This page describes the changes made in each new release of Reading App Builder. You can download the latest or previous versions on the Download page.

Reading App Builder 12.3

Release date: 07 November 2024

New Features and Improvements:

  • Updated Abyssinica SIL font to version 2.300 (29 October 2024).

Bugs Fixed:

In the app builder:

  • Picture story book images were not read correctly from the app project configuration file, leading to missing pictures in the book (#1732).
  • EPUB documents created by the app builder contained fatal errors.
  • If English was removed from the list of enabled interface languages, it would appear again when the app builder was restarted and would also be enabled in apps, hence making it impossible to remove it (#1733).
  • When converting MP3 audio files with video streams to 3GP format, the conversion failed due to an error: “Could not find tag for codec h263 in stream #0, codec not currently supported in container”. The video stream is now ignored when converting to 3GP.

Reading App Builder 12.2.3

Release date: 26 October 2024

New Features and Improvements:

  • Updated fonts:
    • Harmattan 4.300 (21 October 2024)
    • Lateef 4.300 (21 October 2024)
    • Scheherazade New 4.300 (21 October 2024)
       
  • Bloom Player updated to version 2.6.3.

Bugs Fixed:

In the Android app:

  • Dropdown lists on the Registration screen were not working.

In the app builder:

  • The build could fail for certain custom interface languages.

Reading App Builder 12.2.2

Release date: 17 October 2024

New Features and Improvements:

  • App Builder interface now available in Brazilian Portuguese.

  • Code optimization.

Bugs Fixed:

In the Android app:

  • The audio toolbar would sometimes show for chapters that did not have audio files (#1594).

In the iOS app:

  • The chapter view shifted to the top of the chapter if you swiped slightly left or right.

In the app builder:

  • If a custom interface language was defined which had a non-ISO code (e.g. “custom” rather than something like “es”), this would prevent the build from completing.

Reading App Builder 12.2

Release date: 10 October 2024

New Features and Improvements:

  • Feature and Settings Finder in the App Builder
    • As the number of configurable options has increased in the app builder, users can sometimes forget where to find a feature on the many pages and tabs. The Feature and Settings Finder is a way to help.
    • To find a feature or setting within the app builder, press the “Find” button on the toolbar at the top right of the screen, or CTRL+F.
    • You can begin typing to find the configuration page you are looking for.
    • Select an item and press enter to move to that page.
       
  • Redesign of the APK tab
    • The settings at the bottom of the “APK” tab are now split over three tabs, “Android Version”, “Install Location” and “Multiple APKs”.
    • The Target Android Platform is now displayed above the Minimum Android Platform. This is because some users were changing the minimum platform, thinking it was the target platform, and finding that their app would not work on older devices.
    • Added a note with Minimum Android Platform to say “Keep this as low as possible, so that people with older Android devices will be able to install the app”.
       
  • Quiz shuffle questions
    • It is now possible to turn on/off shuffling the order of quiz questions.
    • Shuffling the order of questions is now turned off by default.
    • See the “Quiz” tab for a book.
       
  • Bulk change image of audio-only books
    • To change the image for several audio-only books at once, select the books, right-mouse click and select “Change Image…”.
       
  • First Book and Chapter changes
    • The book and chapter that are displayed at first launch are now specified on the “Book Navigation” > “First Book and Page” tab.
    • You can now choose to always start from this book/page or from the book/page that the user was most previously visiting.
       
  • More menu Item image gallery icons
    • Additional icons are available in the Image Gallery for menu items and the bottom navigation bar.
       
  • Fonts added and updated
    • Ezra SIL and Ezra SIL SR fonts are now available for use for displaying Hebrew scripts.
    • Awami Nastaliq font updated to version 3.300 (9 October 2024).
       
  • Project configuration file improvements
    • The project configuration file (.appDef) used to contain a lot of unnecessary information, such as app interface translations and writing system details for languages that were not enabled, and features that were unchanged from the defaults. This additional information is now removed to reduce the configuration file size.

Bugs Fixed:

In the Android app:

  • When pressing the back/forward audio buttons multiple times in quick succession, the scrolling of the text was not smooth, especially when the text was off the screen and needed to be scrolled into view.
  • When viewing a picture story book with one audio file per page, pressing the back/forward buttons on the audio toolbar would get confused and jump multiple pages if a page had verse numbers (#1646).
  • The font chooser was sometimes showing a blank font name (#1647).
  • If one of the Audio Repeat mode or Audio Playback Speed buttons was hidden, the audio toolbar would not be centred correctly (#1563).
  • Do not ask for the READ_MEDIA_VIDEO permission, unless we are needing to find videos on the device or use WebM audio files (which Android stores in the video folder).

In the iOS app:

  • The font selector should not appear when the Contents menu is displayed.
  • Upgrade of XCode to allow support for the latest iOS version.

In the app builder:

  • Audio tasks failed if there were special characters in filenames. This affected Aeneas audio-text synchronisation and audio file conversion.
  • The new “Read Media” permissions for audio, video and images were not being displayed in the App > Permissions tab.
  • Picture story books images could be displayed as blank images, and one of the images added instead to the book collection.

Reading App Builder 12.1

Release date: 15 August 2024

Bugs Fixed:

In the Android app:

  • The app could crash when using the forward/back section buttons on the audio toolbar.
  • The message asking the user to give permission for notifications did not display correctly in some apps.
  • Changing the text colours after being in a contents menu could cause the app to crash.

In the app builder:

  • On the “APK” tab, allow the Android Version Code to be greater than 1,000.

Reading App Builder 12.0

Release date: 20 July 2024

New Features and Improvements:

  • Build for Android 14
    • Apps are now compiled to target Android 14 (API 34).
    • You will need to update your Android SDK with the new libraries. Use Tools > Install Android SDK.
    • The minimum Android version is now Android 5 (API 21), required for many of the latest library versions. Apps will run on devices from Android 5 to Android 14.
    • Removed Grandroid font rendering libraries which were only for Android 4.x.
       
  • Keyman 17
    • Keyman keyboard handling has been updated to use Keyman version 17 in both the Android and iOS apps.
       
  • Video download/streaming improvements
    • If you specify an MP4 video which can be streamed or downloaded from the internet, app users can choose between these options on the Settings screen.
       
  • Audio playback speeds: added 0.9x, 1.1x and 1.3x.
     
  • Font update: Annapurna version 2.100.
     
  • Bloom Player component (used for displaying Bloom books) updated to version 2.2.42.
     
  • Updated libraries used in compiling Android apps.

Bugs Fixed:

In the Android app:

  • After selecting an item in the Search results, pressing the Android back button did not take the user back to the search results.
  • If there are no books to be shown in the book selector, the down arrow should not be shown (#1626).

Reading App Builder 11.4.4

Release date: 17 June 2024

Bugs Fixed:

  • For some app configurations, the Android app build would fail due to Kotlin library incompatibility errors.

Reading App Builder 11.4.3

Release date: 11 June 2024

Bugs Fixed:

In the Android app:

  • Stability issues in GeckoView causing blank screens when moving back to Contents menus.
  • Audio and Lock icons were not shown properly on the Contents screen when using GeckoView.

In the app builder:

  • Use a newer reCAPTCHA library when using Firebase to respond to rejections of apps on Google Play due to security vulnerabilities found in the reCAPTCHA library used by the current Firebase.
  • The Contents menu viewer did not display audio and lock icons in the right place.

Reading App Builder 11.4.2

Release date: 28 May 2024

New Features and Improvements:

  • Quiz books can now be hidden in the book selector.
  • See “Show in book selector” in Book > Book Features.

Bugs Fixed:

In the Android app:

  • When in the song book index page, selecting a song from the page selector could cause the app to crash.

In the app builder:

  • On the Interface > Languages page, some of the languages in the table were shown without names.
  • Image filenames in picture story books needed to be encoded for XML in the configuration file.
  • Internal improvements and bug fixes.

Reading App Builder 11.4.1

Release date: 21 May 2024

Internal improvements and bug fixes.

Reading App Builder 11.4

Release date: 17 May 2024

New Features and Improvements:

  • Contents Menu audio (Android app)
    • You can now assign an audio clip to Contents menu items. This can be a help to less literate users and where it would be helpful to give an audio description of what will happen when the item is selected.
    • When the menu is displayed, a speaker icon is shown at the bottom right corner of each menu item with audio. When the user taps this icon, the audio clip is played.
       
  • Hiding books from book selector (Android app)
    • You can now hide a book from appearing in the book selector.
    • This could be useful if you only want it to show from a Contents menu item or from a link in the text.
    • See “Show in book selector” in Book > Book Features.
    • Note that users will still be able to swipe into the book, unless you disable swiping between books.
       
  • Bottom navigation improvements
    • Added support for the bottom navigation bar in iOS apps.
    • Added a checkbox in the app builder to allow turning on or off the bottom navigation buttons feature.
    • See Navigation > Bottom Navigation.
       
  • Bloom Player library updated to version 2.2.36.
     
  • More interface translations in Russian and Vietnamese.

Bugs Fixed:

In the Android app:

  • Back navigation to contents menus and submenus sometimes caused the app to close.

In the iOS app:

  • Fixes for privacy manifest requirements.
  • Fix for playing downloaded video files.
  • Contents menu items for targets other than references did not work.

In the app builder:

  • Special characters were often shown in the tree view, heading panel, book name and book abbreviation fields as square boxes.
  • Bottom navigation buttons should be limited to a maximum of 5.

Reading App Builder 11.3

Release date: 29 April 2024

New Features and Improvements:

  • Bottom Navigation Buttons (Android only so far)
    • You can choose which bottom navigation buttons (if any) to show, e.g. “Contents”, “Books”, “Plans”, “About”.
    • Separate buttons can point to different Contents screens.
    • A “Books” button can point to the current book and page, and you can also add a button to point to a specific book (such as a song book).
    • Go to Navigation > Bottom Navigation, and click “Add Button” to add a button.
    • You can add up to five buttons.
       
  • Include iOS Privacy Manifest in apps
    • Starting May 1, 2024, Apple App Store will require new or updated apps to contain privacy manifests. See Apple’s privacy requirements for details.
       
  • Updated version of Android SDK Tools
    • The latest version of Android SDK Tools is downloaded in the Install Android SDK wizard.

Bugs Fixed:

In the Android app:

  • Pressing the phone’s back button did not always result in going back to the previous page in the app as expected. Improvements were also needed in the way the back arrow at the top left of the screen worked.
  • Pressing the back audio button at the start of a book caused the app to crash (#1544).
  • Pressing the forward audio button at the end of a picture story book caused the app to crash (#1562).
  • The History screen was blank when there was no history. It should contain a “No history yet” message, otherwise apps were getting rejected when submitted to Google Play.

In the iOS app:

  • Added search index bar back into search results display.

In the app builder:

  • Finding Python on Linux for Aeneas was causing a lot of errors in the error log.
  • Audio File Source could have an invalid URL. Added a check for this during the build.
  • Display markdown syntax for images on the About page.
  • Specifying an increment (+) to the version number in command line arguments did not work as expected.
  • In the Tab Type configuration, the choice of Name/Icon was not saved (#1421).

Reading App Builder 11.2

Release date: 28 March 2024

New Features and Improvements:

  • Quiz improvements – access types
    • You can choose to restrict access to a quiz by (i) requiring the user to enter a 4-6 digit code, or (ii) requiring them to complete another quiz successfully first.
    • See the ‘Quiz’ tab for a book to configure this feature.
    • If the code option is chosen, a numeric keypad will be shown when the user selects a quiz.
    • If the required quizzes option is chosen, a message will be displayed telling the user which quizzes they need to complete before starting the currently selected quiz.
    • If quizzes are listed in the Contents menu, a lock symbol will appear to the right of quizzes that are locked.
       
  • iOS app improvements:
    • In-App Messaging

Bugs Fixed:

In the Android app:

  • The notification popup on newer versions of Android was displaying the IDs instead of the localised reason strings.
  • In the long press menu on Android, add a search icon.

In the iOS app:

  • App launch turns off background audio of other apps (issue #1490).
  • On iPad, chapter selectors were cut off on the right (issue #1502).
  • Pressing play from the selection toolbar does not immediately scroll to the verse (issue #1515).
  • Rewrite of search results display to be compatible with the Android version.
  • Reduce time required for search to complete.

