Release Notes for Latest Versions

Scripture App Builder 4.0

Release date: 21 November 2017

New Features and Improvements:

• Navigation Drawer
• The app bar menu has been replaced by a navigation drawer which slides in from the side of the screen.
• To show the drawer, swipe in from the side of the screen or tap the hamburger icon (the three horizontal lines on the app bar)
• At the top of the drawer is an image which you can customise in the app builder. See Images > Navigation Drawer. (For Android only at this point, the iOS app shows the app icon.)

• Text Selection Toolbar

• If you tap a verse in the app, it will be selected (underlined) and the text selection toolbar will appear at the bottom of the screen. From this toolbar you can choose to highlight the selected text, add a note, place a bookmark, play audio beginning at this verse, copy the text to the clipboard or share it.

• Highlighting

• Select the highlighter pen button from the text selection toolbar.
• There is a choice of several highlighter pen colours: yellow, green, orange, blue and pink.
• You can remove a highlight by selecting the white pen colour.

• View a list of highlighted verses by selecting Highlights from the navigation drawer menu. On this screen you can sort highlights by date, reference or colour (tap on the Sort button on the app bar). You can delete highlights or tap an item to go to the highlighted verse. You can also share the list of highlighted verses with someone else (tap on the Share button on the app bar).

• Notes

• Select the Note button from the text selection toolbar. You can add personal reflections, teaching notes, feedback on the translation, etc.
• The Add Note screen will appear. Special characters can appear as buttons, like on the Search screen.
• A note icon will be displayed at the end of the verse. Tap on this icon to see the note in a popup window at the bottom of the screen. Tap on the edit icon to enter the Edit Note screen.
• View a list of notes by selecting Notes from the navigation drawer menu. On this screen you can sort notes by date or reference (tap on the Sort button on the app bar). You can edit or delete notes or tap on an item to go to the verse with the note. You can also share the list of notes with someone else (tap on the Share button on the app bar).

• You can use the notes sharing feature to allow reviewers in the language community to send feedback on a translation. For this, specify an email address and subject line in the app builder on the Features > Annotations tab.

• Bookmarks

• Select the bookmark button from the text selection toolbar.
• A red bookmark icon will be displayed at the end of the selected verse.
• To remove the bookmark, tap on the bookmark icon at the end of the verse and then tap on the bookmark button.

• View a list of bookmarks by selecting Bookmarks from the navigation drawer menu. On this screen you can sort bookmarks by date or reference (tap on the Sort button on the app bar). You can delete bookmarks or tap on an item to go to the verse with the bookmark. You can also share the list of bookmarked verses with someone else (tap on the Share button on the app bar).

• Text Copy and Share

• To copy a verse to the device clipboard, tap on the verse to select it. Then select the Copy button from the text selection toolbar. (Android only)
• To share a verse with someone else, tap on verse to select it. Then select the Share button from the text selection toolbar. You can choose to share by text message, email, WhatsApp, etc. For iOS apps, the menu that allows you to select an app also contains a “Copy” icon that will copy the verse to the device clipboard.

• You can include an extra line of text after the copied verse and reference, e.g. copyright information or details of how to get the app. See Book Collection > Copyright & Licensing.

• Changing the app Interface language (Android app only)

• The user can now change the language of menus and messages within the app, via the Settings screen.
• To define which interface languages the user can choose from, see the new Interface > Languages tab in the app builder. You can add additional languages here and enable/disable existing languages.

• You can choose to set the default language to be the current language of the smartphone or tablet.

• Right-to-Left layout (Android app only)

• The whole app layout can be switched around so that the navigation drawer slides in from the right of the screen, the contents of the app bar are displayed in the reverse order (i.e. book name on the right), and audio controls are displayed with a right-to-left play button and seek bar moving from right to left.
• Set the default layout direction in the app builder on the Interface > Layout Direction tab.

• Users can change the layout direction within the app, via the Settings screen.

• Settings within app

• The Android app Settings screen has been rewritten and rearranged into categories.

• Audio settings

• Audio features in the app builder have been moved to the Audio > Audio Settings tab.
• Two new features have been added:
• Choose whether to allow the user to turn on/off the audio toolbar.

• Choose to show the audio toolbar when the app is launched.

• Default package name

• You can set the default start of the package name for building new apps. See Settings > Defaults.

• Copyright & Licensing

• Copyright and Licensing information for text, audio and illustrations are now saved and displayed on the new Copyright & Licensing tab for each book collection.

• Other Android app design changes

• Book and chapter selector images have been changed to dropdown arrows to the right of the book name or chapter number on the app bar.

• The About box is now a full screen page rather than a popup window.

• Compling for Android 8.0 Oreo

• Android apps are now compiled using the Android SDK platform library for the latest version of Android (version 8.0 Oreo).

• You will need to update your Android SDK installation. The Android 5.0/5.1 platform has been used up until now and can no longer be used for SAB 4.0+.

• Documentation updates

• Most of the documents have been updated with new information for SAB 4.0.

• Other iOS app improvements

• Swiping between books is now supported as an optional feature as it has been in the Android app.
• The option to display a verse selection tab after selecting a chapter is now supported as an optional feature.
• If no timing files are associated with audio for the chapter being played, an audio seek slide control is displayed as it is in the Android app.
• Picture storybook features are mostly completed.

Bugs Fixed:

In the app:

• The app was not synchronising chapters correctly in two-pane layout when one of the texts had empty chapters.
• A chapter containing only period characters (.) should be considered empty.
• Right-to-Left cross references (using the \r marker) were not linked correctly in the text display.
• Verse numbers such as 2a or 3b were not processed correctly when reading USX book files.
• Footnote custom callers with more than one character were not handled correctly when reading USX files.
• On list selection popups from the Settings page, the Cancel button was not translated into the app interface language.
• Allow changing the font of Chapter/Verse selector tabs, using the style “ui.selector.tabs”.
• Changed book collection “Abbreviation” to “Short Name” to encourage users to use something longer than a language code which could be hard to see and tap on the screen.
• If formatting codes were used, such as italics (\it…\it*), audio highlighting of these sections was out of sync if a space was found just before the closing formatting code.
• If a page has no audio, the audio toolbar should be hidden.
• If the user is playing audio for a chapter and then selects the current chapter number from the chapter selector and restarts audio, two audio tracks were played (#51922).
• If a timing file had been written using the Fine Tune Timings utility, the first timing might not be read correctly in the app due to a BOM (byte-order mark) at the start of the file (#51650).
• FCBH Analytics retries sending data if attempts initially failed.

