After going home and taking a holy nap to recover from the busy weekend of worship prep, I am starting a week of vacation and excited about both preaching and the iPad.

For the last week the various Digital Bible study outlets have been prepping for the iPad launch. Sadly, only a few of them made it over the finish line. But never fear because the race is not over. Some are taking the slow and steady pace approach and others the get there and get it done approach. One of those latter, sadly fell victim to the App store approval process and so wasn’t ready despite great efforts.

The ones that are available are getting in on the excitement. Logos is shining the brightest in my opinion. It is atop the store when you search for Bible and has some really good reviews. YouVersion is very popular and gets a lot of downloads from people who are not looking for a serious Bible study tool. BibleXpress is making a name for themselves, but also has the the most expensive price in the currently available apps for the iPad. HandiBible is there too with the most instances – they have the basic app, a version in Romanian, German, and The Message. holiwrit (yes it is supposed to be lowercase h) is a newcomer going after the crowd who only want a simple Bible reader. Coming soon are OliveTree, PocketBible and MantisBible.

I am excited about the future of Bible study on the iPad. The things that are net yet out may be some of the most creative and use the space most effectively. So be looking for them soon. Until then, it is a little sparce.

One sad note! I did a search for Bible in the Apple iBook app and found very little. You can get the KJV, NIV, and NRSV, but none of the other most popular translations like ESV, HCSB or NLT are there. I hope this changes. On the Kindle side publishers have had a large collection of Bibles for a long time and this helps Bible students who want to read on their iPad. There are also some commentaries and reference works available in iBooks and Kindle. I found the Expositor’s Bible Commentary in iBooks.

The company just released 4.7 from the Apple App store with a few really nice improvements.

Text to Speech

The first addition of note is the Text to Speech capability using one of five optional voice add-ons. The voices can be purchased either in the app or through MantisBible.com for only 1.99. I tested them out reading from 1 Peter.

Of the five voices, I liked the Ryan voice the most. It is an adult mail voice and is clear and easy to listen to. If you prefer a female voice you can choose Heather or Laura. The Heather voice was my personal favorite. Two of the voices are children’s voices and they are not as good, but your kids might prefer them. The Kenny voice actually sounded a little more like a girl to me.

You first must install the voices from the library menu by tapping the book name in the top left corner. Tap the Media tab and scroll down to see the voice names. Purchase them by tapping and the next screen will give you the option. If you purchased them online, you will have to tap the Check for updates in bright red at the top of the screen to have them in your list of available content. They take a little while to download, so be patient.

While in a reading window, tap on the Tools button in the top right to reveal the toolbar. The button directly next to the larger white Options button is a sound icon. It reveals the reading toolbar at the bottom (pictured below). From there you will see the toolbar at the bottom of the text with the close button to turn off the voice, a long slider, the voice chooser button in white and the play button to the right. Tap the white box to choose among the installed voices. Hit the play button and it will start reading to you.

I am not sure what the slider is used to adjust. It thought it was for the speed of the voice or the volume, but it seems to do nothing right now. Also you cannot switch voices on the fly; you must first pause the voice and then tap the voice selection box. Not sure if this is by design or a bug. I wish it would automatically stop the voice and take me to the screen where I can choose another voice.

While choosing the voice you can adjust the volume and speed of the voice (see the above screen shots – the lower left screen shot shows the voice selector with volume and speed sliders).

This will be a nice feature while driving or exercising. You can do your devotional “reading” while on the go. Aside from the minor annoyances, it works great!

Verse Memorization Module

There are verse memorization apps in the Apple App store, but it makes so much sense to have one in your Bible app. When reading your devotions or listening to someone teach on a verse you can quickly add the verse to the memorization module and come back later to learn it.

You access the module from the menu that appears when you press and hold the verse number. For example, if you want to add Romans 3:23 to the memorization list, top and hold the 23 in Romans 3:23 and the menu will appear. If you have used Mantis for awhile you will recognize this as the way to access the inline translation chooser, commentary chooser, and other functions like adding notes or highlights. The inline study Bible as they like to call it is one of the greatest plusses of MantisBible. Now there is a Memorize button with a heart over the word.

After adding the verse by tapping the Memorize button, you access your list of verses by going to your notes. At the top you will see folders. If you have no other folders of notes it will be the only one there. Otherwise find the Memorize folder. Tap on the verse you added and the Memorization module screen appears. From there you can work on memorizing the verse. Hit the Question mark button to learn about how to use the module as it is not obvious, but once you are told it is quite useful and easy to work with.

The way to memorize is by repetition. You read and re-read the verse over and over. You then start tapping words to remove them from the verse (see right below). After awhile the entire verse is gone but you are saying it from memory.

At the bottom of the screen you see [RESET VERSE], which you tap so you can see the original verse. When you think you know it, tap the test  button at the upper left (see above pictures). There are two test styles. With the Scrambled button selected, when you tap the Test button it puts all the words of the verse in the bottom half of the test screen all scrambled in the wrong order (see left below). Tap the words in the proper order to show that you have it memorized. The alternative test type lets you type out the words. When the 1st Letter button is selected prior to tapping the Test button, a keyboard is placed in the bottom of the screen (see right below). Start typing the first few letters of a word to make it appear above to test your memorization.