In the app builder:

  • Names of File Sources were not being retrieved correctly.
  • Creating a new Keystore on Mac failed if the JDK was not installed. It now uses the bundled JDK.
  • On Windows, when synchronising files with Scriptoria, sometimes it would get confused (e.g. a books.zip file next to the books folder would confuse the sorting).
  • On Mac, restoring the integrated menu bar after crashes on Sonoma 14.1.2 was fixed in Sonoma 14.2.

Reading App Builder 11.1.1

Release date: 19 December 2023

Bugs Fixed:

In the Android app:

  • If you were building an app with web radio without any other features that required internet access, the internet permission would not be included.
  • If you locked the device screen when playing a web radio station, the audio would stop playing.

In the app builder:

  • If the name of a Change contained angle bracket characters, the app project would not be saved correctly.

Reading App Builder 11.1

Release date: 06 December 2023

New Features and Improvements:

  • Web Radio Stations
  • You can include streaming web radio (internet radio) stations in your app.
  • To add a radio station, go to Media > Radio and click Add Station.
  • For more details, see the ‘Radio’ section in the ‘Building Apps’ documentation.

  • In-App Messaging

  • You can now use Firebase for in-app messaging. These are messages that users will see when they are inside the app.
  • To enable in-app messaging, go to Data & Analytics > Firebase > Firebase Features.

  • To send in-app messages, go to Data & Analytics > Firebase > In-App Messaging.

  • Push Notifications tab

  • It is now easier to find the page in the Firebase console to send push notifications.

  • Go to Data & Analytics > Firebase > Push Notifications.

  • Contents menu item targets

  • In addition to pointing to book chapters and other contents menu screens, a contents menu item can now point to the following: About screen, Settings screen, a Web radio station or any website.

  • Go to Navigation > Contents Menu, click the Add Item button, and select ‘Elsewhere’.

  • Build multiple Android App Bundles

  • When building multiple apps, you can now choose between building Android APK files and Android App Bundles (AAB).

  • See Build > Build Multiple Apps

  • Prevent screenshots when using the Android app

  • In some cases, you might want to prevent users taking screenshots when they are using your app, for example, to make it more difficult to copy illustrations.

  • To do this, there is a new setting on App > Security, ‘Prevent the user from taking screenshots in the app’.

  • Font updates:

  • Updated Annapurna SIL font to version 2.000 (8 Nov 2023)

  • Updated Awami Nastaliq font to version 3.200 (23 Oct 2023)

  • Bloom Player updated to version 2.1.31.

Bugs Fixed:

In the Android app:

  • If no search results were found, after tapping the Search button, two search fields were displayed instead of one. This would happen when using embedded Keyman keyboards.
  • If using Firebase but not Branch deep linking, disable the use of the Advertising ID.

In the iOS app:

  • The Image pop-up would not close.
  • The Audio bar in a tab was not displaying correctly.

In the app builder:

  • On the Illustrations page, resizing settings were not saved for an image. This happened when image placements were not being used.
  • If the name of a Change was modified, the new name was not saved (#1461).
  • When sorting apps in the tree on the left of the app builder screen, they would be sorted using the group name whether or not the group was being shown (#1450).
  • Correct the Google Play Language for Khmer (km-HK to km-KH). If you used this language for a Google Play Listing, you will need to rename the folder under {project name}_data/publish/play-listing folder before opening the project in RAB 11.1+.
  • If URLs in the app were the same except for case, then both were included in the Android app metadata and the app would crash on startup on newer versions of Android.
  • Require the iOS signing identity to start with “Apple Distribution” or “Apple Development”. “iPhone Distribution” used to work but is now causing app uploading errors.

Reading App Builder 11.0.4

Release date: 12 October 2023

New Features and Improvements:

  • Custom resizing of Illustrations
    • When the app is built, illustration file sizes can be reduced differently for each image, or turned off altogether for certain images.
    • Go to Media > Illustrations, double-click on the illustration and adjust the settings on the Resizing tab.
    • For example, you can set maps to not be resized, in order to maintain their full details when they are zoomed in, whereas other picture files can be reduced in size.
       
  • Audio file discovery improvements
    • After an audio file has been downloaded and located on the device, its location will be saved to the app’s database to make it quicker to find the next time it is needed.
       
  • Keyman 16
    • Keyman Engine library updated to version 16.0.142.

Bugs Fixed:

In the Android app:

  • In Android 13, the app needs to ask for different permissions to read audio, video and image files.
  • In Android 13, the app would ask for permission to show notifications even when it would never need them.

In the app builder:

  • The compiler might fail to complete, warning about a missing BlurTransformation class.
  • The Tools > Setting dialog would not close when clicking the OK button.
  • When adding an audio file to a new audio book, the audio files would be added to the first book rather than to the new book that you are adding.

Reading App Builder 11.0.3

Release date: 03 October 2023

New Features and Improvements:

  • Contents Menu improvements
    • You can now choose to link a menu item to the About, Settings or Language and Layout screens.
       
  • When opening an app, the tree nodes on the left of the app builder screen are expanded to the first level instead of fully expanding every node.
     
  • Updated to the latest Android Gradle Plugin build tools, which now require a minimum Android SDK Build Tools version 33.0.1.
    • If you receive a warning about an older version of Build Tools, you can use the Tools > Install Android SDK wizard to install an updated version of the Android SDK.

Bugs Fixed:

In the Android app:

  • If an app was used to download an audio file, then uninstalled then reinstalled, it would fail to locate the previously downloaded audio file and would not successfully download and play another one.

In the iOS app:

  • Cache border images to improve performance when borders are present.
  • Adjust the size of the Share Media Type dialog to fit the text.

In the app builder:

  • If a modified image was added, e.g. to the contents menu, with the same filename as the previous version of the image, the thumbnail would not be updated on the screen.
  • For quiz books, if a question did not contain text, the Character Inventory screen would fail to load.
  • The Convert Audio Files feature required Aeneas to be installed, when this should not have been necessary.
  • Could not add iOS icons or iOS splash screen images.
  • On macOS, trying to import the app store listing information from Google Play would fail.

Reading App Builder 11.0.1

Release date: 03 August 2023

Bugs Fixed:

In the Android app:

  • When using an Android 13 device, daily reminder notifications were not shown. The app should ask permission to post notifications.
  • When using an Android 13 device, there could be problems saving files to device storage.

In the app builder:

  • There were problems finding Python used by Aeneas when synchronizing audio and text.
  • On Mac computers, the download path was wrong for installing JDK 17.

Reading App Builder 11.0

Release date: 27 July 2023

New Features and Improvements:

  • Reorganised app configuration pages
    • In the tree on the left of the app builder screen, the pages have been organised into categories: Appearance, Data & Analytics, Publishing, Navigation, and Engagement.
    • The Appearance category contains pages for Icons, Graphics, Interface, Colors, Fonts, Styles, Formatting and Changes.
    • The Data & Analytics category contains pages for Analytics and Firebase.
    • The Publishing category contains pages for App Store, E-books (EPUB), and will also be where PWAs are configured in future versions.
    • The Navigation category contains pages for the Contents Menu, the Navigation Drawer, Book Navigation, Deep Linking and Tab Types.
    • The Engagement category contains Notifications.
    • The Media category contains pages for Audio, Video and Illustrations.
    • The Firebase tab has been moved to its own page, with two tabs: Firebase Features and Firebase Configuration.
       
  • Building apps for Android 13
    • Apps are now compiled using Android 13 (API 33) libraries, which is required by Google Play for new apps from 31 August 2023.
    • Before building an app, you will need to install a new version of the JDK (version 17). Use the Install JDK wizard (from Tools > Install JDK…)
    • You will also need to update the Android SDK to install the latest libraries. Use the Install Android SDK wizard (from Tools > Install Android SDK…)
    • Apps can still be installed on older versions of Android, down to Android 4.1 (API 16), although this will be Android 4.4 (API 19) if using Firebase, or Android 5.0 (API 21) if using Branch deep linking, because of the requirements of the latest versions of these libraries.
       
  • Data Safety information for Google Play
    • The Data Safety CSV export has been updated with the latest questions and answers.
    • It will be generated automatically in the APK Output folder when building an Android App Bundle (AAB), or when selecting Build > Export Data Safety to CSV.
       
  • Updated libraries used in compiling Android apps:
    • Gradle compiler version updated to 8.2.
    • Android Gradle plugin updated to 7.4.2.
    • Android AppCompat version 1.6.1.
    • Android Material components library 1.9.0.
    • Firebase Bill of Materials: 32.2.0.
    • Google Play Services library 4.3.15.
    • Branch deep linking SDK: 5.6.1.

Bugs Fixed:

In the iOS app:

  • The app could crash on start if it was displaying a contents menu without an interface language.
  • The Search entry text font was not being set, which could result in characters not being displayed correctly.

In the app builder:

  • SFM files were treated as empty if all content appeared on lines without markers.
  • The SIL logo in the About box needed to be updated.
  • Inconsistent left and top margins were being used in several App Builder configuration pages.
  • On Linux, the Books > Book > Viewer tab was being hidden due to missing dependencies. These dependencies are now installed and the Viewer tab is available.

Reading App Builder 10.4

Release date: 28 June 2023

New Features and Improvements:

  • Better handling of audio-only books:
    • You can choose to add audio books in the New App wizard and the Add Books wizard.
    • Audio files can be added on the new ‘Audio Files’ page of the wizard.
    • If you want to specify selected chapters for an audio book, you now do this in the Portions section on the Book tab, rather than on the ‘Audio Only’ tab.
    • The ‘Audio Only’ tab now contains just the album image and has been renamed ‘Image’.
       
  • Default fonts and choice of fonts
    • In the New App wizard, the default font will now be based on the script used within the first book, i.e. Latin, Arabic, Devanagari, etc.
    • On the Font Choice page, the fonts displayed will be based on this script.
       
  • Improved keystore creation:
    • Changed the layout and descriptions on the Signing page of the New App wizard, making it clear that the choice is between creating a new keystore file and using an existing one.
    • Instead of a hyperlink, there is now a ‘Create Keystore’ button.
    • In the Create Keystore wizard, the Browse button is now connected to the choice of folder rather than the filename.
    • When adding Certificate Issuer information, there is now a country code selector dialog. You can search for a country and find its two-letter code.
       
  • GIF images:
    • You can now include illustrations in GIF image format, including animated GIFs (#1350).
       
  • Contents Menu headings
    • You can now add heading items to the contents menu. These are not selectable but allow you to provide more information to the user and divide up the contents menu into sections.
    • Use the ‘Add Heading…’ button on the right of the Contents Menu page.
       
  • Registration screen: improvements to Skip functionality
    • If you are using a registration screen, you can choose to add a Skip button. If a user presses Skip, you can now choose if and when the user gets asked again to fill in the form: every time they launch the app, never again, or after a certain number of days.
    • See App > Security > Configure Registration > Skip Registration.
       
  • Registration screen: database path
    • If you are using a registration screen, you can choose where you want the data to be stored in your Firebase database: either at the top level (as before), or at an app-specific level (which allows you to use the same database for different apps).
    • There is a new ‘Database Rules’ dialog which gives you the rules you need to copy to configure your Firebase realtime database.
    • See App > Security > Configure Registration > Database.
       
  • Website addresses in tooltips
    • Where the App Builder provides links to external websites, a tooltip is now displayed showing the web address when the user hovers their mouse over the link.
       
  • Updated library versions:
    • GeckoView updated to version 114.0.
    • Bloom Player updated to version 2.1.28.
    • Keyman upgraded to version 16 (in the iOS app).
       
  • Additional fonts:
    • Noto Naskh Arabic
    • Noto Sans Devanagari, Noto Serif Devanagari
    • Noto Sans Ethiopic, Noto Serif Ethiopic
    • Noto Sans Malayalam, Noto Serif Malayalam
    • Noto Sans Telugu, Noto Serif Telugu
    • Noto Serif Tibetan

Bugs Fixed:

In the Android app:

  • Tapping the Text Appearance button when viewing the Contents menu caused the app to crash if there was a choice of fonts (#1309).
  • For picture story books, if the motion duration was set to less than the duration of the audio for the page, the position of the slider would not be set correctly (#1295).
  • In quizzes, the audio clip sound was not found if the app contained audio from a non-assets source (such as internet download).
  • In quizzes, explanations containing single quote marks were not displayed.
  • When failing to add data to the database in a registration screen, the error message was untranslated.
  • When using a registration screen and GeckoView, the submit button cleared the form rather than attempting to add the data to the database.
  • When using GeckoView, video thumbnail images were not shown, and nor was the arrow in quiz questions.