In the iOS app:

• Allow pinch zoom on image annotations.
• Adjust the size of the section header in the Search Results display. Occasionally, part of the characters in the header were being cut off.
• Do not highlight first timing section if audio is turned off.

In the app builder:

• In the New App Icon wizard page or the Icon Gallery dialog, the user should only be able to choose one icon, not multiple icons.
• The OK button was not working in the Devices dialog box.
• The Run iOS Simulator dialog works with Xcode 9 and can build for just the simulator. (Mac only)
• The Create New KeyStore feature uses new default key algorithm (RSA) and size (2048) to work with jar signing in JDK 1.8 u151+.

Scripture App Builder 3.5

Release date: 13 July 2017

New Features and Improvements:

• Verse selector:
• After selecting a chapter number, a verse number selection page will slide into view.
• This can be turned on/off in the app builder and also via an optional user setting within the app.

• Song book indexes:

• A new Song List index page is available for song books, displaying songs by number and by title.

• To enable this, set the Book Type of a book to be “Song Book”.

• Enhanced Styles configuration:

• Styles can now be configured at a book collection level and also at the level of individual books.

• See the Styles tab for each book collection and each book.

• Language tag in HTML output:

• You can specify a language code to be used in the HTML output as a tag, e.g. lang=”xyz”.

• See the Styles tab for each book collections or book.

• Spanish Interface

• Additions and corrections to the app builder user interface in Spanish.

• iOS app enhancements:

• Added media clip annotations.
• Added locking the orientation for books to portrait or landscape.
• Added Ken Burns effects in Picture Story books
• Added Subtitles in landscape orientation
• Allow pinch zoom of image annotations
• Added support for SAB Layout Defaults Tab

• Added support for two pane layout with panes not linked

• Paratext markers:

• Added \pi1.

• Analytics:

• Added FCBH Analytics which sends a small digest package of anonymous app usage information to Faith Comes By Hearing. FCBH will provide a service to collect and display in an Analytics dashboard.

• Crosswalk viewer component:

• If the standard Android viewer component is not displaying your complex script correctly, there is now the option of bundling the replacement Crosswalk viewer with your app.
• Note that this will mean an increase in app size of at least 20 MB, so do not enable Crosswalk unless you know you need it.

• Three APK fies will be created: one for ARM devices (-arm.apk), one for Intel x86 devices (-x86.apk), and a universal APK for both (-universal.apk).

• Fonts

• Added Alkalami font, for Arabic-based writing systems in the Kano region of Nigeria and in Niger.

Bugs Fixed:

In the app:

• Border images around the text were not being scaled properly according to screen resolution.
• Audio synchronization was getting behind a phrase each time a document contained a picture with no other text in the paragraph.
• Not processing Scripture reference links properly where a comma was used as a chapter list separator, e.g. Matthew 3:4, 5:6.
• App sharing text was not translatable (“I can recommend this app”, “Share App via”, etc.)
• If an SFM table had three columns, for example, and there was no space following a blank \tc3 then SAB did not handle \tc3 as an empty cell.
• Failed when trying to write analytics event when no chapter was selected.

In the iOS app:

• Fixed app crash caused by font not being defined in app definition and in some cases where
  specified font could not be loaded.
• Don’t display settings button in app if all settings are deselected in app definition
• Scale borders around text area to match Android app border sizes
• Set font for navigation bar menu items and text fields in settings screens
• Certain sequences could result in the app attempting to download the audio for a chapter when it had already been downloaded.
• If the user clicked on a URL link placed within the footer text, the web page would be displayed within the Scripture app. Attempts to download a file could crash the app. Now clicking the link will start the default browser.
• Most of the popover menus did not display properly when run on an iPhone Plus model in landscape mode.
• If the same name is used for audio files in different sources, only the first was recognized. Now use both the source id and the audio name to identify the downloaded file name.
• Moved Text Size button to be under the “hamburger” menu when in iPhone portrait mode to prevent the “hamburger” menu button from being pushed off screen when the book name was very long.
• App crashed if you played audio, went to book with no audio, went to full screen and pressed the “play” button which erroneously appeared at the bottom of the screen.
• App crashed if multiple book collections were defined, one of which had audio, and an attempt was made to play the audio while another book collection was the current selection.

In the app builder:

• Translations to app names not being saved between app builder sessions.
• Not handling the deletion of book files properly or restoring book files that were deleted but not saved.
• Failed to generate HTML when creating glossary entries in Export to HTML.
• Minimum Build Tools version should now be increased to 25.0.0.
• Android builds failed if the package name contained certain Windows reserved directory names in the package name (e.g. con, aux, nul).
• Validate Font at the book collection level was not checking against correct font if the book collection font was different from the first font defined in the app.

Scripture App Builder 3.4

Release date: 10 May 2017

New Features and Improvements:

• Multiple book collections in iOS app:
• Supports single pane view, two pane view, and verse by verse view of up to three translations in a single pane.

• Android SDK installation changes:

• The SDK Manager GUI is no longer distributed with the SDK command line tools. There is instead a command line installer, which is launched from the new Tools > Settings > Android SDK tab.

• Updated installation documentation.

• Audio Synchronization:

• Audio phrase ending characters can be defined per book and book collection, rather than just at the app level.

• See the Audio Synchronization tab.

• Styles:

• Added missing paragraph styles for \ipi and \ib.

• Book order:

• Added choice of book order when adding a book collection.

• Can change the book order of a book collection on the Features page.

• iOS Provisioning Profile and Signing:

• The Signing (iOS) tab has been enhanced to provide information about the type, app id and team id associated with the selected provisioning profile.

• Validation: Attempting to build an iOS app, SAB now performs a check to ensure that the Provisioning Profile and Signing Identity that have been selected may be used together and displays an error if not.

