and it drawn inside this "space".

 

Scott.

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3. That would be fairly non-intuitive and won't really save any effective space. Because a "touch" does not have the precision of a mouse, you still need lots of area around the position of where a user would grab the line. We are already around the minimum vertical space that Apple recommends for such an area. Drawing the "grabber" lines is really just a visual enhancement and it drawn inside this "space".

 

I like those two lines, they are necessary as they give a clue that you can do something with them. But perhaps Accordance programmers could make the area above those line (about 14-20 pixels on iPhone 4) transparent? As of now, non-transparent area above these handle-lines hides half of the text line, which could be visible.

 

When I turn iPhone horizontally, suddenly commentary pane has twice wider left margin than the Bible text pane to the left of it. And both panes have too wide right margins. Please fix this.

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(Despite my giving a list of 11 things to fix, don't think your work isn't appreciated! Thanks for the improvements already made. I'm looking forward to v. 1.3.1 --- and even more to 1.4. :) )

 

1. What is the official purpose of the book icon in top left? I can tell that at least one thing it does is hide the search bar--but it doesn't toggle, so you can't get the search bar back after it's hidden. Why would you use a book icon to indicate hiding a search bar?! At the least, this isn't intuitive. I must be missing something here...

As Joel said, this button is used to clear the current search results and return the user to what we are calling "Reader" or "Reading" mode. It's really a shortcut to run the default search which uses a search text of the asterisk wildcard character and sets the search mode to Verses. As a bonus, we also scroll the text to the same verse location that was being displayed at the top of the text view.

 

I agree this can be confusing and less than ideal. So we are exploring other options, particularly in conjunction with adding some type of search history feature.

 

2. When entering a GNT-T search with an English version in the top pane and GNT-T in bottom pane, running the search changes the tip pane to GNT-T. That leaves BOTH panes Greek! Grrr! :angry: Should either run the search in the bottom pane (as Mac app would) or at the least reverse the two panes and put Eng in bottom. (At least it's now easier to change the versions/texts displayed.)

This is a difference in how Accordance for Mac and iOS work with regards to search texts and display texts. In Accordance for iOS the search text and display text are ALWAYS the same. So choosing a different module in the search interface not only runs the search against the chosen module, but switches the display text to this module also if the search is successful.

 

 

3. Tag button sometimes left grayed out and non-functioning; have to tap Commands button 2x to get Tag button to be usable.

This looks like a bug.

 

4. Ought to be a Search button in the Search bar instead of only the default keyboard search button. (That's where your finger often is when you're entering search commands...)

We're using the system supplied search bar and the system supplied keyboard. This combination is what supplies the "Cancel" button you see next to the search bar and the "Search" button on the keyboard. And because we are trying the keep the search interface as "common" between the iPhone and iPad platforms, I don't really see the benefit of creating a more custom interface, particularly when we really don't have the screen real estate on the iPhone for the button.

 

5. When an invalid search criteria is entered the error msg. is "No results found." That's not helpful; it should say there is an invalid criteria entered as in Mac version. Even if you can't give as many specifics as the desktop app, at least tell the user it's an error, not a valid search with no results.

I agree it's not helpful. And it's really a placeholder until we bring over our localization code which drives the text of the various error messages. It's definitely on the list to change.

 

6. Greek font doesn't appear in search bar when typing.

Ahh. Another difference between Accordance for iOS and Mac. Because we are using the system supplied search bar, text entry is now in terms of Unicode and not a custom Accordance interpretation of Mac Roman characters. And we don't have control to dynamically change the characters as they are being entered. So if you want to type Greek text, then turn on the Greek keyboard in the Settings app and switch to it for entering Greek characters. Same for Hebrew.

 

Note that if you do enter MacRoman characters for Greek and Hebrew, we do try to "interpret" them as appropriate when performing the search and display the translation of the search term. But it is a fairly fragile system at the moment particularly when mixing search commands and tags (which are English based) and Unicode text entry. We'll improve it as we can.

 

7. No word lists for lexical or inflected forms. That would be very helpful if for some reason you can't display mixed languages in the search field (#6).

 

8. Font size buttons are sorely missed, esp. on iPhone, but even iPad would make work flow much simpler.

Both on the feature list.

 

9. Need navigation controls other than just finger scroll. Next hit/verse/chapter/book, etc. (At one point I saw some grayed arrow heads in bottom margin that I hoped were these sort of controls, but they didn't do anything.)

The left/right arrows in the bottom toolbar do function as next/previous location navigation just like they do in Accordance for Mac. Use the GoTo view to change your location, or tap on a hyperlink in a tool search view and note that these arrows will enable or disable as appropriate to move you back and forth through the text.

 

The up/down arrows are equivalent to the previous/next bookmark arrows in Accordance for Mac. So they are only enabled when your search results are being viewed in terms of the entire module. (All Context in text modules). I agree that we could possible have them do "double" duty when in the reading mode of a search view. The question is what is the extra functionality by default? Wouldn't it be confusing to users to have these buttons change their operation based on the mode? And while there may be enough room on the iPad to add all the various navigation arrows we have in Accordance for Mac, there is no way we can do that for iPhone.

 

We also talked about adding gestures as shortcuts for some of these navigation needs, but haven't agreed or finalized a specification yet.

 

10. Entry of search criteria is much faster if typed manually for those who know the search syntax. For those who don't, there is no way to enter related criteria, e.g., you can use Tags to enter [verb], but then you can't specify, say, [verb aorist middle indicative]. There ought to be either a dialog or popup to specify this.