In the iOS app:

  • Repeat mode buttons were displayed on the audio toolbar when configured to be off.
  • Contents Menu language was not changing immediately after the interface language was changed.
  • Line spacer control was not appearing correctly after the latest changes.
  • Special characters were displayed on the search screen in the wrong font.

In the app builder:

  • The Build folder and App Projects folders were not created when first running the app builder program.
  • Creating a keystore failed if you had not already installed the JDK (#1353)
  • When compiling apps in Windows, a ‘ÿ’ character would appear instead of a non-breaking space when displaying the APK file size.
  • The output and error logs displayed in Tools > View Logs did not handle UTF-8 encoding in Windows.
  • In the Contents Menu Add Menu Item wizard, some of the controls on the first page were not being disabled according to the selected radio button.
  • The compilation dialog was not being placed in the centre of the program window. It would appear on screen 1 even if the App Builder program was being displayed on screen 2.
  • Additional compilation warnings needed to be hidden from the user.
  • The recommended EPUB 3 readers linked to on the EPUB page were no longer available and needed to be updated.
  • Deleted custom styles reappeared after saving (#1326).
  • You could not change the name of a Change added from the gallery (#1348).
  • For picture story books, more space is needed for the story book image filename label on the Story Pages tab.
  • On the Book tab, the Portions text field was visible at first when it should have been hidden.
  • The title of the Google Account dialog appeared in Russian when the app builder interface was in English.
  • In the JDK wizard, use the Next button to start the download, rather than a separate Download button. It was confusing to users, who are used to pressing Next to progress to the next step.
  • The ‘Using aeneas for text-audio synchronisation’ documentation included expired links to the aeneasweb service, which is no longer available (#1352).
  • Replace the dependency on the JCenter repository which is no longer being updated.
  • Some of the statements used in the Gradle build configuration files were deprecated.
  • Sorting apps into alphabetical order did not take into account project group names. The sort should also be case insensitive.

Reading App Builder 10.3.2

Release date: 17 May 2023

Bugs Fixed:

In the app builder:

  • If an image had placements, it could not be edited.
  • The most recently used video folder should be saved separately from the most recently used image folder.
  • In the New Keystore wizard, the Browse button should select the folder rather than the filename.

Reading App Builder 10.3.1

Release date: 03 May 2023

New Features and Improvements:

Bugs Fixed:

In the app builder:

  • After running a build, the color picker would not display.
  • A build would fail if a video didn’t have a valid URL. It will now display a warning and not try to build.
  • Data Safety: incorrect answers were given when using deep linking, and in some other situations.

Reading App Builder 10.3

Release date: 30 March 2023

New Features and Improvements:

  • Font Chooser
    • The app user can now choose the text font in the Text Appearance dialog.
       
  • Choice of Fonts
    • The New App wizard now has an additional page ‘Choice of Fonts’ which allows you to select some additional fonts from which the user can choose in the font chooser.
    • For each book, you can choose which fonts the app user will be able to choose from. See the new ‘Fonts’ tab at both ‘Books’ and book levels.
       
  • Changes at a book level
    • Changes can now be specified at a book level, as well as being available at book collection and app levels.
    • See the ‘Changes’ tab for each book.
       
  • Media Player in notifications
    • When the audio player is active, a media toolbar will be displayed in the Android device notifications, with a seekbar and play/pause button.
       
  • Control over zooming into illustrations
    • In the past, all illustrations could be tapped on to see them full screen, with the possibility to zoom in and out. Since you might want to disable this feature for some illustrations, this can now be done on the Illustrations tab.
    • Double-click the illustration you want to modify and adjust the setting on the ‘Zoom’ tab.
    • To change this setting at an app level, use the checkbox ‘Allow users to view images full screen and zoom in to see the details’, which is checked by default.
       
  • Responses to Data Safety questions
    • When publishing an Android app on Google Play, you need to answer a set of Data Safety questions, telling your users which data is collected and why. To help you answer these questions correctly, on the menu select ‘Build’ > ‘Export Data Safety to CSV’ to create a CSV file which can be imported into the Google Play developer console for the app.
       
  • Allow the Play/Pause button on the app’s audio toolbar to be colored differently from the other audio toolbar buttons.
     
  • Fonts
  • Hide or Show Font subsets
    • Since the font subsets of Andika, Charis and Gentium are no longer updated, they are not shown by default. There is a new checkbox under the font chooser to allow the showing of font subsets, for example on the ‘Font’ page of the New App wizard.
       
  • Documentation updates
    • Updated ‘Building Apps’ with information about using GeckoView for font handling.
       
  • Updated Bloom Player to version 2.1.25.
     
  • Stability improvements.

Bugs Fixed:

In the Android app:

  • The ‘font-family’ setting was not always respected for user interface elements, such as chapter and introduction buttons in the chapter selector.
  • Downloading audio for a picture story book caused the app to crash.

In the app builder:

  • In footers, the following HTML tags were not handled correctly: <img>, <span> and <div>.
  • In the HTML ‘Page Number’ dialog, the default button should be the OK button.
  • In the ‘Change Book Collection Id’ dialog, the default button should be the OK button.
  • On the HTML files page, href attributes starting with # were being interpreted as if they were HTML files.
  • If any Change contained a regular expression with an ‘Index Out of Bounds’ error, app builds would fail.
  • ‘Browse…’ buttons were missing from the Build Folders and Export Folder tabs in Settings.
  • In Export to HTML, fonts were not being copied if the ‘fonts’ folder already existed.
  • If you changed the Build folder (in Settings) to a folder which already contained files, these were deleted the next time you compiled an app. Since this could have unintended consequences, if a non-empty folder is specified, the ‘build’ sub-folder is used instead, or a warning message is displayed to the user.
  • The description of min/max dimensions for 10-inch Android tablet screenshots was incorrect.
  • The width of the Source column in the Audio Files table needed to be resized wider to see a longer name.

Reading App Builder 10.2

Release date: 02 December 2022

New Features and Improvements:

  • Repeat Audio (in the Android app)
  • There is now an optional ‘Repeat Mode’ button on the audio toolbar. The user can tap it to toggle between four modes: continue playing to the next page, stop at the end of this page, repeat page, and repeat selected text.
  • A text hint is displayed above the audio toolbar to indicate the currently selected repeat mode.
  • To enable/disable these features, go to Audio > Audio Toolbar, and check/uncheck the checkboxes at the bottom of the page.

  • App Builder Compiler window

  • When compiling an app, instead of using the standard command/terminal window, the app builder now uses its own window.
  • This allows us to hide some of the distracting compiler warnings that were not problems but which might have given the impression that there was an issue with the app compilation.
  • The window also allows app compilation using macOS Ventura, which otherwise was not working.

  • Added ‘Close compiler window on build success’ option for Mac and Linux.

  • Fonts: Updated Abyssinica font to version 2.200 (17 Nov 2022)

  • Bloom Player: updated to version 2.1.19.

Bugs Fixed:

In the Android app:

  • When using GeckoView, the About page was not being displayed correctly. An external browser would be opened instead.
  • The book selector in the app toolbar could not be disabled when using GeckoView.

In the iOS app:

  • In the container app, the cancel command showed in the app bar on the first launch even though there was nothing to cancel.
  • In the container app, the browser window during package selection continued into the safe area at the bottom of the screen.

In the app builder:

  • If app project paths contained an ‘&’ character, the list of open apps would not be saved and restored properly between launches of the app builder.
  • In the ‘Add Translation’ dialog, i.e. when adding an app name, you could not specify a language code like ‘pt-BR’ with a hyphen and uppercase letters (#1124).
  • If the welcome page was showing, changing the interface language using the button at the top-right of the screen made the welcome screen disappear, rather than redisplaying it in the selected language.

Reading App Builder 10.1.1

Release date: 30 September 2022

New Features and Improvements:

  • Error Log Viewer
    • To view the log files created while running the app builder, select Tools > View Logs.
    • Up to five previous logs are kept in case they are needed to identify problems.
       
  • Removed Crosswalk libraries
    • The Crosswalk libraries, which are no longer used, have been removed from the release. This reduces the size of the app builder installation file.
       
  • JDK install version updated to: zulu11.58.23-ca-fx-jdk11.0.16.1
     
  • Gradle compiler version updated to 7.5.1.
     
  • Bloom Player version updated to 2.1.10.
     
  • Font updates: Awami Nastaliq (3.000) (20 Sept 2022)
     
  • Stability improvements.

Bugs Fixed:

In the Android app:

  • The audio player would crash when trying to play WebM audio files.
  • In picture story books, when playing audio on a page with background music, sometimes the background audio would not play until the app moved to the next page.
  • After searching for a video file on the device, if it was not found, the app would not go on to show an online video (if specified).
  • If a video file was not found on the device and no online option was available, a message should be shown.
  • The Play/Pause button animation would not show in some cases when searching for a file or when looking for the path to use for audio streaming or downloads.
  • Reduced stroke width of Play/Pause button animation circle when using the smaller Play button.
  • When using Branch deep linking, updated Android Advertising ID library to 17.1.0, which sets the required app permission.

In the iOS app:

  • The Next and Previous buttons needed to be updated on the audio toolbar to use the latest image. The other images on the toolbar were updated with the latest version used by Android to get consistent shading.
  • The Settings screen needed to get font, color, and text size from the Text Settings.
  • The layout configuration icon and menu drawer were not appearing consistently with configuration.

In the app builder:

  • In the Video dialog, if an offline MP4 file was not found in the project data folder, it would not be shown.
  • The Link tab should not be shown on the menu item dialog for Rate the App.

Reading App Builder 10.1

Release date: 09 September 2022

New Features and Improvements:

  • GeckoView for Graphite font rendering of complex scripts (Android)
    • Some scripts cannot be rendered correctly using the standard Android web viewer component. Instead we need to replace the viewer with a Graphite-enabled viewer, such as Crosswalk.
    • In Android 11 and 12, the Crosswalk component no longer worked and only displayed a black screen. To resolve this, Crosswalk has been replaced by Mozilla’s GeckoView component, which is the web viewer used in Firefox. GeckoView includes SIL’s Graphite font rendering libraries.
    • Using GeckoView adds at least 55 MB to your app size, so you will only want to use it if you really need to.
    • See Fonts > Font Handling, or the Font Handling page in the New App wizard.
       
  • Font updates:
  • Updated library versions:
    • Bloom Player updated to version 2.1.7.
    • Android library versions updated (material components, preferences, AppCompat support).
       
  • iOS app improvements:
    • If user taps the screen during splash screen delay, the delay is canceled and the app starts
    • The minimum deployment level was changed to 12.2, which reduces the size of the app that needs to be uploaded to the App Store by about 80MB.
    • Added Branch Native Link option support. To make use of this feature for your app, you need to go to the Branch.io configuration for your app and enable Native Link there.
       
  • For Scriptoria:
    • When publishing a PWA, you can add the publishing property BUILD_PWA_AUDIO_RELATIVE_URL so that the audio URL used will be a protocol relative URL so that the PWA will work when accessed from https (on a webserver) or http (from a wifi box).

Bugs Fixed:

In the Android app:

  • In older versions of Android, the app could crash when preparing an audio file, while animating the Play/Pause button.
  • When streaming audio, it was possible to hear the same audio track played twice, one of which was impossible to stop without exiting the app.

In the iOS app:

  • If the Audio file download feature is not selected and the user selects Automatic download, the option is not saved.

In the app builder:

  • In the Publishing > Google Play Listing page, when doing Import From Google Play on Windows, the results were not displayed.
  • When attempting to build and the Build Folder in Tools > Settings > Build Folders was not a valid folder, it would fail to start the build – but not report any error.
  • When migrating from an App Builder prior to version 10, the checking of the automatic JDK Location was not looking for Java 11. On Linux, Java 11 is an install requirement and was already present and it should have automatically switched to the new JDK.
  • On Linux, when manually installing the JDK, it was using the Windows JDK install zip.
  • The ‘Audio Not Found’ message on the Audio > Audio Settings page is no longer used. The localizable translation ‘Audio_File_Not_Found’, defined at Interface > Translations is used instead.