• Updated Gradle Build compiler to version 3 to optimise building apps.

Bugs Fixed:

In the app:

• Border images not resizing properly in two-pane view.
• Image-only pages in picture books were showing as empty.
• Numbers in the chapter selector should be displayed right-to-left for RTL book collections.
• Not parsing “Revelation given to John” correctly as a book name in Scripture reference links. It was recognised as referring to “John”.
• Crashed when playing back audio if audio seek bar container was not found.
• Footer was showing twice in the introduction chapter.
• Introduction character being shown as 0 in some situations.

In the app builder:

• Word document import: digits in Word character styles caused problems.
• For iOS, display an error message early in the build process if fastlane has not been installed properly.
• Enable the DELETE key when running SAB on a Mac.
• Updated default aeneas folder in SAB for Mac.
• If there is more than one font family, show Custom as selected on the Fonts page rather than a known font.

Scripture App Builder 3.3.2

Release date: 27 March 2017

Bugs Fixed:

• In the Add Contents Menu Item wizard, the Next button would not allow you to advance in some situations.
• In the ‘Installing and Building on Mac’ document, the XCode tools install instruction contained an n-dash rather than two hyphens.

Scripture App Builder 3.3.1

Release date: 15 March 2017

Bugs Fixed:

• Could not change choice of book collections in the app layout configuration dialog.

Scripture App Builder 3.3

Release date: 8 March 2017

New Features and Improvements:

• Scripture App Builder for Mac:
• First release of SAB for Mac: can build both Android and iOS apps.
• First release of iOS app for iPhone and iPad.
• Documentation: Installing and Building Apps on a Mac.
• For details of which features are supported in the new iOS app, please see Android and iOS App Features.

• Analytics:

• Support for sending analytics data to Amazon Mobile Analytics (book views, audio files played, apps shared).
• Allow multiple Analytics engines in the same app to allow sending analytics data to more than one account.

• See the Analytics page for the app.

• Contents:

• You can choose to show the contents screen every time you launch the app or to go to the previously selected screen. See Contents > Contents Settings.

• You can specify the target layout for contents items in multiple book collection apps.

• Multiple Book Collections:

• Save book collections in separate data folders so that book filenames can be repeated across different collections.

• Styles:

• Added a CSS tab to the Styles edit dialog to allow adding/editing CSS properties directly.

• App Install Location:

• Now configurable. See the App > APK tab.

• Numeral Systems:

• Added N’ko numeral system.

• Footers:

• Footer styles can be set per book collection and the text direction of the footer can be set to be different from the direction of the main body text.
• Allow line breaks <br/> in footers.

• Allow horizontal lines <hr/> in footers.

• Security:

• Improvements to styling of screens used by the restricted access by code security mode.

• Fonts:

• Annapurna version 1.202 release.

Bugs Fixed:

In the app:

• Book selection grid of abbreviations not showing right-to-left for RTL scripts.
• Search special character buttons not showing right-to-left for RTL scripts.

In the app builder:

• Parameters for aeneas tasks were not being written out correctly if system locale was French.
• Could not use aeneas to synchronise audio for an introductrion chapter (chapter number 0).
• Book name, abbreviation, character inventory and source preview not showing in correct font for multiple book collections if the book collection uses a font other than ‘font1’.
• Book name and filename fields were too short for long filenames and book names.
• Build path was often too long if the package name was long. Use a shorter path.
• Image file dimensions not shown on Audio-Only book image page in Add Books wizard.
• Style edit dialog should allow editing of all the currently defined properties.
• Problems processing book files in EPUB format.
• Do not try and show an EPUB file in the book Source preview tab.
• Timing validation report, e.g. “Files with validation warnings” was not translatable into the current interface language.
• Export to HTML not showing audio player for second and subsequent pages for picture story book with single audio file.
• Text direction and numeral system combo boxes were not translatable.
• Corrected French spelling of ‘Abréviation’.
• Missing French translations on the Audio Source tab.
• If the About box font has been changed to a different font from the first font, make sure that the edit field is updated to use this font.

Scripture App Builder 3.2

Release date: 24 January 2017

New Features and Improvements:

• Build Multiple Apps:
• New ‘Build Multiple Apps…’ added to toolbar.
• Choose which apps you want to build and they will be queued and compiled one after the another.

• Allow setting the maximum height of images for picture story books.

• Prevents portrait images from taking up all of the screen, leaving no room for text.

• See Book > Story Pages > Other Settings. Default is 45% of the screen height.

• Updating books without needing to delete them and add them again:

• Allow adding a new version of a book on the Book Collections screen to replace an existing book.

• Audio-Only Books:

• Use new Add Books Wizard to add Audio-Only books for Old/New Testament without needing skeleton Paratext files.
• You can choose the album art to show in the app when playing the audio.

• See Book Collection > Add Using Wizard…

• Two pane layout:

• Allow different default font sizes for book collections (see Styles tab), allowing Arabic script collections to use a larger font size than Roman script book collections.

• If a corresponding chapter is not available in the adjacent pane, show pane as blank rather than showing the chapter of the first book.

• Audio seek bar:

• Add an optional audio seek bar under the play/forward buttons

• This is useful if there is no timing information for a chapter.

• Avoid the need for the “Read Phone State” permission:

• The app used to need this permission in order to pause audio when a phone call came in.

• This is now handled in a different way to avoid needing this permission.

• USFM markers:

• Added support for \qac…\qac* – acrostic letters within poetry lines.

• Documentation:

• Updated Installation Instructions for installing the basic command line Android SDK tools.

• Added a comment next to the Android Asset Studio link that it works better with the Chrome browser.

• Fonts:

• Updated regional font subsets with inclusion of Graphite support.