Advanced Search

The final new feature in this release is the Advanced Search function. I won’t go into a lot of detail here. But from the MantisBIble.com forum, here is what they developer is saying about it.

New Search Screen (allows you to search across all installed volumes at the same time, select specific books of the Bible to filter the search, and allows you to view the entire verse for each "hit" and drill-down to strongs numbers, etc., all in the search screen.)

The search feature is much improved and will give you more control over finding content.

MantisBible just keeps getting better. The text to speech and memorization modules are very nice additions. As per my custom of rating using the App Store model, I give Mantis a definite five star rating. After reading some of the reviews about stability issue in the App store reviews, I was surprised. I think that one caveat iPhone software users should consider is that if an app is buggy or crashing ask yourself two things.

1. Have I reset my iPhone since upgrading? That usually fixes problems I have had with a cantankerous app.

2. Have I been updating for so long that it might be time to do a fresh install. The iPhone OS keeps all your preferences when you simply upgrade. After a few point releases it is a good idea to delete the app and reinstall from scratch either from the App store or by syncing with iTunes on your desktop.

I have had no issues with buggy behavior with v. 4.7. Nor has it crashed once. YMMV!

They’re super into the sharing thing: "Think of ways people might want to use your application with others. Expand your thinking to include both the physical sharing of a single device and the virtual sharing of data."

As I read that I thought again about the thing I am most excited about when it comes to using the new iPad – Bible study.  How could developers of Bible study apps incorporate more “sharing” so that we could take advantage of the “application with others”? Already there is some social network built into a few of my favorite Bible apps on iPhone/Touch. YouVersion is probably the best at this with their community based app that can be used by people together in church or together commenting and sharing about the app. My problem is I don’t like the YouVersion’s selection of content or the interface. I also really don’t like only being able to use it online, although you can now download a number of Bibles. While it may be the most downloaded app, it is not more favorite and I don’t have it installed.

Of my favorite Bible apps, Logos can post to Facebook and Twitter from within the app. You can also email verses from within Logos. But there is no two way interaction. Olive Tree syncs notes with Evernote, so I guess there could be some do it yourself interaction there.  Neither Laridian PocketBible nor MantisBible have any social interaction at all.

Imagine, if someone would really jump on this with some really useful social interactivity. I could imagine a Bible app that …

• Let’s people share reading plans by marking them to be shared between devices and posted to social networking sights
• Highlighting and other mark-up that is shared in real time. A pastor or Bible study leader wants everyone to look at the word “perish” in John 3:16 so in social networking mode, everyone’s Bible app would sync to the same place (John 3:16) and the word “perish” would be highlighted. Then a note he had already added the word would pop up on everyone’s device with the same content saying “perish means to destroy yourself. God is not responsible for our perishing; we are.” I could then tap a spot in the pop up to save it to my mark-ups or just let it go away once the social networking session is finished.
• What if I had a book on my device that I wanted others to see while we are studying together – like TWOT as we look up an Old Testament Hebrew word. They might have access to TWOT, but for this session they can see it temporarily during the study. There would also be a link somewhere on the other person’s screen giving him/her the opportunity to purchase this book either now or later. This would be a good way to legally share content either temporarily or permanently and would give a revenue stream to the software maker.
• Like YouVersion, it would be nice to have a “wall” where we could post comments or sermon notes so that anyone searching that version could access the public content. There could also be a collaborative way to create content together from within the program that is later searchable.

These are just a few ideas. What would you like to see in this kind of app. I know that some of the Bible app producers read this sight so you can speak to them via this post and comments.

Check it out at Dave’s Blog over at the rabble.rule blog.

The major new feature is notes. You can associate notes with any Bible verse. Notes are independent of the Bible you’re reading. So a note on John 3:16 in the KJV also shows up on John 3:16 in the NIV.

Notes are indicated by a “Note” link at the start of the verse. Tap the link to view the note, or simply tap-and-hold anywhere on the verse to open the context menu and from there, choose to view or create a note.

Any references to Bible verses in your notes will be automatically linked. While viewing a note, just tap the reference to view the Bible verse. Notes are happy to be just plain text, but if you’re comfortable with HTML you can use most HTML tags in your notes. We provide a menu of HTML tags you can easily insert, and bold and italics are available from a toolbar in the note editor. So select the word you want to italicize, then use the <i> button to italicize it. No advanced HTML tagging knowledge required.

The note editor supports undo and redo. Few iPhone apps do, and for good reason. The current state of the text editing features on the iPhone is pretty primitive. It’s difficult to get access to everything you need to support undo/redo.

That will be great.  Of course their competitors at Olive Tree are doing some really exciting things with notes and syncing with Evernote.  Also Mantis Bible has some form of note syncing and their web site.  Both are still very much in “beta”.

The update to Laridian’s software will be coming in a few weeks.  When it does it will also add rotation lock, copy/paste of passages and verses to other apps, and some bug fixes.