News Equipd Bible App Launched Today

Welcome to the first Announcement in the Forums! I am proud to launch the new Equipd Bible app for iOS today. It should start appearing on your App Store later today.

I encourage users to join the Support Forums and share your ideas, feedback and questions. I will focus on populating the Knowledge Base and other forums over the coming days. You can also subscribe to RSS feeds in the forums or get emailed when updates occur.

I sincerely hope this new app can accomplish its goal and help you to be “completely equipped for every good work” — 2 Timothy 3:17.

 

Hi Kim,

This forum is all about the new Equipd Bible app - it is not really a place to compare to the older app which was removed from the App Store due to changes to the Terms of Use on the underlying web content.

Anyway, I guess it is worth asking the question, as I am sure others will! So...

The main reason, which also happens to be the primary answer to your question, is that the new app is available for anyone. Those who missed out on the older Equipd app are now able to access this Bible functionality. Which many, especially those in the foreign language field, have been begging for.

In terms of absolute differences - I believe these were already addressed in the official announcement about the older app being updated. As of version 1.0 the differences are limited to:

1. It is an EPUB reader. This may or not be seen as an advantage, but it is a huge difference to the old app.
2. You can add notes against verses
3. You can organise bookmarked scriptures by topic/category
4. It supports offline audio which the older app did not
5. It has many optimisations to the interface, such as landscape support on the iPhone and more
6. It has many optimisations to the Chinese support
7. It supports the x-callback-url standard which some developers were asking for

Many of the advantages of this newer app are described in passing on the About page - hopefully you looked there.

And moving forward this is the app that will be updated with new features and be supported into the future.

I hope that partly answers your question. As mentioned, if you are fortunate enough to have the older Equipd app, then you may not be interested in this new app. Fair enough

 

Wow that was fast! Thanks so much @AppChasers - it is a very well-written and thorough review of the new app.

A couple of small recommendations.

1) It might pay to change the wording slightly around "ability to import any Bible in ePub format". This is not quite true. As mentioned on the About page, the app can import any "compatible" EPUB file. Because EPUB files are not consistent at all - each EPUB can use different folder structure, different file names for the Bible chapter files, and totally different HTML inside each file. So the Equipd Bible has to be able to locate the Chapter files and then be able to parse the chapter HTML in order to detect the verses. Maybe change this sentence slightly to use "compatible" or similar as well.

2) Since you have done such a great job incorporating some "tutorial" level training - one thing users might really benefit from learning about is the ability to create links inside verses. So in a Note, you can "double-quote" a word in that verse, and Equipd will create a link around that word in the verse. So you have a screenshot of a note for verse 16 of 2 Timothy 3. If you put inside the note.

When you save the note then the verse will suddenly have a link on the word "inspired".

Hope that all makes sense?

Overall I loved the review and really appreciate the effort and enthusiasm with which you recommend my new app. Makes all the effort worth-while

 

@Kim I don't believe I have ever said that you will be able to highlight in this new app. In fact, quite the opposite. See this thread. If I did, please let me know where so I can correct the statement...

 

I don't believe the ESV is in the Public Domain sorry @Fritz thompson. Which means that I cannot host it here.

 

No problem!