Bugs Fixed:

In the app:

• Drop caps not being formatted properly for poetry books such as Psalms.
• Cross references (\x + \xt John 1:1\x*) opened a popup but the Scripture references in the popup were not active links.
• In Scripture references which include a comma to extend the reference range, the extended range is not active e.g. in \xt John 1:2,10\xt* – verse 10 is not active.
• Glossary links in glossary entry popups were not linked correctly. Instead some numbers were showing.
• Switching between multiple book collections did not work properly if the abbreviation of a book collection was blank.
• Audio toolbar disappeared when changing device orientation in two-pane view.
• After changing orientation when playing audio in 2-pane view, the second pane was not scrolled alongside pane 1.
• When downloading audio files from the internet: if the download was completed quickly, the progress bar would not reach 100% and the user would not know whether it succeeded or not.
• If ‘Search all folders for audio’ is not enabled, do not try to look in sub-folders of the named folder for files.
• Layout configuration dialog: on the Verse-by-Verse tab, if user selects a book collection already showing in a different position, need to swap the other choice.
• Font not showing correctly in verse-by-verse view if the first book collection was shown in second place.

In the app builder:

• Require Android SDK Build-tools of version 23 or later. Otherwise inform the user that they need to upgrade.
• In multiple language apps, custom translation strings for book groups were lost.
• Unwanted blank line appeared at the top of pages imported from Word documents (from page 2 onwards).
• For multiple book collection apps, check that first book collection has a name other than the default ‘Main Collection’.

Scripture App Builder 3.1

Release date: 12 December 2016

New Features and Improvements:

• Translated Strings within the app
• Added Import/Export, to allow you to share menu item translations between apps.
• Added ‘Reset Translations’ to the popup menu in the Translated Strings table to allow reset to defaults.
• More default translations for Spanish and Portuguese.

• Import/export book collections

• Allows you to save a book collection and reuse it in another app.

• This is useful if you want to add a regional language book collection to several of your local language apps.

• Export to HTML

• Show cross reference links and pop-ups.

• Show glossary links and pop-ups.

• Regular Expression Changes

• Added enabled on/off checkbox for each change, to make it easier to test changes.

• Font updates

• Padauk updated to version 3.002.

Bugs Fixed:

In the app:

• If the two pane separator was dragged too far down or right, it could not be pulled back again.
• Verse ranges were not being written correctly for right-to-left scripts: missing RTL marker before the hyphen.
• Handle double spaces in verse markers, e.g. \v__1 rather than \v_1.
• App bar not formatted with color, arrow and title for Settings screen on Gingerbread phones.
• App bar title and arrow disappeared when changing device orientation in Settings screen.
• Book Group titles in book selection popup were not right-aligned for right-to-left scripts.

In the app builder:

• Warnings showing in the build if Google Analytics is turned on.
• If the same audio file was used in two different book collections (e.g. for two different scripts) it was added twice to the app.

Scripture App Builder 3.0

Release date: 29 November 2016

New Features and Improvements:

• Multiple book collections
• Add two or more translations to the app.
• Display in Single Pane, Two Pane or Verse-By-Verse layout.
• User can configure the choice of translation and layout within the app.
• Scripture reference and numeral system settings are now at the book collection level.
• For more details, please see the section ‘Multiple Translations’ in the Building Apps document.

• Settings screen

• Allow the user of the app to configure the following settings:
• Book selection type: list or grid
• Red Letters: show the words of Jesus in red
• Show Verse numbers

• Verse layout: Verses in paragraphs or One verse per line.

• Share App

• Added optional ‘Share App’ item in the app menu.
• Gives the app user the choice of:

1. Sharing a link to the app on Google Play, or
2. Sending the APK file to another phone via Bluetooth, Wifi transfer, email, etc.

* See Features > Sharing to turn on this app sharing feature.

• Drop chapter numbers
• Chapter numbers are now displayed by default as drop cap numbers just before the first verse.
• See Features > Formatting.

• Audio file searching

• Previously, the app would search all accessible folders on your device to find an audio file if it was not found in the specified default folder.

• You can now turn off this feature on the Features > Audio page.

• Reset colors

• Added ‘Reset Color’ option to right-click menu to reset color to its default setting.

• Regular Expression Changes – Show After Changes:

• Added a ‘Show After Changes’ checkbox to the Book Source page, to allow viewing of what the source will look like after applying any regular expression changes.

• This is shown only if you have specified some changes on the Changes page.

• Icons

• Added ‘Choose from Icon Gallery’ button on Images > Android Icon tab.

• Allow selection of multiple images when adding custom icon images.

• Image sorting

• Sort images in size order when adding app icons.

• Click on headers in image table to sort rows.

• Export to HTML improvements

• Style the Book and Chapter titles as buttons so it is clear they can be clicked to get the dropdown menu.

• Added viewport meta tag for better responsive design.

• Contents Menu

• Keep track of the font size for the Contents Menu as different from the font size of the main text.

• Prevent contents menu text flowing underneath the image.

• Fonts

• Updated Padauk to version 3.001.

• Updated Annapurna to version 1.201.

• Gradle compiler – updated to version 2.14.1

• Note: the first time you build an app, Gradle will need internet access to download an update of the Gradle Android plugin

• Documentation

• Building Apps: added sections on Multiple Translations and Sharing Apps.
• App Publishing Checklist: added final approval item.
• New French version of the App Publishing Checklist.

Bugs Fixed:

In the app:

• Pressing the >> audio button before playing the audio for a chapter causes app to crash.
• Images specified in the text as .tif files were not shown even if a corresponding .jpg file was present.
• Introduction paragraphs within chapters were displayed at the start of the book rather than in their place.
• Duplicate items were showing in Contents menu.
• Chapter selector not displaying right-to-left for Arabic numeral system.
• Do not show the audio toolbar for landscape picture story books if there is no audio for the book.

In the app builder:

• Do not include text enclosed by \rq…\rq* markers in phrase lists for aeneas synchronization.
• Add borders to tables (Audio, Styles, Contents Menu items, etc.)
• Ensure selection background color is consistent across tables.
• Turn off column re-ordering for some tables.
• \ord…\ord*, \dc…\dc*, \sls…\sls* and \rq…\rq* missing from span styles.
• Verse numbers superscript set in CSS rather than using ^{to allow style changes.}
• HTML export audio playback was starting at the first verse and skipping the heading.
• Do not show Menu_Access_Code on Strings page if security mode is not set to Code Required.
• Could not change a document interpreted as a Picture Story book back to Default book type.