Reading App Builder 10.0.1

Release date: 13 July 2022

New Features and Improvements:

In the iOS app:

  • Support added for new audio sound bar play/pause buttons and button sizes.

Bugs Fixed:

In the iOS app:

  • App was crashing on startup because Keyman was being initialized even if not used.
  • App was crashing on startup if Keyman keyboards were used.

In the app builder:

  • Downloads of JDK and Android SDK as well as other network communications including with Scriptoria were not working on Mac.
  • When uploading to Scriptoria, video stills in the videos folder were not uploaded and deleted remotely.
  • When installing a new version on Windows, the old versions of Bloom JavaScript files were left and all were included in the app.
  • Changed “bloomd” to “bloompub” in user interface.

Reading App Builder 10.0

Release date: 29 June 2022

New Features and Improvements:

  • Building apps for Android 12 (API 31)
    • Android apps are now compiled for Android 12.
    • Apps continue to work on Android versions 4.1 and above.
    • You will need to use the Install Android SDK wizard to download and install a new version of the Android SDK before you build an app.
    • See Tools > Install Android SDK.
       
  • JDK 11
    • Android apps are now compiled using Java Development Kit (JDK) version 11, rather than version 8 which has been used until now.
    • You will need to use the Install JDK wizard to download a new version of the JDK before you build an app.
    • See Tools > Install JDK.
       
  • Audio toolbar styles
    • While preparing an audio file for playback, the play/pause button becomes an animated circle to indicate a waiting state.
    • The Play/Pause button can be displayed larger than the other buttons on the toolbar, as a simple arrow, a filled circle or an outline circle.
    • See Audio > Audio Toolbar.
       
  • Updates for Bloom books
  • Improved Keyman keyboard support
    • Updated to use Keyman version 15 (Android and iOS).
       
  • Updated iOS minimum version to 12.1
     
  • Font updates
  • Updated Gradle compiler to version 7.4.2.

Bugs Fixed:

In the Android app:

  • Background audio files in picture story books would cause the app to crash (#992)
  • Downloaded videos could not be found in Android 10+ devices.
  • Fixed various stability issues.

In the iOS app:

  • Fix whole word match delimiters for search to match Android.
  • Handle window opens from within the container app HTML.
  • Handle email and telephone links from within book text.
  • Use standard background color for single pane view.
  • Fix crash in audio controls on lock screen.
  • Support 3GP files.
  • Link pressed in YouTube video did not go to link.
  • Adjust verse on image text to initially fit on screen.
  • Fixed quiz book sometimes selecting the wrong answer for the first question.
  • Fixed issues with swiping in and out of a quiz book.
  • Fixed issues with HTML source quiz book displaying the font at the wrong size.
  • Fixed crash in container app with Firebase Analytics.
  • Fixed crash in container app that was not configured with a Firebase database and the asset package was configured to have user login. User login option is ignored in this case and the user login is not shown.

In the PWA app:

  • When using .3gp or .webm audio file, fall back to .caf or .mp3 audio file. The .3gp and .webm audio file format is not supported by Safari on iOS or macOS. You can provide alternate audio files in .caf audio file format (native to iOS and macOS) or .mp3 audio file format.

In the app builder:

  • If the Python 3 version of Aeneas was installed, Python might not be found and Aeneas could not run.
  • Double-clicking a book after reordering books viewed the wrong book.
  • Do not allow HTML books to have a book type other than ‘Default’.
  • When uploading or downloading a project to Scriptoria, you can choose how to handle video as well as audio.
  • The duration of 3GP files are now correctly determined.

Reading App Builder 9.3

Release date: 15 April 2022

New Features and Improvements:

  • Page views in Analytics:
  • If a page or chapter is viewed for more than 5 seconds, an analytics event is created.

  • iOS App improvements:

  • Adds search and other buttons to the right of the navigation bar depending on the size.

  • Documentation updates:

  • Installation instructions: describing the new Install JDK wizard.

  • Building Apps: added a description of variables program-type and program-version.

  • Use modern style for the Windows install wizard.

Bugs Fixed:

In the Android app:

  • Tapping a link to an audio clip would result in the app crashing (#965).
  • If the selected default interface language was not among the enabled interface languages, the app would crash on launch (#994).
  • On the song index screen, the number “1” would be displayed even if the numeral system was different.
  • Images could be displayed twice on a page if the book had previously been marked as a picture story book but the book type was now set to be default.
  • Handle sharing audio clips with WebM files for Android 10 and above.
  • If using Amplitude Analytics, the app would crash on older versions of Android.
  • Stability improvements.

In the iOS app:

  • The title of the Close button did not immediately change text when a new interface language was selected.
  • Automatically advance page if streaming audio is selected and playing.

In the app builder:

  • If the JDK or Android SDK folders have not been specified, we need to look first in the default folders for Windows, e.g. c:\jdk and c:\sdk.
  • Do not show the Contents menu page in the New App wizard if no books have been selected.
  • Do not allow JPEG files to be added as images if only PNG files are allowed, e.g. for navigation drawer images.

Reading App Builder 9.2.4

Release date: 22 February 2022

New Features and Improvements:

  • JDK Install wizard
  • You can now download and install the JDK using a wizard within the app builder.
  • Click Tools > Install JDK, or the Install JDK button on the Settings > Code Libraries tab.

  • Install buttons on Welcome screen

  • If the JDK has not been installed, an ‘Install JDK’ button will be displayed on the Welcome screen.

  • If the Android SDK has not been installed, an ‘Install Android SDK’ button will be displayed on the Welcome screen.

  • Documentation for About screen variables

  • Details about the %program-type% and %program-version% variables have been added to the ‘Building Apps’ documentation.

Bugs Fixed:

In the app builder:

  • There was an encoding problem on the Help menu when the interface was in French.

Reading App Builder 9.2.3

Release date: 15 February 2022

New Features and Improvements:

  • App Icons from IconKitchen
  • If you create your app icon using IconKitchen, the downloaded zip file will be correctly interpreted for setting Android legacy, adaptive and iOS icons.
  • Choose the IconKitchen-Output.zip file on the ‘Android Icon (legacy)’ or ‘iOS Icon’ page when selecting the icon image files.

Bugs Fixed:

In the app builder:

  • If the app project could not be saved after the New App wizard, an error message should be displayed rather than failing silently.
  • Borders which contained graphic elements only in the corners, and not on the sides, were not interpreted properly, leaving too much top and bottom padding around the text.
  • If the Android SDK Install wizard failed to rename certain folders, this should be done before trying to build an app.
  • JDK version 17 will not work for building an app. A check is made to ensure that a valid JDK version (8 to 16) is specified.

Reading App Builder 9.2.2

Release date: 02 February 2022

New Features and Improvements:

  • In Android versions 10 and above, rules about how apps can write to external device storage were changed with the introduction of “scoped storage”. This has affected where audio files are downloaded.:
  • From now on, downloaded audio files will be saved in a sub-folder of the phone’s Music folder.

  • For Android icon creation, link to the new IconKitchen tool rather than Android Asset Studio.

  • Added documentation about compressing videos for including in app assets.

  • See Building Apps > 7.2. How do I reduce the size of a video that I want to package within the app?

  • Improved information about which code (IMEI, serial, Android ID) to specify on the Security Devices dialog, according to the Android version.

Bugs Fixed:

In the Android app:

  • If a song book was linked to from a Contents menu, the first song would be shown instead of the song index page.

In the iOS app:

  • Fixed quiz feature functionality.
  • The Security authorization screen was off centre.
  • Single audio story book: If you pressed Play on a screen other than the first, the audio still started at the beginning.
  • Single audio file story book: Moving the progress bar did not set the sound to the correct page.
  • Do not display the audio toolbar on the Contents screen.
  • Landscape subtitles could appear in portrait mode if device was lying flat.
  • The slider drawer title image always displayed with a white background.

In the app builder:

  • After clicking ‘Update from Source’ on the Book File tab, the text in the Preview window would not be updated unless you moved away from the tab and came back again.
  • Missing translations on the ‘Show Access Code’ tab of the Security configuration dialog.
  • If you select the registration screen, restricted devices or device-specific code access, the builder needs to check that the user interface messages have been provided before building the app.
  • If you used the Android SDK Installation wizard on a Mac, when you tried to ‘Install APK’ on a device, you would get permission denied messages.
  • The Video thumbnail grabber was not working for MP4 video files.

Reading App Builder 9.2.1

Release date: 23 December 2021

New Features and Improvements:

  • Improvements to Book File tab
  • The ‘Source’ tab for a book has been renamed ‘Book File’.
  • The project filename and original source filename are displayed, together with the date/time last modified for each.
  • Clicking the ‘Edit Source’ button launches the associated file editor for the original source file.
  • Clicking the ‘Update from Source’ button updates the file in the project with the original source file.
  • An ‘Update from Source’ menu item has been added to the popup menu for a book on the treeview.

  • Navigation Menu Items

  • The rows in the Navigation Menu Items table can be reordered by dragging rows up and down.

Bugs Fixed:

In the app builder:

  • ‘Authentication’ was mispelt in the documentation.
  • For some tables, the popup menu item corresponding to the double-click action was not indicated in bold.

Reading App Builder 9.2

Release date: 10 December 2021

New Features and Improvements:

  • Quizzes
  • You can create multiple-choice quizzes with questions and answers.
  • Questions and answers can be in words and/or images, with an audio recording for each.
  • Sound effects for right and wrong answers can be specified.
  • Explanations in text and audio can be given after a user taps on an answer.
  • A final score is given after the user answers all the questions.
  • For full instructions, please see the new “Creating Apps with Quizzes” manual, accessible from the Help menu.

  • Search bars for Styles, Colors and Interface Translations

  • It is now easier to find the row in the table you are looking for. The Styles, Colors and Translations tables all have search bars at the top. Begin typing to filter the list of items displayed.

  • Image gallery for navigation menu items

  • Added an icon gallery in the Add Menu Item wizard and Edit dialog, allowing you to select the navigation menu item icon.

Bugs Fixed:

In the app builder:

  • Remove ‘Create Job’ option in the aeneas synchronization wizard.
  • Removed the old Scheherazade font, so users are encouraged to use Scheherazade New.

Reading App Builder 9.1.1

Release date: 05 November 2021

Bugs Fixed:

In the Android app:

  • When doing a long press on a word or phrase in the viewer, the Copy and Share icons were hardly visible if the popup background colour was dark.
  • When doing a long press in the edit box on the Search screen, the Paste icon was hardly visible if the popup background colour was dark.
  • In some situations, a long press in the edit box on the Search screen could result in the app crashing.

In the app builder:

  • If the Create New Keystore wizard failed to create a keystore file, it would say it had succeeded (#818).
  • Spaces could be added accidentally to publishing property names. Extra spaces are now trimmed at the beginning and end of property names and values.
  • When uploading a project to Scriptoria with the audio mode set to “Send Assets”, the audio clips that were assets were not included.
  • When building Android apps, preference should be given to the Google repository rather than JCenter for downloading libraries.

Reading App Builder 9.1

Release date: 26 October 2021

New Features and Improvements:

  • Improved audio file handling (Android app)
  • The ExoPlayer audio player is now used instead of the standard Android media player. This handles WebM audio files in earlier versions of Android. WebM audio files are now supported in Android 4.1+.

  • Contents Menu improvements

  • You can set the image width separately for different contents menu items, for example making some images take up half the screen width and others to take up the whole menu item.

  • See the ‘Titles and Image’ page for the contents item.

  • Language selection in App Builders

  • If you run the Windows installer in French, Spanish or Russian, the app builder interface will default to this language when it first launches.

  • You can swap between interface languages using a new selector button a the top right of the main app builder window.

  • Language definition page

  • There is a new language definition page in the New App and Add Book Collection wizards.

  • This includes an ISO-639-3 language code chooser, and a chooser for BCP 47 language tag scripts.

  • Fine Tune Timings improvements

  • Buttons have been added to move back or forward 10 seconds.