 

11. When typing in search criteria manually, the keyboard requires going 3 levels deep to access the square bracket keys--which are used constantly in grammatical searches! Grrr! :angry: There must be a better way to do this, ideally with a specialized keyboard for at least iPad version that would put the most commonly used keys on main keyboard (like browser keyboards do with slash and suffixes, etc.), ideally on iPad with a numerical keypad too! (even if accessing that were only possible in landscape mode). If for some reason that isn't possible technically (I didn't say "easily! :) ) then at least give us pop-ups with the needed symbols.

We really, really don't want to write a custom keyboard. The real solution would be to make the Tags entry easier. We've had it on our feature list to "translate" the set of complicated dialogs for entering Tags in Accordance for Mac to a set of hierarchical table lists so users would not have to perform any (or a very minimal) amount of typing. But, as I said, it's pretty complicated. Are you volunteering for the work? :)

 

 

 

Thanks for all the feedback,

 

Scott.

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I like those two lines, they are necessary as they give a clue that you can do something with them. But perhaps Accordance programmers could make the area above those line (about 14-20 pixels on iPhone 4) transparent? As of now, non-transparent area above these handle-lines hides half of the text line, which could be visible.

We've played with this "buffer" area some, and while I could make the area "transparent" , my guess is that I would then get complaints when users tried to "tap" on words in this transparent area which is really hidden behind the pane divider view.

 

 

When I turn iPhone horizontally, suddenly commentary pane has twice wider left margin than the Bible text pane to the left of it. And both panes have too wide right margins. Please fix this.

The left margin on the right pane is really not any wider than on the left pane. It's an optical illusion due to the finite width of the pane divider view. I agree it's somewhat visually distracting. I'll look into what can be done to narrow the divider view when holding your iOS device in landscape.

 

The right margins are exactly the same width as the left margins. However, because our text layout is not fully justified the right margin can appear to be visually larger than the left. Not much we can really do about that.

 

Thanks for the feedback,

 

Scott.

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The update to IOS 1.3 really does make using the iPad with Accordance a lot more pleasurable for me, an avid user but definitely not a bible scholar. The ease now with having two columns on my iPad- one with a choice of all my bibles and the other one a choice of all the reference works that are linked to bible texts makes bible study really convenient with Accordance. The ease and speed of switching from one reference tool to another is faster, smoother, and much less bother than attempting the same thing with Olive Tree's Bible Reader software on my iPad.

 

There are a couple of features that I'd like to see in future releases:

 

1. I note that bible reference links now display fully in the scrollable black box- no cutting off afterjust a few verses as before. That's great. However, will it be possible in the future to offer a reference display box more equivalent in looks to that currently offered by Olive Tree in their browser? They clearly have the best version at this time.

 

2. One thing that works great on my Macintosh and less good on my iPad is reading a bible text and having something like the Archaeological Study Bible in another box.

 

On the Mac, when I come to a link to something other than that of a bible verse- clicking on it will bring up the link. Clicks to links for special articles or sections of the study bible work perfectly. Clicking further on a photo thumbnail will bring up a larger version of the photo.

 

On the iPad, with a bible and Archeological Study bible both displayed, verse references and picture thumbnails display just fine. Links to special articles or sections of the study bible do not work. If the Study Bible is brought up full screen all of the links will work, and very well, but the accompanying bible is then lost. Can the iPad version be made to work as well as the Mac version in this regard?

 

Are these both feasible projects for future revisions? I realize that iPad operating system components may make many of our requests over the limit at this time.

 

Thanks again for such a fine update to the IOS program, I feel that I'll be spending a lot more time on my iPad using Accordance than I have been up to now.

 

Jim

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There are a couple of features that I'd like to see in future releases:

 

1. I note that bible reference links now display fully in the scrollable black box- no cutting off afterjust a few verses as before. That's great. However, will it be possible in the future to offer a reference display box more equivalent in looks to that currently offered by Olive Tree in their browser? They clearly have the best version at this time.

I think the amplify workflow we have planned for Accordance for iOS should more than satisfy your need.

 

2. One thing that works great on my Macintosh and less good on my iPad is reading a bible text and having something like the Archaeological Study Bible in another box.

 

On the Mac, when I come to a link to something other than that of a bible verse- clicking on it will bring up the link. Clicks to links for special articles or sections of the study bible work perfectly. Clicking further on a photo thumbnail will bring up a larger version of the photo.

 

On the iPad, with a bible and Archeological Study bible both displayed, verse references and picture thumbnails display just fine. Links to special articles or sections of the study bible do not work. If the Study Bible is brought up full screen all of the links will work, and very well, but the accompanying bible is then lost. Can the iPad version be made to work as well as the Mac version in this regard?

This is a missing feature in the iOS app that we do plan on remedying soon.

 

 

Thanks for the feedback and support. And don't forget to rate the app and/or write a review in the App Store if you can.

 

Scott.

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  • 2 weeks later...

The left margin on the right pane is really not any wider than on the left pane. It's an optical illusion due to the finite width of the pane divider view. I agree it's somewhat visually distracting. I'll look into what can be done to narrow the divider view when holding your iOS device in landscape.

 

The right margins are exactly the same width as the left margins. However, because our text layout is not fully justified the right margin can appear to be visually larger than the left. Not much we can really do about that.

 

Here you can see both margins. I don't think here is optical illusion

post-634-029050000 1313066334_thumb.jpg

post-634-005625500 1313066342_thumb.jpg

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