Bible App

The Need: A Paper Directory Does Not Remember Anything Every year my church prints a small booklet with a photo of each family. Under each photo there are the names, a short address, and a mark next to each name: br for brother or si for sister. In my church the mark is not about being male or female. It means the person has been saved and baptized. A husband who has not been baptized has no mark, even when his wife has si next to her name, and in church we call that family by the wife’s name. ...

The Need: Every Verse Cost Me My Place I prepare short talks for a Bible study. My routine is simple. I read a passage in my Bible app, add the verses I want to my notes, and write a few lines under them. Then I go back to read the next verse. That last step was the problem. The app has one screen at a time. To read the next verse, I left the notes, opened the viewer, and found my place again. Sometimes the next verse was in a completely different book, so there was no place to go back to. Finding it again took longer than writing the note. ...

This is a small bug with a nice reason behind it. I speak Korean, so I will explain the Korean part first. In a Korean Bible, most books are divided into 장 (jang, “chapters”). The Book of Psalms is the exception. Its sections are called 편 (pyeon), and people say “Psalms 23 pyeon”, not “Psalms chapter 23”. Both words are in normal use. A person might say either one, depending on habit. ...

I have a feature in my Bible app that I am quietly proud of. This feature connects Old Testament and New Testament verses that point to the same idea—one side is the shadow, the other is its fulfillment. It lets me bring up these pairs as I read. Until this past week, what the app could not do was show where these pairs came from when there were two different sources for the list. ...