  • Quizzes

  • You can create multiple choice quizzes with text, images and audio.

  • More information will follow in the coming weeks, including documentation and training.

  • Share Link to app installer file

  • When publishing Android apps as Android App Bundles (AAB) to Google Play, the “Share app installation file” feature is disabled. This is because Google Play uses the AAB to send each device a customised APK which is just right for that device but does not contain all of the resources necessary to be shared with other devices.
  • The new “Share link to app on website” allows you to publish a full APK to a website that can be shared in the app.

  • If you are publishing apps using Scriptoria, you can add the publishing property BUILD_SHARE_DOWNLOAD_APP_LINK=1 and Scriptoria will enable this feature and set the URL to a Scriptoria URL which provides a download page with the icon, title, description, APK size, and “Download APK” button. It uses the localized string from the Google Play Listing information. There is a ‘Download_APK’ entry in the Interface translation that can be customized per project.

  • Bloom Player version 2.0.86.

  • Includes a new page selector slider, allowing you to move to a page quickly within the book.

  • iOS App

  • Support for all Deep Linking configurations.
  • Selecting About for a Container App will display about information from the container app configuration as well as the information from the asset package currently loaded.
  • Added support for iOS 15.
  • Upgraded Firebase to the latest version.

Bugs Fixed:

In the Android app:

  • Bloom books that used the default Andika Basic font were being shown in a standard sans serif font, not Andika (#835).
  • Registration screen: some of the messages were hard-coded to English and could not be translated.

In the iOS app:

  • Video sound was continuing after swiping to the next page.
  • Add version name to asset package configuration.

In the PWA:

  • When using WebM audio for chapters, include MP3 audio as a fallback for Safari on macOS and iOS. Make sure to include MP3 files with the same basename as the WebM files (e.g. if there is Book01.webm, include Book01.mp3).

In the app builder:

  • Import from Word documents: list numbering was incorrect when lists were interrupted by blank paragraphs.
  • Allow logout of Scriptoria. The Login process launches a web browser to do the authentication. It launches the page in the front most window. If the user has multiple windows with different profiles, then the wrong might be used. The user can logout and bring focus to the correct window and attempt to login again.
  • Book names with double quotes would break the book name dropdown in the PWA (#827).
  • When downloading a project from Scriptoria, if the images were changed by someone else then this would not display correctly (old thumbnails of images still cached).
  • Added a hint in the About box configuration page on how to include illustrations.
  • Added missing French translations for various pages in the app builder interface.
  • If Aeneas was installed while App Builder was running, checking its installation and using it to synchronis text and audio would fail.
  • If you edited or reset the interface translations, the modified flag would not be set and you would not be warned about saving the project before closing the App Builder.
  • It was not possible to delete the video filename in the Video dialog.
  • The Convert Audio Files dialog would not use the folder specified but would always output files in its default folder.

Reading App Builder 9.0.1

Release date: 19 August 2021

New Features and Improvements:

  • Install Android SDK
  • Updated to download and install the Command Line tools version 5.0.
  • Made unzipping the package files more reliable after downloading them.

Bugs Fixed:

In the Android app:

  • Include access mode (server or local) in audio analytics events.

In the iOS app:

  • Videos configured as having their source in an external folder don’t play streaming link.
  • Include access mode (server or local) in audio analytics events.

In the app builder:

  • When building an Asset Package from a project with Firebase enabled, do not require iOS Firebase configuration. Firebase is defined in the Container app.
  • When adding Publishing Properties, do not allow blank entries.
  • When adding Interface Languages, do not allow invalid entries (which cannot be deleted).
  • When sorting videos by a different column, display the correct data when editing an entry.

Reading App Builder 9.0

Release date: 04 August 2021

New Features and Improvements:

  • Building for Android 11 (API 30)
  • Google now requires all new apps to be compiled for Android version 11 (API 30), and updates to existing apps will need to be compiled for Android 11 before November 2021.
  • Before building an app, you will need to go to Tools > Android SDK and click ‘Install Packages’ to update your Android SDK packages, or install a fresh Android SDK installation by clicking ‘Install Android SDK’.
  • See the updated Installation Instructions.

  • iOS Container app

  • A container iOS app can be created which gives the user a choice of app contents on first launch. You need to specify a URL to a website which will give the user the choice of Asset Packages to download.
  • See App > IPA on a Mac.
  • Assets Packages for the container app can also be created using Mac, Linux or Windows. See App > iOS.

  • More information on this feature is available in the Installing and Building Apps on a Mac documentation.

  • Android SDK Install Wizard

  • Installing the Android SDK was not easy for new users. They needed to go to the Android Developers’ website, download the command line tools zip file, unzip it to their computer, and then Install Packages to download and install the other Android packages.
  • There is now a simple wizard that takes you through all of these steps. See Tools > Android SDK > Install Android SDK.
  • You can now install the Android SDK from the Tools menu. See Tools > Install Android SDK.

  • You can check the Android SDK installation from the Tools menu. See Tools > Check Android SDK Installation.

  • Improvements to Keyman keyboard support

  • Android and iOS apps now contain version 14 of the Keyman engine.

  • You can specify what text to display on the keyboard’s space bar (Android only).

  • Updated documentation:

  • Installation Instructions: updated section on installing the Android SDK, now using the Install Android SDK wizard.
  • Installing and Building on Mac: update sections on installing JDK and Android SDK, and added section on building iOS container apps.

  • Distributing Apps: updated all sections, including publishing on Google Play with Android App Bundles.

  • Updated Fonts:

  • Padauk (5.000) (18 June 2021)

  • Scheherazade New (3.200) (15 July 2021).

  • For iOS apps, the minimum deployment level has been changed to iOS 10.0.

  • Updated Libraries:

  • Gradle compiler updated to version 7.1.1.
  • Firebase libraries updated to BoM 28.1.0.
  • Bloom Player updated to version 2.0.75.

Bugs Fixed:

In the Android app:

  • When downloading an audio file after pressing the Play button, the file would not automatically begin playing after download. You would see a Pause button and would need to tap it twice to start the audio.
  • When viewing a Bloom book, pressing the back arrow would open the navigation drawer if the wrong contents menu navigation type had been selected. It is now fixed to moving back to the contents menu.
  • On the registration page, markdown links to web pages were not handled.
  • When building an Android App Bundle (AAB), the “Share app installer file” option should be disabled (since the APK file on the phone will be device-specific and not useful to share with others).

In the iOS app:

  • Turn off full screen mode when transitioning from landscape mode to portrait.

In the app builder:

  • Images were not being displayed in EPUB documents created by the app builder (#705).
  • Adaptive icons were not being saved if no background image or background color were defined.
  • If the book collection ID was changed, image and video placement references need to be updated (#762).
  • When adding new user details fields to the registration page configuration, non-alphanumeric chars should be removed from the field code.
  • Do not show the ‘Allow skip’ checkbox in the Security configuration for device-specific access codes.
  • Do not show Lint errors when building Android app releases.
  • The download link for Azul JDK 8 needed updating.
  • Allow uploading projects to Scriptoria from multiple App Builders (e.g. RAB & DAB) at the same time.

Reading App Builder 8.6.6

Release date: 04 June 2021

New Features and Improvements:

  • Added ‘Text Font’ setting for the Contents Menu.
  • Otherwise the font for the Contents menu was being set to whichever font was last used in the text display.

  • Added ‘View Apps in Group’ checkbox menu item to the root of the app tree on the left of the screen, to turn on and off viewing by group.

  • Optional ‘SKIP’ button on Registration screen.

  • Scriptoria Improvements:

  • When a user uploads or downloads a project, an entry is added to the product details’ history of events.

  • The builder of the project in Scriptoria can add the authors so that the author can upload/download the project directly to Scriptoria. This requires the author to have a Scriptoria account.

  • iOS App: Added support for Firebase realtime database and user registration.

  • Updated Mac installation and building documentation for use of Firebase features in an iOS app.

  • Updated libraries used to build apps.

  • Updated Bloom Player to version 2.0.58.
  • Use latest version of Branch deep-linking library.
  • Use latest AndroidX appcompat and material libraries.
  • Use latest FFmpeg library.
  • Use mavenCentral rather than JCenter as the repository for downloading libraries.

Bugs Fixed:

In the Android app:

  • The registration screen could complain about a lack of internet connection in the latest versions of Android, even though there was an internet connection.
  • Allow links to image web pages in the About screen.
  • Fixed some occasional causes of crashes within the app.

In the iOS app:

  • The wrong top image was being displayed when swiping between books.
  • Inconsistency with Android with picture book backgrounds. It now displays black background for the image in landscape mode and the default background when in portrait mode.
  • A crash occurred when the configured font file was not found.
  • A crash occurred on pre iOS 11 installs where webm files were configured.

In the app builder:

  • Rows in the book table could not be dragged up or down to reorder the items.
  • Menu items in the Contents Menu could not be dragged to reorder them.
  • If you tried to add an image from the images folder in the project data, the image file would be deleted.
  • On Windows, connecting to Scriptoria would only work once and then hang on subsequent attempts.
  • When uploading a project to Scriptoria, if there was something missing in the Google Play Listing, a warning would appear but it would still upload.
  • When downloading a project from Scriptoria, if the project name changed, then the project would not download correctly.

Reading App Builder 8.6.5

Release date: 04 May 2021

Bugs Fixed:

  • If a deprecated analytics type (old Google Analytics or Amazon Analytics) was used in a project, the project would not be opened properly and would lose its books and settings.

Reading App Builder 8.6.3

Release date: 31 March 2021

Includes changes made in 8.6.1 and 8.6.2.

New Features and Improvements:

  • The main toolbar in the App Builder now shows only those buttons that are applicable.
  • When launching for the first time, only the ‘New App…’ button will appear. Other buttons will be shown when there is an app to build or install.

  • Add option of “Always use main theme” for dark theme.

  • Installation changes:

  • Windows 32-bit is no longer supported. Windows 64-bit is required.

  • When selecting the Android SDK folder in Settings, look in the parent and child folders of the selected folder if the folder was selected incorrectly.

  • Scheherazade New font updated to version 3.100.

Bugs Fixed:

In the app builder:

  • Allow .jpeg files to be selected for screenshots on the Publishing > Store Listing page.
  • Validate build folder for Windows. If special/accented characters are in the default path, use C:\temp\SIL\build instead.
  • Include additional files in the Java runtime library.
  • Added missing French interface translations to the Analytics page.
  • Added more space for several French and Spanish translations.

Reading App Builder 8.6

Release date: 15 March 2021

New Features and Improvements:

  • Crosswalk Viewer for complex script handling in Android apps
  • The Crosswalk viewer component had been removed in version 8.0 (August 2020) because of changes in Android 10 which caused it to crash. It is now working again and can be used if you have a complex script which relies on Graphite font rendering.
  • See Fonts > Font Handling.

  • Include Java runtime to avoid JAR file association and high resolution screen problems

  • After installing the App Builder on Windows, some users found that they could not launch the program because of incorrect JAR file associations. This has now been resolved by including a minimal Java runtime in the Windows setup program that is always used to run the App Builder (rather than searching for the Java runtime elsewhere on your computer).

  • This change will also mean better support for users with high resolution screens, since we use a more recent version of Java.

  • Default images for menu items

  • When adding additional menu items to the navigation drawer menu (e.g. Visit our website, Rate this app, etc.), default images are provided.

  • Improvements to the iOS app

  • Added support for Bloom books, using Bloom Player

  • Support for streaming of WebM audio files

  • Welcome screen

  • The App Builder logo and a ‘New App…’ button have been added to the welcome screen, rather than it being a blank page.

  • Install APK improvement

  • Added more information about enabling USB debugging to the Install APK confirmation dialog.

  • Keystore usability improvements

  • When creating a new keystore, on the Alias page, you can choose to ‘Use the same password as on the previous page’.
  • When specifying a keystore, on the Signing page, you can choose to ‘Use the same password as above’ for the alias.

  • When trying to build an app, a warning is shown if the keystore password has been entered incorrectly.

  • Updated Bloom Player to version 2.0.47.

  • Updated Firebase and Material Design library versions.

  • Documentation improvements

  • Building Apps: Added section on ‘Installing the app on your phone’.
  • Building Apps: Restored sub-section on Crosswalk in the Fonts section.

