Changing History

You may have noticed in my previous post that the History button has moved from middle-right to the far left.

My thinking is that with the Reading Plan functionality, the History button has become a lot more important. It is now the quick way to bounce between a plan and the main scripture area. 

It's always acted as something of a "back" button, but I think it'll be used a lot more as such when people start using the Reading Plans. So having it had the far left made more sense to me. I'm tempted to make it look more like a back button (something like ◄), but am not sure that's a good idea.

You'll also notice a new "Home" button at the top left of the History screen. What do you think that does?

Every once in a while I've had a request for some way to quickly go to the "top" of the screen navigation. Normally if you've tapped "Holy Bible / Book / Chapter X", it takes three "back taps" to get back to the first screen.

A good way to shortcut this has never occurred to me, nor did it seem like a big deal, since one was usually browsing among chapters and books and rarely needed to return to the Home screen. 

This changed with Reading Plans. I may be reading in Holy Bible and want to go to a Reading Plan. If I'm lucky, I've already been in that plan and can just use History to quickly go there. But if I haven't, it could take three taps to get to Home, then possibly three more to navigate into a plan. That seemed a bit much. And it occurred to me that the top left space of the History screen isn't being used for anything. So there you are.

Comments are welcome! It'll probably be another week or so before I send the update to the store, so if you have something to say, say it now!

Typing book name

Minor enhancement coming next update, the ability to start typing in a bookname to quickly find that book.

Side scrolling between chapters in iOS 4

If you've noticed that scrolling between chapters became more difficult after upgrading to iOS 4, you're not alone! Sometimes it could take two or three tries to get it to work.

As I've been working on the same kind of functionality in Reading Plans (in this case, side scrolling to go between different days in the plan), I got the chance to re-visit code I wrote in the early days for iOS 2, which also worked in iOS 3 but seemed to deteriorate a little in iOS 4.

I'm happy to report that I've been able to make adjustments for much easier side scrolling. This will be included in the Reading Plans update that I hope to deliver to the store within a couple weeks.

Thank you to Matthew S. for putting the bee in my bonnet at exactly the right time!