Scripture App Builder 2.1.1

Release date: 1 September 2016

Bugs Fixed:

• Picture story books crashed in the app if the user pressed the >> button before playing audio.
• When renaming an app project, the app publishing repository folder (git) was not copied.

Scripture App Builder 2.1

Release date: 31 August 2016

New Features and Improvements:

• Scripture App Publishing Service
• Enables automated publishing of apps to Google Play.
• See the ‘Publishing’ page for each app.
• Pages for defining title, short/full descriptions, screenshots, hi-res icon, etc. for Google Play store details.
• For more details and answers to frequently asked questions, please see Scripture App Publishing Service.

• Fine Tune Timings improvements:

• Added additional ++ and – – buttons to allow moving timings forward/back 1 second as well as 0.1 seconds.

• Added tooltips to +/- buttons and made buttons the same size.

• Contents Menu improvements in app builder:

• New wizard for Add Contents Item.
• Gets default title and image from book reference.

• Allows selection of image from picture story book images.

• Book selection:

• Can disable book selection popup, e.g. for those cases where you just want users to navigate using the contents menu.
• See Features > Navigation tab.

Bugs Fixed:

In the app:

• Problems displaying introduction-only books (i.e. those without any chapters).
• Links to glossary items in glossary book were not shown first time if the item definitions (\k) were lower in the book than the link (\w).
• When swiping between books was disabled, audio files were not selected properly for a book when coming from contents menu.
• Stop audio playing when user moves back to Contents menu screen.
• Do not show Audio icon while in Contents menu screen.
• Do not show audio toolbar for books without audio.

In the app builder:

• Add image motion in a picture story book, then select No motion. Motion was still present when building or re-opening app.
• 72×72 image missing for icon with green cross.
• Audio files and timing files were not being assigned to a single line when ‘single file’ is shown as default in the Book > Audio tab for a picture story book.

Scripture App Builder 2.0

Release date: 24 August 2016

New Features and Improvements:

• Installing aeneas for audio-text synchronization
• New all-in-one aeneas installer for Windows, replacing the complex manual install of each component.
• Available on the Download page, under Audio Synchronization Tools.
• Includes significant speed improvements for Windows users, cutting the synchronization time by up to 50%.
• Added install check. See Tools > Check aeneas installation…

• Improvements to Picture Story books:

• New ‘Story Pages’ configuration tab in the App Builder for each book.
• Turn on audio toolbar automatically when viewing story books.
• When viewing the story book in landscape orientation:
• The pictures are shown full screen and fade to the next one when the page turns.
• A transparent audio progress bar is shown, which slides off the screen after
  a couple of seconds of playback, and slides back in when the user taps the screen.
• Subtitles are shown over the pictures.
• Optional Ken Burns effects (pan and zoom) to move the pictures as the audio is playing
• Go to the new ‘Story Pages’ tab for a picture story book and choose
  ‘Specify start and end positions’ to modify start and end rectangles visually.
• Additional SFM codes:
• \imgms left top width height – for the start rectangle
• \imgme left top width height – for the end rectangle
• Include optional background music, including fading out the music at the end of the story book.
• Choose either one audio file for the whole story book or one file per page.

• If using multiple audio files, all are downloaded at start of book rather than one at a time.

• Handling of verse segments, e.g. \v 1-2a, \v 2b, \v 5-6a, \v 6b-7

• Formats verse numbers correctly.

• Handles verse segments in timing files.

• Illustration resizing

• Resizes images to contain in app to reduce app size.

• See the Images > Illustrations page.

• Lock screen orientation

• You can lock the screen orientation to Portrait or Landscape for a book.

• See the Book > Features tab.

• Audio clips

• You can insert short audio clips to be played when the user taps on a word, phrase or image.
• To add clips in Word documents, insert a hyperlink with the filename of the audio file.

• See section 5.5 in the Building Apps manual for more details.

• Added link styles and removed generic \hyperlink style:

• a.web-link – allows styling of web links

• a.audio-link – allows styling of audio clip links

• Word document import improvements:

• Handle rotated images.

• Read footnotes from Word (.docx) document.

• Offline mode:

• Attempt to use Gradle in offline mode if there is no internet connection, even if user has not selected offline mode in Settings.

• Contents menu

• Use left arrow rather than the house icon to move up to previous contents screen.

• This is in accordance with Google’s Material Design guidelines.

• Fonts:

• Padauk font updated to version 3.0.

• Scripture references:

• Read the chapter-verse separator from the Paratext project settings file (.ssf) if it exists.

• Handle Scripture reference links in table cells.

• EPUB improvements:

• Include illustrations in EPUB documents.

• Added web links to EPUB page for Readium and Gitden Reader.

• New documentation:

• App Publishing Checklist: Is your app ready to publish?

• Running Workshops: Tips for running App Builder training workshops

• Updated documentation:

• Installation Instructions: added a section on copying Android SDK files from another computer
• Building Apps: new sections on ‘Preparing app content’, audio clips and picture story book enhancements.
• Distributing Apps: more information on Google Play store details.
• Using aeneas: new installation instructions for Windows users.
• Using HearThis: updated web links.

Bugs Fixed:

In the app:

• Problems with getting audio for the next chapter if the screen orientation had changed after the current audio was started.
• Problem displaying two books with the same book id.
• Do not show Up navigation button on Search screen.

In the app builder:

• When reading Word documents with images, SAB did not take into account image rotation.
• Changes to default translation strings for existing languages were not being saved.
• The label Features_Chapters_And_Verses_Info was not translated on the Features page.
• Corrected web link to Android SDK tools to go to the downloads section of the page.
• In Fine Tune Timings, make sure that the next timing is always after the current timing.
• Text was truncated on some screens when using 150% text size.
• Need to check for sufficient image sizes for Android icon when building app.
• Explanatory text on Android Icon definition page needed to be clearer about which images sizes are required.
• Build warnings on command line build were using a special character for bullet point.
• Problem exporting to HTML two books with the same book id.
• Icon image paths written in Windows not read correctly on Linux machines.

Scripture App Builder 1.11.1

Release date: 01 June 2016

New Features and Improvements:

• Audio features: added option ‘At the end of a book, go to the next book and continue playing audio’.