Bugs Fixed:

In the Android app:

  • Audio clips with spaces in their filenames could not be played within the app.
  • If you started playing one audio clip then tapped on a second one, two clips would play at the same time rather than stopping the first one.
  • Do not show the line height slider when showing the text appearance dialog for a contents menu.
  • Handle line breaking on zero-width spaces in the Crosswalk viewer, e.g. for Thai scripts.

In the iOS app:

  • Fix issue with colors on text size popup slider controls.
  • Book names over 15 characters were only showing the first three characters for the book button on the main screen. Changed so that book names over 18 characters will show the first 18 characters followed by ellipsis.
  • In an Right-to-Left configuration, the back to contents arrow pointed in the wrong direction.

In the app builder:

  • Yes/No dialog boxes should be shown in the centre of the App Builder window, not the centre of the user’s desktop.
  • French translations were missing on the Contents Menu configuration and Notification Icon pages.
  • More space was needed for some French translations which were being truncated on the screen.
  • The Android device architecture specified on the ‘After Build’ tab in Settings was not being used.
  • Previous/Next image buttons in the Contents menu item dialog needed to be wider.
  • Use thumbnail.jpg as the default contents menu item image for Bloom books.
  • Handle \s1 as the song title (as an alternative to \s) when building the song book image.

Reading App Builder 8.5

Release date: 12 February 2021

New Features and Improvements:

  • Copyright and Licensing:
  • New Copyright and Licensing page in the New App wizard, combining both copyright and licensing.
  • New Copyright Helper wizard (see the Copyright Helper button on this page) to help to construct the copyright and licensing statement from title of work, copyright owner, year of publication, etc. This wizard contains an Organisation selector and a License selector.
  • Buttons for copyright and trademark symbols.
  • Copyright and Licensing metadata are merged and can be viewed on the Copyright and Licensing tab on the About page of Reading App Builder.
  • New variables for the About box, including %copyright-all%, which displays all of the text, audio and image copyright information.

  • Install Latest APK on Device

  • If you have recently built an APK but didn’t have your phone connected to your computer, or if you want to install the same APK on multiple devices, you can use the ‘Install Latest APK on Device’ feature.
  • See “Install APK” on the main toolbar, or “Build > Install Latest APK on Device” from the main menu, or “ Install Latest APK on Device” on the right-click popup menu in the app tree on the left of the screen.

  • If no APK is found, you will be asked if you want to build it.

  • Support for .webm audio files containing Ogg Opus audio format

  • Compared to MP3, Ogg Opus .webm files provide better quality audio with a smaller file size.

  • Requires Android 5.0 and above and iOS 11.

  • Changes to New App wizard:

  • The Font Handling page has been removed from the wizard, and Grandroid has been enabled by default (with fewer people owning Android 4.0-4.3 devices, it is less likely that those building apps will think of testing on such devices). Grandroid can be turned off in the Fonts > Font Handling page if it is not needed.

  • Updated fonts and modules:

  • Updated Bloom Player to version 2.0.43.

  • Updated Awami Nastaliq font to version 2.100

  • User interface improvements:

  • Themes: allow striped tables which is defined for some themes (Light Flat and Dark Flat).
  • Increased the height of the Project Description field.
  • Removed the choice of Crosswalk for the Font Handling page, and added a link to App Support.

Bugs Fixed:

In the Android app:

  • The long press popup menu items were being shown as asterisks on some Android 6 and 7 devices. Icons will now be shown for Android 8 and above.

In the iOS app:

  • Fix crash that could occur when downloading audio file whose name contained spaces
  • Improve handling of internet disconnects while streaming audio.
  • Improve maintaining playback speed when transitioning between pages.

In the app builder:

  • If there are revoked iOS Signing Identity certificates, use the correct user selected certificate.
  • If a non-existant Android SDK folder was specified, the Settings dialog could not be opened again.
  • The final page of a wizard should have a ‘Finish’ button rather than a ‘Next >’ button.
  • Consider ! or ? followed immediately by an alphabetic character as not a phrase-end character (for Solomon Islands languages which use these markers at both the start and end of phrases).
  • On Windows, correctly determine Classic mode for dialog frames.

Reading App Builder 8.4

Release date: 15 January 2021

New Features and Improvements:

  • New look and feel to the app builder desktop interface, with a choice of themes.
  • Updated folder and book icons for the app tree on the left of the screen.
  • To change the theme, go to Tools > Settings > Interface.
  • You can specify a dark theme to be used if the app builder is launched when the computer is in dark mode.

  • Faster launch times for Android apps.

  • Improved Text Appearance dialog:

  • Added font size as a number, to the right of the text size slider. (Android)
  • Added line height slider, to adjust line spacing.
  • These sliders can be turned on or off (See Features > Formatting).

  • If both sliders are disabled, and there is only one choice of color theme, the text appearance icon and navigation drawer menu item will not appear.

  • Enhancements to app publishing with Scriptoria:

  • If an app project is in Scriptoria, you can download it (File > Open App using Scriptoria)
  • You can download the latest version of the app from Scriptoria (see the Download button on the Publishing page).

  • Updated Google Play listing languages (added 13 languages) to match what is available in the Google Play Developer Console.

  • Audio controls should always be left-to-right, including the seek bar (which is shown when there are no timing files).

  • Improved responsiveness of the Interface pages and translation tables in the app builder.

  • Updated Installation Instructions:

  • Android SDK command line tools are now in cmdline-tools folder.
  • The recommended JDK is now Azul Zulu OpenJDK.

Bugs Fixed:

In the Android app:

  • Search was crashing on devices running Android 4 and 5.
  • The menu shown after a long press in the viewer would show * rather than icons on Android 5 devices.
  • On Android 10 devices, audio files in external storage (outside the app-specific data folder) were not found by the app. They will now be found if they are indexed in the app’s Media Store.
  • Do not show the page selector after the book selector for books with only one page.

In the iOS app:

  • If dark theme is not selected for the app, iPhone transition to dark mode will not switch to dark theme. Previously it did, and the app would appear in a mode that the application developer did not support.
  • For dark and sepia themes, correctly invert colors in the border.
  • Use configured colors for text size slider.

In the app builder:

  • Android SDK command line tools were not being found in the cmdline-tools folder.
  • When installing Android SDK packages in the Settings > Android SDK tab, the Platform API version number would stay red, “Not Found”, after completing the installation.
  • Correctly handle expired or missing iOS Signing identity.
  • When importing a book from an EPUB document, the reading order of the pages was not being read correctly from the EPUB’s contents.opf file.
  • If importing a song book from a Word document, manual line breaks in song titles would appear as \zbr codes in the song indexes.
  • If you sorted the Illustrations table by clicking on a column header, double-clicking on a row would show you the wrong image.

Reading App Builder 8.3.1

Release date: 19 November 2020

New Features and Improvements:

  • Added Scheherazade New font – an Arabic script font.

  • Updated Firebase libraries to use the latest versions.

Bugs Fixed:

In the Android app:

  • Apps were containing a reference to an AdMob library (a sub-dependency of Firebase Analytics) which could cause Google Play to ask whether the app contained ads.

In the iOS app:

  • Search with books with names less than 3 characters and no abbreviation defined could crash the app.
  • In landscape mode with no orientation lock defined, the screen could get flipped to an upside down view when navigating to a new book.

In the app builder:

  • When using Firebase Analytics in an iOS app, the app builder was not checking if the iOS config file was included in the project. If it wasn’t the app would crash on startup.
  • If you changed the body font size in Styles, this would be reset to its original setting after running Export to HTML.
  • The user registration configuration dialog did not appear when clicking ‘Configure Registration’ on the App > Security tab.

Reading App Builder 8.3

Release date: 05 November 2020

New Features and Improvements:

  • Fine Tune Timings:
  • Two right-click menu options are now available:
  • “Fine Tune Timings” – create the files for local fine tuning and launch the browser immediately.
  • “Fine Tuning File Manager” – launch the Fine Tuning File Manager wizard, allowing you to create timing files to send to others.

  • Updated Bloom Player to version 2.0.17.

Bugs Fixed:

In the Android app:

  • Searching for audio files on the device could cause the app to crash in Android versions lower than 10 if the read permission had not already been granted.

In the iOS app:

  • Replace icons for audio controls with less pixelated versions.
  • If in full screen portrait mode, continue to hide the audio control bar when advancing from page to page in a storybook app.
  • Correct problem that made black borders disappear in Sepia mode.
  • Use UI drawer item text font for slide drawer menu items.
  • Use the same color for the bottom area background after the last option in the slide view drawer that is used for the option entries.
  • Support color codes with a transparent alpha setting.
  • Horizontal and vertical elements of the border were adjusted differently which could cause corners to appear squashed or horizontal components to be wider than vertical. Now they are consistent.
  • The option to use a default language if the current interface language was not available was not matching the languages properly, resulting in it taking the default even when the translation for the current interface language was available.

In the app builder:

  • Logging into Scriptoria to send the project data could fail.
  • On macOS, trying to create a new keystore would fail.
  • On macOS, dragging the window to a secondary monitor would cause the App Builder to crash.
  • On macOS, change the JRE (which includes OpenJFX) used in the App Builder so that the Viewer works again.

Reading App Builder 8.2

Release date: 14 October 2020

New Features and Improvements:

  • Publishing with Scriptoria improvements:
  • Added tool to Import Google Play Listing. This will take the information from the online Google Play Store and add it to the project. See Publishing > Google Play Store Listing.
  • Added field for specifying a Promotional video.
  • Additions to command line arguments for sending to Scriptoria.

  • Contents Menu:

  • Added Clear button to allow you to remove an image for a menu item.

  • Documentation Updates:

  • Updated iOS Certification Authority information in the ‘Building on Mac’ document.

  • Updated code signing certificate for Windows installs.

  • Updated Bloom Player to version 2.0.7.

  • iOS App

  • Updated to build template app with XCode 12. SAB users are not required to upgrade to XCode 12 at this time.

Bugs Fixed:

In the Android app:

  • There were sharing permission problems in Android 10, e.g. sharing the APK file.
  • Handle finding media files in external device folders on Android 10.
  • Do not try to download the audio for the next chapter if user is at the last chapter (app would crash).
  • If audio file is not found on device for an external folder source, change the toolbar back to the paused state.
  • Add Paste button to the context menu in the Search screen.
  • Make sure security access code message dialog appears after a splash screen.
  • If only the Dark or Sepia color themes were enabled, the Normal theme was still showing first.
  • If only one color theme was enabled, there was a white row at the bottom of the in the text size popup.
  • Fixed some stability issues which could cause the app to crash.

In the app builder:

  • In Export to HTML, the text was not being scrolled when the audio reached the bottom of the page.
  • Selecting a table row with the left mouse button and then right-clicking could be interpreted as a double-click.
  • The footer text direction was not being saved correctly.
  • Recognise the Aeneas install location when using Python 3.
  • Do not include progress bar images when building for iOS.

Reading App Builder 8.1

Release date: 26 August 2020

New Features and Improvements:

  • Audio file streaming in the iOS app.

  • About box improvement:

  • If you put three or more hyphens (---), asterisks (***) or underscores (___) on a line without any other text, the app will display a horizontal line.

  • Keyman Engine updated to version 13.0.6216.

  • Updated AndroidX libraries.

Bugs Fixed:

In the Android app:

  • The history of pages viewed would disappear between sessions if you had not selected a different book and page within a session.
  • Tapping the ‘Submit’ button twice in the Add User screen could cause problems.

In the iOS app:

  • Styles are applied to side menu background, text and icons.

In the app builder:

  • When generating PWA output and the name and short name fields were blank, then default App Name was not being used (like it says it would be in the Export to HTML Settings dialog).
  • Fine Tuning keyboard shortcuts N (next) and P (previous) were not working.
  • Removed unused interface translation rows from the translation tables.

Reading App Builder 8.0.1

Release date: 11 August 2020

New Features and Improvements:

  • Fine Tuning wizard
  • Show the wizard when choosing Fine Tune Timings in the Audio Files table.
  • Remember previous choices in the wizard.

Bugs Fixed:

In the Android app:

  • When using the access code security method, the key was not being read correctly from the project configuration file.

