A while back I posted that I had the privilege of testing Laridian’s new iPhone app, PocketBible Free.  I have been a longtime fan of their Windows Mobile app and have used their desktop app too.  But when I switched to the iPhone awhile ago, I needed a good app.  In this month’s Christian Computing Magazine article I will be sharing my review of many of the iPhone Bible apps available including this one.

But before then I wanted to give you a taste of what I found about this newest app.  Soon OliveTree will be releasing a new version and when it does I will be posting about it too. I’ve enjoying testing it as well.

PocketBible has as its strength, simplicity.  As you can see from the screenshot, it is very simple and clean.  The program also is very solid; for a 1.0 release it has not crashed once.  As I went through the beta testing process the Laridian programmers were very detailed and stamped out all the bugs.  It may have some still as most code does, but I haven’t experienced it after a lot of use.

Notice also the inline notes.  When you click on a footnote asterisk it just opens inline instead of taking you to another screen or popping up a window as some others do.  I like this because again it is simple.

The navigation is a little unique for book reading software.  It seems that most book readers scroll as you swipe up or down.  But PocketBible has a tic-tac-toe style interface.  As you can see from the screenshot, it has an overlay that will appear when you tap the center of the screen.  Each of the outer squares moves forward or back in the book or takes you to the other open books.  You can either tap in that square or swipe from the square to the center.

I have to be honest, using the other Bible apps on iPhone makes me think twice about this.  They all scroll either within a chapter or through the entire Bible.  I sort of hope that Laridian changes this in the future.  I’d rather have the program scroll in that chapter and then when it gets to the end of the chapter swipe to the next chapter instead of the next page.

I like the choice you have between either the bingo screen Book, Chapter, Verse chooser or the Spinning Wheel style chooser.

I personally use the bingo chooser on the left. It seems faster to me.

If you like to read your daily Bible reading on the iPhone, then you will like that opening a reading plan and tapping the link takes you to your Bible and temporarily highlights the reading. See below.

Notice above that the left screenshot is the highlighted reading.  The right is the highlighting that comes from choosing to highlight an individual verse.  You can do this by tapping and holding the verse number.  You can even search the highlighted verses.

That leads me to one of the best features in PocketBible. It has a very powerful search engine.  It has all the Boolean searching features you would expect in a powerful desktop Bible program.  The resulting list has a grey bar along the right side.  This is a nice feature that lets you quickly move from the top to the bottom of the list. Touch the grey bar and slide your finger up or down and it will move to the verse in the list under your finger.  You would think that with the list font being so small that it would be hard to use.  But it is amazingly easy.

Finally, notice that you can also rotate the screen to landscape mode, which makes reading text very easy.

I like Laridian’s app and you will too.  It is free and comes with a large selection of free books. Of course these are public domain books for the most part.  But it makes trying it out very easy. You risk only some time and a very small amount of space on your iPhone or iPod Touch.

I know, it is a pretty glowing review.  So what’s wrong.  Well, there are a couple of features that I think it needs to make it the perfect Bible app and to compete head to head with the other power houses from OliveTree and Mantis Bible.  One is the ability to split the screen so you can have two books open at once. This was so nice to be able to do on the Windows Mobile version of Laridian’s PocketBible.  But the developers wanted to make the app more solid first and then add the little extras later. So I would wager that it will be in an update in the near future. A couple of other missing features is note taking and tracking your daily reading progress. But again, these should be part of an update.

Since the app is free, there is really no reason not to give it a try.  There are some books that Laridian offers that are not available in the other programs.  So click on over to iTunes app store and happy downloading. When my review is available in Christian Computing Magazine, I will post a link here and on Twitter.