Bugs Fixed:

In the app:

• Playing audio from a picture story book page sometimes caused the page to move to the previous one for a moment before moving to the current one.
• If playing audio for a second book when ‘swipe between books’ is enabled, the audio for the first book was played again.

In the app builder:

• Corrections to USX file import:
• Book names were not read correctly if there was a <para style=”ide”> element.
• Footnote elements were not read correctly if the attributes were in a different order than expected.

Scripture App Builder 1.11

Release date: 23 May 2016

New Features and Improvements:

• Borders: improve performance when drawing borders around the text

• Picture story book import from Word (docx) documents: delete blank lines between images and text.

• Basic import of HTML files for books

• Fine Tune Timings: allow audio files to be found in relative paths, useful for sharing the Fine Tuning tasks with others to view on their computers.

• Export Subtitle files from timing files:

• See ‘Export Subtitles’ at the bottom of the right-click menu on the ‘Audio Files’ tab.
• Available formats:
• SubRip SRT subtitles (.srt) – these can be played in the VLC media player with Audio Visualizations turned on or in Windows Media Player with the Local Subtitles for WMP plug-in installed.
• SAMI subtitles for Windows Media Player (.smi)
• WEBVTT (Web Video Text Tracks) subtitles (.vtt)
• Adobe Encore Text Scripts (.txt) – a tab-delimited format.

Bugs Fixed:

In the app:

• Error on choosing not to include a border around introduction pages.

In the app builder:

• Failed to find certain colors for a color scheme if the color scheme name was blank.
• Book Source tab: not displaying picture story books page by page; change ‘Chapter’ to ‘Page’; remove initial blank line.
• Fixes to HTML export for picture story books:
• Include images in HTML export.
• Specify start and end audio times for each page.
• Export HTML for all pages when clicking Export to HTML from the Audio page.
• On File > View APK Output Folder, need to create this folder if it doesn’t exist already.
• Do not include 512x512px drawable-web icon in app resources.
• Problems with file paths in projects when switching between Windows and Linux.

Scripture App Builder 1.10

Release date: 10 May 2016

New Features and Improvements:

• Material Design color schemes:
• ‘Color Scheme’ page added to New App wizard, giving you a choice of 20 Material Design color schemes.
• Status bar color – a darker version of the app bar color
• The previous gradient-style color schemes have been removed since they do not comply with Google’s Material Design app design guidelines. If you want a gradient app bar, this is still possible but you will need to modify the colors manually.
• See Google’s Color Style Guide for more details.

• Improvements to Word document (.docx) book import:

• Hyperlinks
• Numbered lists and bullet points
• Tables
• Character styles

• Line breaks

• Markdown hyperlinks in About box and Footer:

• Allow use of markdown link formatting, where text to display is enclosed in square brackets [], followed by the link in normal parenthesis ().
• Example: [Text to Display](http://www.example.com)

• Example: [Email me](mailto:john@example.com)

• Mixed case book names:

• ‘Book Names’ page added to the New App wizard, asking if you want book names in all caps to be changed to mixed case, e.g. change “MATTHEW” to “Matthew”, etc.

• This page is shown only if there are any all caps book names in the collection.

• Audio:

• Added option ‘At end of chapter, go to next chapter and continue playing audio’ in Features > Audio.

• Uncheck this option if you want the audio to stop at the end of the current chapter.

• Book-specific features:

• See Features tab for each book, to specify book-specific features, such as:
• Show chapter numbers
• Continue playing next chapter audio at end of chapter
• Show border around text
• Show border around introduction (in some cases you might want to show a border for all chapters of a book except the introduction)
• Only the relevant features above will be displayed, e.g. the border settings will not appear if there is no border image specified.

Bugs Fixed:

In the app:

• If using \vp… \vp* to specify published verse number, the first character of the content was not shown if the content started immediately after the * without a space.
• In footnotes, when there was a space after an end marker like \fr* or \fqa*, the space was deleted.
• When the user changed the color theme (e.g. from normal to dark), the background color of the next page or chapter did not get changed.

In the app builder:

• If changing book groups using the ‘Change Book Group…’ dialog in the books table, need to create the corresponding translation string ids.
• Back matter books (BAK, CNC, TDX, NDX) should be sorted by default to the end of the book collection, together with GLO.
• Styles needed for \fv (footnote verse number) and \fl (footnote label). Use superscript for \fv.
• aeneas was reporting an error if you chose the ‘At X% of the silence between the two phrases’ option on the Phrase Boundaries page.

Scripture App Builder 1.9.2

Release date: 21 April 2016

Bugs Fixed:

• Changing books in the app was giving ‘No content found in book’ errors.
• Chapter range em-dash character was not displayed correctly in Scripture reference popup.
• Plus some minor bug fixes.

Scripture App Builder 1.9

Release date: 18 April 2016

New Features and Improvements:

• Book groups:
• Added Group as a column in the books table.
• Added ‘Change Book Group…’ to the right-click menu in the books table to allow for bulk-editing of book groups.
• Select the books you want to edit, then right-click, ‘Change Book Group…’, specify the book group, then press OK.

• Book order:

• Added ‘Book Order’ page on New App wizard.

• Allows you to specify the book order for Bible books, e.g. Western Protestant, Ethiopian Orthodox, Russian Protestant, etc.

• Allow adding books of the same book id into a single book collection

• This is needed, for example, when adding metrical Psalms as an additional book at the end of the Bible.

• Documentation updates:

• Installation Instructions: change of web page for downloading SDK tools.
• Building Apps: added information on how SAB gets book names from Paratext Scripture Reference settings (BookNames.xml); more on glossary popups.
• Using aeneas for Audio-Text Synchronization: added note to restart SAB if it is open when installing aeneas.

Bugs Fixed:

In the app:

• In some cases, Xiaomi phones stopped on startup with the message ‘Reader – Could not open file: device_features’. This was due to the system adding additional files to the app assets which the app did not expect.
• Books with introduction text only and no chapters were not shown if swipe between books was enabled.
• If books were blank, access to subsequent books would be offset by a few chapters, e.g. if front matter book was blank, the first Bible book would be shown from chapter 3 onwards.
• Search results: references were always using colons rather than the specified chapter-verse separators.
• Contents menu: references were not displaying correctly for Right-to-Left.
• Scripture reference popup: numerals were not being converted to the specified numeral system.
• Audio player needs to check current book and chapter are the same before starting to play an audio file automatically after download.