In the app builder:

  • If using Arabic script, add the Arabic comma and question mark as default phrase ending characters for audio-text synchronization.
  • Android app compilation failed when using both Firebase and Amplitude analytics in the same app.
  • When showing the building app progress bar, the title was not displayed correctly.
  • When generating HTML with video embedded, the HTML formatting had unbalanced tags and the audio toolbar didn’t display correctly.
  • Missing app interface translations in French.

Reading App Builder 8.0

Release date: 04 August 2020

New Features and Improvements:

  • Android apps are compiled for Android 10
  • Google Play now requires new apps to be compiled for Android 10.
  • Apps can still be installed on Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) and above.

  • Audio file streaming

  • Instead of downloading audio files, they can be streamed directly from the web server.
  • For each audio source, you can specify whether streaming or downloading or both are options. See the Access Method in the Edit File Source dialog.

  • If both streaming and downloading are options, the user can choose their preferred access method in the app Settings. The default access method is specified on the Audio > Audio Settings page.

  • Facebook Analytics

  • Basic support: integration of Facebook SDK library for logging when the app is launched.

  • To add Facebook, go to Analytics, click Add Analytics Account, and select Facebook Analytics as the Account Type. Enter your Facebook App ID.

  • Android App Bundles

  • Instead of creating an APK (or multiple APKs), you can create an Android App Bundle to upload to Google Play.

  • Select Build > “Build Android App Bundle” in the main menu, or right-click on an app name in the left-hand menu, and select “Build Android App Bundle”.

  • Updated libraries:

  • Gradle build tool updated to version 6.5.1.
  • Bloom Player updated to version 1.1.85.
  • Firebase libraries updated to latest versions.
  • Crashlytics library updated to use latest Firebase version.

Bugs Fixed:

In the iOS app:

  • If you choose not to “Enable book selection popup”, this setting is now supported.
  • Audio setting allowing playing to continue and automatically advance to next book was not supported
  • Forward and backward audio buttons would not advance to next or previous book

In the app builder:

  • Turn off auto-scrolling in Fine Tune Timings, which was making it difficult to adjust timings.
  • Turn off tooltips for the move back/forward buttons in Fine Tune Timings – they could get in the way.
  • Stylesheet filename was incorrect in Export to HTML index.html.
  • When sending files to Scriptoria, it was always sending large files (those larger than 16MB such as embedded video). Now it correctly detects whether they are different.
  • When building iOS apps that do not use Analytics, also remove the debug symbols. (Apple App Store submission was complaining about unneeded debug symbols being included.)

Known Issues:

  • The Crosswalk viewer, which handles Graphite font rendering, is not available. Please contact the support team if you need it for your app.

Reading App Builder 7.2

Release date: 09 July 2020

New Features and Improvements:

  • Updated Russian interface translations

  • Analytics in iOS apps

  • Support Firebase Analytics.

  • Support Amplitude Analytics.

  • iOS App improvements:

  • Support for dark mode.

  • Add file size to the “Download Audio?” message box.

  • The App Builder macOS app is notarized.

  • Use Android ID rather than IMEI code for device-specific security access in Android 10.

  • In Android 10, apps no longer have permission to access to the IMEI code, but they do have access to a unique device and app-specific ID, called the Android ID.

  • Long Press selection menu

  • Uses image buttons for Copy Text and Share Text.

  • Fine Tuning Wizard

  • Right-click on one or more books and select Fine Tuning.
  • Choose between fine tuning yourself or packaging the fine tuning files to send to others.

  • If you choose to send to others, the audio files can be copied and the folders zipped, book by book.

  • Improvements to Fine Tuning interface

  • Audio speed control: can slow down or speed up audio when doing fine tuning.
  • Documentation ‘Using aeneas for Audio-Text Synchronization’ updated.
  • Added keyboard shortcuts:
  • Spacebar – start/pause audio
  • T – save timing file
  • N – start playing from the next row
  • P – start playing from the previous row
  • B – set phrase start time to be at the current audio position
  • A (or Q) – move start of current row back 1 second
  • S – move start of current row back 0.1 second
  • D – move start of current row forward 0.1 second

  • F – move start of current row forward 1 second

  • Audio file handling

  • The app builder now warns if variable rate MP3 files are added.

  • Navigation Drawer improvements

  • The text size of navigation drawer menu items is now adjustable according to the interface language text size.

  • Updated Bloom Player (for displaying Bloom Books) to version 1.1.80.

  • Updated Keyman Engine to version 13.0.6214.

  • Updated fonts

  • Harmattan (2.000) (19 June 2020).

Bugs Fixed:

In the Android app:

  • When opening the app in some situations, the app bar appeared right at the top of the screen, partially obscured by the status bar.
  • Android 5.0 and 5.1 devices could crash on startup due to a bug in the androidx app compat library.
  • If an expiry data was set with the app exiting on tapping OK in the message, if the user tapped outside the message, the app would not exit.
  • If device-specific security is used and a device was not authorised to use the app, if the user tapped outside the ‘Permission denied’ message box, the app would display a blank screen rather than exit.
  • If using the access by code security mode, the app would crash when administrators tried to add a user.

In the iOS app:

  • Settings text was clipped off if RTL interface language in use.
  • Settings back button pointed in the wrong direction if RTL interface language in use.
  • Search result label now aligned to right if RTL language.
  • Search switches for match display and match accents were displayed incorrectly if RTL interface language in use.
  • Borders were displayed incorrectly for RTL languages.
  • User menu items were not displayed by interface language.

In the app builder:

  • Fine Tuning: times ending in .999 seconds were incorrectly displayed as .100.
  • Fine Tuning: the page did not automatically scroll up when the highlighted row was near the bottom.

Reading App Builder 7.1 (Mac only)

Release date: 28 May 2020

New Features and Improvements:

  • iOS support for new contents menu title features.

Bugs Fixed:

  • iOS Template app re-built with Xcode 11.5 to fix crashes on 32-bit devices (e.g. iPhone 5).

Reading App Builder 7.1

Release date: 16 May 2020

New Features and Improvements:

  • Spanish translations
  • The app builder interface for 7.0 now has a complete translation in Spanish. To use it, go to Tools > Settings > Interface.
  • Added missing app translations in Spanish.

  • Contents Menu improvements

  • The title at the top of the Contents screen can be configured as one of four options: the app name, a specific title to use for all contents screens, a screen-specific title or a blank title.

  • In the iOS app, a long press of the back arrow button returns to the top level content screen when Contents menus are configured.

  • Updated libraries

  • Latest Firebase libraries.

  • Latest Bloom Player plugin (version 1.1.69).

  • iOS Template app built with Xcode 11.4.

Bugs Fixed:

In the Android app:

  • Various stability improvements.

In the iOS app:

  • Share popups were not displaying properly on iPad. They appeared as small slivers at the top of the screen.

In the app builder:

  • When using Firebase, the minimum Android API version should be Android 4.1 Jelly Bean (API 16). A warning message should be shown if the minimum version is less than this, otherwise the build will fail.
  • If a non-breaking space character was specified in Changes using the Unicode “\u00A0” it would not appear in the resulting HTML.

Reading App Builder 7.0.2

Release date: 27 April 2020

Bugs Fixed in the Android app:

  • More checks for null references which could cause the app to crash.
  • The READ_PHONE_STATE permission was being added unnecessarily when using Branch deferred linking libraries.

Reading App Builder 7.0.1

Release date: 27 April 2020

Bugs Fixed:

  • When creating multiple APKs, version codes needed to be different in each APK.
  • Ensure that Gson library is included and added more ProGuard rules for Gson.

Reading App Builder 7.0

Release date: 24 April 2020

New Features and Improvements:

  • Improved Bloom book display (Android app)
  • Uses Bloom Player plug-in to display Bloom books with the same layout and behaviour as in the Bloom Reader app.
  • Can include integrated video and interactive comprehension quizzes.
  • Upgraded Bloom Player to version 1.1.64.

  • Additional Menu items in Navigation menu (Android app)

  • Add menu items such as “Find us on Facebook”, “Rate App”, “Send us an Email”, etc.

  • See Features > Menu Items to configure this feature in the app builder.

  • Improved Keyman keyboard support

  • Updated to use Keyman version 13 (Android and iOS).

  • Use Keyman Lexical Models in Android app for predictive text and autocorrect.

  • Image Viewer (Android app)

  • Replaced dialog image viewer by a full screen immersive viewer.

  • Daily Reminder notifications (Android and iOS apps)

  • User can turn on/off the daily reminder and set the time in the app settings.

  • See Notifications > Daily Reminder to configure this feature in the app builder.

  • Support Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal)

  • Aeneas is not included in the install due to issues with changing Python 2 to 3 in the packaging. This should be fixed in a future release.

  • Fonts

  • Added AbeeZee font.

  • Updated libraries:

  • AndroidX (Jetpack) libraries rather than older Android Support libraries.
  • Gradle compiler – updated to version 6.2.1.
  • Firebase – updated to latest library versions.

Bugs Fixed:

In the Android app:

  • Pressing the Globe keyboard change button on an in-app Keyman keyboard caused the app to crash.
  • When there was a Contents menu and the first action was to change the font size with the slider, the app crashed after touching a menu item.

In the app builder:

  • The latest version of the Android SDK Command line tools was not being recognised by the app builder.
  • The Color scheme chooser table was not using the correct selection background colour.
  • Song book indexes were not rebuilt after updating a song book from its source file.
  • Table headings on a Mac were displayed in a very small font.
  • Restored missing translations in Bahasa Melayu [ms].

Reading App Builder 6.2.2

Release date: 20 March 2020 for Mac

Bugs Fixed:

  • When the iOS app does not have audio, do not include “audio” in the UIBackgroundModes.
  • Fix the formatting on the UIBackgroundModes so that an iOS can be uploaded to AppStore Connect.
  • Fix issue with Android app crashing when downloading audio while playing audio in the background.
  • When sending files to Scriptoria, only send the .appDef file and files in the project_data folder.Release date: 21 February 2020

Bugs Fixed:

  • Text alignment of Right-to-Left scripts was not being displayed correctly.
  • When viewing a Bloom book, audio from adjacent books could sometimes be heard.

Reading App Builder 6.2.1

Release date: 19 February 2020

Bugs Fixed:

  • The Add Image button for adding an Android splash screen was not working.

Reading App Builder 6.2

Release date: 12 February 2020

New Features and Improvements:

  • Faster app launch
    • The app initialisation has been optimised, making the app start significantly more quickly.
       
  • Notification icon
    • You can now define the small icon that appears at the top of an Android device when the app receives a push notification.
    • See the Images > Notification Icon page.
       
  • Improved Bloom books support
    • Bloom books must now be added as .bloomd files.
    • Updated Bloom Player to version 1.1.38.
    • We are continuing to improve the integration of Bloom Player in the app and hope that this work will be completed in SAB 7.0.
       
  • Fonts
    • Added Archivo Black, Roboto, Merriweather and Baskerville fonts.
    • Updated Alkalami font to version 1.200 (31 January 2020).
    • Improved the appearance of the Font Files table interface in the app builder.

Bugs Fixed:

In the Android app:

  • Long book names were truncated to be shorter than they needed to be in the book selector list.
  • Book-specific numeral systems, when different from the main numeral system, were not being handled correctly.
  • Read Phone State permission was requested in certain security modes where it was not required.
  • When using right-to-left layout, one of the security mode screens was not displaying correctly.

In the iOS app:

  • Now using iOS version 13.
  • Upgraded to Keyman 12.
  • Add localization of app name. (#59580, #59518)
  • Changed audio controls for right to left configurations. Audio controls are always left to right regardless of the current interface or text direction.
  • For story books, if playing audio and user rotates the device to landscape view, hide the audio bar after 3 seconds as it does when you hit play.
  • Content button pointing to a story book with no chapter reference crashed.
  • Story book view images should maintain their aspect proportions rather than trying to fill the screen
  • Generate BundleExecutable based on project name (instead of always being TemplateApp).
  • Generate list of localizations so that App Store sees the list of languages supported. (#58199)

In the app builder:

  • Fine Tune Timings was not using book-specific phrase ending characters.
  • The text appearance button should not be shown when viewing a book using Bloom Player.
  • Remove Fastlane dependency for building iOS apps.
  • Support new (Xcode 11+) Apple certificates for signing iOS apps.
  • Generate index.html (using first book and chapter configuration) when exporting HTML.