In the app builder:

• ‘Export to HTML’ caused an error where there were no non-empty chapters in a book.
• Contents menu: could not change the order of the screens in order to set the home screen. Move Up/Down added to right-click context menu.
• Right-To-Left mark characters in the book and timing files were causing synchronization problems and ‘Validate timings’ warnings.
• No default style information found for \mt4 (Major Title 4).
• INT (introduction) book should be ordered by default after FRT (front matter).

Scripture App Builder 1.8

Release date: 04 April 2016

New Features and Improvements:

• Allow swiping between books
• You can now swipe right from Matthew 28 to Mark 1, etc.
• See Features > Navigation.
• Enabled by default but can be disabled.
• Added File > Open APK Output Folder in File menu, to make navigating to the APK folder easier.
• Read book names and abbreviations from Paratext Scripture reference settings (BookNames.xml) if they exist before looking at \toc2 and \toc3.
• Updated ‘Using aeneas’ documentation:
• to explain how to get a working version of the NumPy Python module.
• to use aeneas 1.5.0.1
• Show sample text when choosing font in New App wizard.

Bugs Fixed:

In the app:

• Multiple chapter range links not working properly in Scripture reference popups, e.g. Matthew 1—2; Mark 1:8—2:14.
• ‘No Books found’ error message displayed when launching app.

In the app builder:

• Images from Picture Story books defined in Word documents (docx) not read correctly if book added in New App wizard.
• Signing alias not saved in some cases in New App wizard
• Default APK filename should not contain non-ASCII characters
• Warn if APK filename contains non-ASCII characters
• Security configuration dialog boxes crashing
• ‘User Interface’ tab title displayed in Spanish instead of English.
• Layout issues on Grandroid and Add Changes pages.
• Make New App wizard dialog wider for larger font size screen resolutions.
• The gradle path was added at the end of the PATH environment variable, so if the user has gradle installed already and newer, it would break the build.

Scripture App Builder 1.7

Release date: 5 February 2016

New Features and Improvements:

• Export to HTML:
• Added dropdown menus for book and chapter selection.
• Add language code prefix to the exported HTML files.

• Audio-text synchronization:

• Added option of creating a job zip file for aeneasweb.org, rather than running the aeneas synchronization locally.

• Updated documentation for installing aeneas 1.4.0 on Windows.

• Copyright and licensing:

• Added copyright information for images in New App wizard.

• Added Licensing page in New App wizard.

• Security:

• New security mode added: require access code to use this app.
• See App > Security, and select “Require access code to use this app”

• This feature is in beta. Please send us your feedback. Thank you.

• User interface:

• More Spanish user interface translations added.

• App building:

• Move to Target Platform page in Settings if no valid platform defined.

• New icon.

• Title bar and table/tree selection colors changed to match program colour.

Bugs Fixed:

In the app:

• Telephone number link not working in about box.
• Scripture reference links:
• Handle verse ranges correctly for one-chapter books, e.g. Jude 3-8
• Preserve n-dash in verse range if used in Scripture reference links.

In the app builder:

• Build failed if the app name contained an apostrophe.
• Could not start build in some cases if audio source type was modified.
• Fine Tuning: Section heading text was being added to some of the verses.
• Images: thumbnail not updated if trying to replace an image by one with the same name.

Scripture App Builder 1.6.1

Release date: 07 December 2015

New Features and Improvements:

• Settings:
• Better information on choosing the Target Platform.
• Save and restore the width of the left tree pane.

• Grandroid:

• Replace the single Grandroid checkbox by two checkboxes:
• Enable Grandroid font rendering up to Android 4.3
• Enable Grandroid font rendering in Android 4.4 (not normally needed)

Bugs Fixed:

• Audio files:
• When working out the chapter number from the audio filename, take into account the actual chapter numbers in the book.

• Default app names were always set to “New App 1” even when this project name already existed.

• Fonts: the Harmattan font file path was not set correctly.

• Default APK filename should not contain accented characters.

• Book collection table:

• Row heights not being set correctly after book reordering.
• Cursor not reset to the default cursor if the selected row was not moved.

Scripture App Builder 1.6

Release date: 19 November 2015

New Features and Improvements:

• Update book files from original source:
• If you change any of the original book files, you no longer need to remove the book and add it again.
• Select the book(s) in the books table, right-click and ‘Update from Original Source’.
• Note that this feature will only work for books added in recent versions of SAB (the original source was not recorded in earlier versions).
• Added ‘Last Modified’ date/time column to books table.

• Audio File Distribution:

• Changed audio file distribution method from a global app setting to a file-by-file setting.
• Some files can be chosen to be packaged inside the apk file, others downloaded from the internet.
• Different files can have different internet download sources.
• Different files can have different FCBH DAM ids. So an app can contain both OT and NT audio files from FCBH – since the DAM ids for NT and OT files are not the same.
• See the new ‘Audio’ page and ‘Audio Files’ tab, and the ‘Change Audio Source…’ action on the Audio Files popup menu. The ‘Audio Distribution’ tab has been removed.

• Updated ‘Building Apps’ documentation.

• Decorative borders:

• You can specify an optional decorative border image to be displayed around the text. See Images > Border.
• Specify the portrait border image and a landscape border will be created automatically.
• When the app is built, the border image is cut into 8 component images (top-left corner, top, top-right corner, left, right, bottom-left corner, bottom and bottom-right corner). These will be stretched according to the screen size.

• Border image background and foreground colors are adjusted to match the color theme, i.e. normal/dark/sepia.

• Display of Scripture text after clicking on reference link:

• You can now choose different settings for Scripture links in the main screen and Scripture links in a popup.

• See Features > References.

• Audio for picture story book section headings:

• If you have audio for section headings in story books, use the following labels:
• 1s1, 1s2, 1s3, etc. for section headings on page 1,

• 2s1, 2s2, 2s3, etc. for section headings on page 2, and so on.

• Audio synchronization using aeneas:

• Linux: Installation of aeneas packages are included within the main SAB install.
• Use ‘aeneas_check_setup.py’ instead of ‘check_dependencies.py’ if it exists.

• Updated documentation to change command line install of lxml which had stopped working.

• USFM Markers:

• Handle \cp marker for changing published chapter character, e.g. A, B, C, rather than 1, 2, 3.

• Handle \mte and \imte markers for major headings at ending.

• Reference links within non-Scripture books:

• Handles \xt Mat 5:4\xt* format in book text to create a link to another book.

• Sort apps in alphabetical order:

• Right-click on ‘Apps’ (the root tree node) and select ‘Sort Apps in Alphabetical Order’.

• Some extra configuration options for iOS apps (coming soon).

Bugs Fixed:

• Changes to the color scheme not happening correctly.

• When adding audio files for one-chapter books (Jude, 2 John, etc.), the chapter should always be set to 1.

• Incorrectly importing some types of Word document (.docx).

• Unable to save changes to the HTML export folder in the Settings dialog.

• Export to EPUB:

• Fixed EPUB validation errors (using EpubCheck validator)
• Audio files not copied properly.
• Problem with footnotes in an audio-sync’ed chapter.
• Put document data into OEBPS sub-folder within EPUB file.

Scripture App Builder 1.5.1

Release date: 16 October 2015

New Features and Improvements:

• Audio synchronization using aeneas:
• Verify aeneas folder and version in wizard. Minimum aeneas version is now 1.3.0.
• Added more character replacements, e.g. Ñ > Ny, modifier letter apostrophe, etc.
• Added –skip-validator for aeneas 1.3.0.
• Show tail detect settings for each task.
• Updated aeneas documentation to simplify the aeneas install process: uses Miniconda rather than needing to download whl files, no longer need scikits.audiolab module.

• Contents Menu:

• Can now drag images onto the Contents Item dialog.

• Documentation:

• New document on Distributing Apps.

Bugs Fixed:

In the app:

• App crashed on some phones when searching for audio files in the phone memory or SD card (affected older Android versions).
• Did not play some audio files from the assets because they had been compressed.
• More exception handling in the app.

In the app builder:

• Not encoding ampersands “&” in footers correctly.
• Signing page: Move focus to the password field after selecting a keystore file with the Browse button.
• Command line build: null pointer exception if project filename is not specified correctly.

Scripture App Builder 1.5

Release date: 06 October 2015

New Features and Improvements:

• Audio synchronization using aeneas:
• Enabled ‘Auto detect head’ feature on ‘Start of File’ wizard page.
• Added ‘End of File’ wizard page, including ‘Auto detect tail’ (which works best in aeneas 1.2.1 and above).
• Default to writing timing files to the app’s data folder in App Projects.
• Added aeneas version number to first page of wizard.
• Output the time elapsed while processing tasks.
• Added more default character replacements.
• Added more troubleshooting to aeneas installation documentation.
• Added \zs marker to mark invisible text that should be seen by aeneas during synchronisation.

• Fine Tuning timing files:

• Produces a browser-based timing file fine tuner (credit to Firat Özdemir for inventing this method).
• Right-click on a row in the Audio Files table and select ‘Fine Tune Timings…’.
• Click on each row one by one and use +/- to fine tune the start.
• Click the ‘Save Changes’ button when finished and copy the modified files back to your timing folder.

• Added Fine Tuning section to aeneas documentation.

• Styles:

• Added font styles (color, font-weight, etc.) to all paragraph (div) styles.
• Removed character (span) styles associated with paragraph (div) styles.

• Added custom colors: CustomColor1, CustomColor2, etc.

• Word document (docx) books:

• If paragraph style names are named after SFM markers, use these markers when doing the docx to SFM conversion.
• Example: you can define a song book in a Word document using a ‘c’ paragraph style for each song number, ‘s’ styles for each song title, ‘q1’ styles for the verses and ‘q2’ styles for the chorus.

• See the updated ‘Song Books’ section in the Building Apps document to describe how to use Word documents for defining song books.

• Book Source page:

• Added font size increase/decrease buttons.

• Audio Files:

• Added Duration (mm:ss) column to Audio Files table.

• Added ‘View Audio Folder’ to popup menu.

• Building App:

• If a warning is shown to tell the user to go to fill in some missing information, take them to the relevant page.

Bugs Fixed:

In the app:

• Stop audio playing if the Contents Home button is pressed.
• Audio phrase highlighting:
• Do not include double speech-mark (“) after a space as part of the preceding phrase.
• Do not include a space in highlighting if using a space as a phrase-ending character.
• Added more checks for the existence of timing files.
• <span class=”glossary”> was appearing in the display text in some situations.

In the app builder:

• Audio Synchronization:
• Do not start a new phrase in the last 3 characters of a phrase.
• Use ‘tsv’ rather than ‘tab’ in the aeneas syncmap output configuration.
• ‘Synchronize using aeneas’ was not displaying on Audio Files popup menu if it had been installed to the default folder.
• Audio filenames with special characters were not being found on Linux.
• Export to HTML:
• Not setting last timing end time correctly.
• Audio sync not working for French language systems, where decimal point is a comma.
• Build failed if there was an apostrophe in the app name.
• Word document (docx) books: paragraph styles were not being preserved between pages if there was a page break.
• Images appeared multiple times on the Illustrations page if the same docx book was added again.
• Adding audio files: SAB was confused as to which chapters to assign to if underscores surrounded the chapter number in the audio filenames.
• Book and audio filenames containing an ampersand (&) character caused read problems in the app project definition file.
• Translations:
• Missing French translations for Security page and Contents title.
• Not enough room for chapter-verse separator label in French.
• Button for aeneas wizard too short for French label.
• Added missing Spanish translations for app menus and messages.

Scripture App Builder 1.4.1

Release date: 24 September 2015

New Features and Improvements:

• Audio synchronization using aeneas:
• Added

Release Notes for Latest Versions
Release Notes v8.0.1 – v9.3
Release Notes v4.1 – v8.0