Reading App Builder 6.1

Release date: 15 November 2019

New Features and Improvements:

  • Keyman in iOS app:
    • The iOS app now support Keyman keyboards for Search.
       
  • App Publishing:
    • Enable the publishing page in Reading App Builder.
    • Added Publishing Properties on Publishing page to configure Scriptoria settings.
    • When sending a project to Scriptoria, there is an option to send the audio files in the project data folder.
    • Improved layout on the Publishing page, with expandable height input box for the long description.
       
  • User interface improvements in the app builder:
    • Added ‘Save’ button to toolbar – to save the current app only.
    • Added ‘Copy Character’ item to the popup menu in the Character Inventory table: copies characters from the selected rows to the clipboard.
       
  • Additional About box variables:
    • %program-version% – version of program used to create the app, e.g. “6.1”.
    • %program-name% – name of program used to create the app, e.g. “RAB”, “DAB”.
       
  • Search for the keystore in the current user’s keystore folder if the full path of the keystore is not found.
     
  • Fonts:

Bugs Fixed:

In the Android app:

  • Book name buttons in the book selection popup should take up all the available width, otherwise the book name could be truncated.
  • Adjusting toolbar contents for available space for book name, chapter number and buttons could crash if there was insufficient room.
  • Allow hyphens, periods and plus characters in the custom deep linking scheme.
  • When using the Crosswalk viewer, the app would crash when entering a word in the Search input field – Crosswalk has been disabled for this screen until a fix is made in the Crosswalk libraries.
  • Audio:
  • Audio playback controls should remain left-to-right even when the app layout is right-to-left.
  • After upgrading an app, the app might crash when it was launched. This could happen if it was an older app that had a setting (auto download audio) saved as a boolean instead of a string.
  • When using the auto download audio setting, the app might crash when you start listening to the last chapter in a book (if it attempts to download the next chapter which is in another book).
  • If audio filenames had 10 or 11 characters, the app would crash when the audio was started (#69661).
  • Analytics events for listening to audio were not being sent correctly.
  • Downloading audio from the internet was not working if the url didn’t end with a slash.

In the iOS app:

  • Set audio and video download folders to not be backed up in iCloud.
  • Set fonts for the download audio/video popups and progress popup.
  • Support download of video files.
  • Chapter Selector did not always appear when they ought to. In some cases, selecting the book automatically went to the first chapter when the chapter selector was configured to display.
  • Problem with RTL book after book or chapter selected. Initial swipe to advance went the wrong direction.
  • If a book is configured to be locked into a specific orientation configuration (portrait or landscape) support that configuration for iPhones. This issue still exists with iPads.
  • If a font was set for the pane configuration button, the button might not appear on screen.
  • If an embedded video is playing, the end of chapter is reached and either audio for the next chapter doesn’t exist or it is not proceeding to the next chapter automatically, pressing the play button displayed a download audio screen. Now you can reposition the audio to a desired point and press play to restart the audio at that point.
  • Support options to automatically continue to the next chapter or book when the audio for a chapter completes.
  • Highlighting was not advancing if the forward button was pressed while the audio was not playing.

In the app builder:

  • When using a background image with Adaptive Android Icons, the background image would be switched to the foreground image when the project was re-opened.
  • On the Mac, the Settings dialog was unresponsive when started. It was getting the Fastlane version which takes a little time.
  • On the Mac, added configuration of the default folder for Simulator files.
  • On the Mac, if Xcode 11 is installed then the utility used to start the simulator, install the app, and launch the app doesn’t work. In this case, the Run iOS Simulator dialog will assist the user to drag/drop the built app to the simulator.
  • If the folder for Keystore files contained an ampersand, it was not saved correctly in the app project configuration file.
  • The program could crash on startup when searching for the JDK folder.
  • Do not delete timing files when a row in the audio table is deleted.
  • The option “Verify Google Play Store listing when sending app data” was not being saved.

Reading App Builder 6.0.1

Release date: 21 August 2019

New Features and Improvements:

  • App interface translations added for Bahasa Melayu.

Bugs Fixed:

In the Android app:

  • Contents menu images were not being shown in some situations.
  • Deep linking did not work if there was a Contents menu.

In the app builder:

  • In the Registration screen configuration dialog, the default title and top message were set incorrectly.

Reading App Builder 6.0

Release date: 08 August 2019

New Features and Improvements:

  • Deep Linking
    • Deep Linking allows you to direct people to specific pages within the app, using a link on a website, in a messaging app, social media or email.
    • Deferred deep links using Branch: If a user taps on a link to the app but does not have the app installed yet, the link will first redirect the user to the app store to download the app. Then after the app is installed and launched for the first time, the user will be taken to the deep link page
    • See App > Deep Linking.
       
  • Adaptive Android Icons
    • Devices with Android version 8.0 (Oreo) and above support Adaptive Icons. It is important to define an adaptive icon for your app, otherwise the icon will not be shown well on newer phones. Foreground and background layers should be specified separately.
    • See Images > Android Icon (Adaptive).
       
  • Bloom Player (experimental feature)
    • Bloom books can now be displayed in the Android app using the same player as used in the Bloom Reader app. This preserves all the formatting from the book, including title pages, sign language videos and quizzes.
    • When you add a Bloom book, you can decide whether it will be displayed with Bloom Player, or converted to a Picture Story book (see Book Type on the Book page).
    • Please note that this is an experimental feature and more testing is needed. Some fonts may not be displayed correctly. Please let us know how it is working for you.
    • Bloom books can be added as .bloomd files.
       
  • Fastlane installation and updates (for Mac only)
    • Simplify installing and updating Fastlane Tools which are used to digitally sign the iOS app for distribution to the App Store.
    • See Settings > Fastlane.
       
  • Close build window after successful app compilation (for Windows only)
    • See Settings > After Build.
       
  • Color scheme:
    • Added new ‘Shamrock Green’ color scheme, to match flag of Côte d’Ivoire.
       
  • Documentation – new sections and updated information:
    • Building Apps: Deep linking, Registration screen, Firebase analytics (updated).
    • App Publishing Checklists (updated).
    • Installing and Building Apps on a Mac: Fastlane installation (updated).

Bugs Fixed:

In the Android app:

  • The first time a user opened the Audio playback speed selection window, no items were selected. The default item, Normal, should be selected.

In the iOS app:

  • Layout direction options to use the direction from the text being displayed or to use the direction from the current user interface language were not being applied.
  • If interface direction was set to RTL, then the swipe gesture for open was not updated to come from the right and for close from the left. There were also some issues with the navigation button order on RTL.
  • Video links for online streaming sources are now supported in the iOS app. Embedded video files are still not supported.
  • The size of the special character input buttons in the search were larger than those on Android. Make them smaller to view more buttons on the screen. The user can still swipe to see more buttons if they are off screen.

In the app builder:

  • The audio synchronization phrase-ending characters field needed to be shown using the font of the selected book.
  • If books are removed, any corresponding Contents menu items should also be removed.

Reading App Builder 5.6

Release date: 05 July 2019

New Features and Improvements:

  • Firebase configuration:
    • Improved configuration screen, App > Firebase, with a link to the Firebase console.
       
  • Registration screen:
    • You can define a registration screen to be shown when a user launches the app for the first time.
    • See App > Security > Require each user to register with their details, and the Configure Registration button.
       
  • Fonts:

Bugs Fixed:

In the Android app:

  • If you wanted a splash screen together with one of the restricted user security modes, the app would crash on start-up.

In the app builder:

  • Building the Android app failed with errors if including Firebase Crashlytics.
  • If using Word documents (docx), custom footnote callers such as asterisks were repeated when converted to SFM files.
  • Right-click popup menus were missing from several tables, i.e. for Edit and Delete actions.
  • Allow use of Zulu OpenJDK from Azul Systems as the JDK.

Reading App Builder 5.5

Release date: 14 June 2019

New Features and Improvements:

  • App Builder Interface in Russian
    • All of the Reading App Builder interface has been translated into Russian. This is in addition to English, French and Spanish that are already supported. Many more languages are available in the app itself.
       
  • 64-bit libraries
    • From August 2019, Google requires all apps submitted to Google Play to have 64-bit versions of native libraries. These have now been added for Crosswalk and Grandroid.
       
  • Amazon Corretto 8 for JDK
    • Since Oracle has changed its licensing agreement for the use of their JDK, we recommend you use Amazon Corretto 8 instead. Amazon Corretto is a no-cost, multiplatform, production-ready distribution of the Open Java Development Kit (OpenJDK).
    • Installation instructions can be found in the documentation.
       
  • View Project Folder
    • Show the current app project folder by right-clicking on the app name in the left panel and selecting ‘View Project Folder’, or ‘File’ > ‘View Project Folder’ on the main menu.
       
  • Updated Gradle compiler to the latest version 5.4.1.

Bugs Fixed:

In the iOS app:

  • Apply fonts to search bar text and special characters buttons.

In the app builder:

  • In the list of images, the thumbnail is now updated correctly if replacing a file with the same name that is only different by case (e.g. replacing wraB1.png with wrab1.png).
  • If an image file contained an ampersand character, it was not saved correctly in the app definition file.
  • The Select Images dialog should show .jpeg files as well as .jpg.

Reading App Builder 5.4

Release date: 06 April 2019

New Features and Improvements:

Bugs Fixed:

In the Android app:

  • Audio file downloads were not working on Android 9.0 (Pie) because of permissions and internet security issues.
  • Offline MP4 videos were not being displayed properly in the app because of styling issues.

In the app builder:

  • Custom styles could not be deleted.

Reading App Builder 5.3

Release date: 20 March 2019

Bugs Fixed:

In the app builder:

  • Installing Android SDK packages from Settings did not work if there were spaces in the path.
  • The READ_PHONE_STATE permission should not included when building the app (unless you are using one of the restricted user security modes).
  • The choice of interface languages in Tools > Settings > Interface should just be English, French and Spanish. This refers to the languages for the app builder, rather than the interface languages for the app itself.

Reading App Builder 5.2

Release date: 1 March 2019

New Features and Improvements:

  • Video Improvements
    • Add Video Wizard – click on the ‘Add Videos…’ button on the Videos page.
    • The ‘File Source’ table is now available in the tabs on the Video page (as well as being on the Audio page).
    • When a YouTube video finishes playing, it shows a set of related videos to play next. You can specify that you want these related videos to be from the same channel as the video that has just finished playing. See Video > Video Settings.
       
  • Book Portions
    • You can now specify which pages of a book to include in an app.
    • This could be useful if only part of a book has been checked for publication.
    • See the bottom of the Book tab.
       
  • More translations:
    • Added more Spanish translations to the App Builder interface.
       
  • Updated font:
  • Separated out code for security modes requiring access to the device IMEI number into a separate library. The code will only be included in the app if it needs to be.

Bugs Fixed:

In the Android app:

  • The book selection menu was blank when using Annapurna font version 1.203. Updated font to latest version 1.204, which fixes this issue.
  • Videos were being shown multiple times if the app was restarted from a minimised state.

In the app builder:

  • The internet permission was not set when including links to online videos (#62578).
  • If the list of interface languages was reordered, this order was not saved between sessions.

Reading App Builder 5.1

Release date: 22 January 2019

New Features and Improvements:

  • In-app Keyman keyboards (for beta testing)
    • You can now integrate Keyman keyboards within your app for use on the Search screen.
    • Add one or more keyboards in the builder at Fonts > Keyboards. You will need the compiled keyboard JavaScript file from Keyman Developer.
       
  • Relative font sizes for interface languages
    • For interface languages that need a slightly larger font size, you can specify a relative font size (e.g. 110%).
    • Currently supported: message boxes, progress boxes and Settings screen.
    • Go to the Interface > Languages tab, edit a language and select the Text Size.
       
  • Documentation
    • Added bookmarks to the PDF documents.

Bugs Fixed:

In the Android app:

  • Message box buttons were not being displayed using the interface language font.
  • If a video and its thumbnail were not of aspect ratio 16:9, part of the thumbnail image was repeated.
  • Some markdown links, such as empty links, were not handled correctly in the About box.

Release Notes for Previous Versions