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.
Verse of the Day notification improvements
Added “Listen” button – when the user taps this button, the app will open at the verse, and the audio toolbar will be displayed, ready to play the audio beginning at the verse.
Added “Create Image” button – when the user taps this button, the app will open in the Verse on Image editor, allowing the user to create and share an image.
Image placement
You can insert illustrations in the text without modifying the source Paratext book files.
See Images > Illustrations. Double-click on an image, and go to the Placement tab to specify where the image should be placed. You can choose at the top or bottom of a chapter, or before or after a specified verse number.
Import and Export of image placements. The file format is the same as used in the PicList.txt files in the PTXprint software.
Analytics for sharing content
The following events are now included in the analytics, with the event name “ab_share_content”:
Share text (content type “text”)
Share audio clip (content type “audio”)
Share video clip (content type “text-video”)
Share text on image (content type “image”)
Share text on image as video (content type “image-video”)
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”.
Added link to Sharing page on the Verse on Image page, to indicate that there are other settings which use the FFmpeg library.
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 Android app:
If an audio file was not found in the Verse on Image page, the app would not offer to download it.
If you tried to change the ‘Language and Layout’ settings from the navigation drawer menu while viewing a contents menu, the changes would not be applied.
Verse of the Day or Verse on Image could contain unmatched quotation marks.
When displaying the contents menu, a lot of image file not found warnings were generated in the logcat.
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.
When using Amplitude Analytics, the app can be uploaded using Transporter without errors.
In the app builder:
Scripture reference links were not being created correctly when verse numbers were specified in non-default numeral systems (e.g. Persian).
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.
Scripture App Builder 7.2
Release date: 09 July 2020
New Features and Improvements:
Verse on Image improvements (Android app):
‘Verse on Image’ configuration tab moved from Features to its own page in the app builder with related tabs such as Background images.
Watermark on image. See Verse on Image > Watermark to specify the image, its size and position.
Scripture reference text size adjustment: it can be smaller than the main text of the verse. See the final tab in the Verse on image editor in the app.
Tapping the Save button now gives a choice of ‘Save Image’ and ‘Save Video’.
Add shared images and videos to the image gallery.
Better caching of background image thumbnails for faster display in the app builder.
Verse of the Day improvements:
Added verses for Joshua to Nehemiah.
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.
Updated Russian interface translations
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, Share Text and Text on Image.
Fine Tuning Wizard
Right-click on a book collection, book, or several 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.
Deep links when sharing videos
If deferred deep linking (using Branch) is enabled and the app user shares a video, a deep link will be added under the shared video, e.g. as a caption in WhatsApp.
Additional changes in Changes Gallery
Replace hyphen with non-breaking hyphen.
Remove word-initial asterisks.
USX file parsing
Handle the tag.
Updated Bloom Player (for displaying Bloom Books) to version 1.1.80.
Updated Keyman Engine to version 13.0.6214.
Updated fonts
Harmattan version 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 appcompat library.
If using the Crosswalk viewer, a long press selection could cause the app to crash (long presses are now disabled when using Crosswalk).
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:
Fix issues with notifications. Failed to display verse when notification pressed. Badge numbers not cleared.
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.
Fixed issue where sometimes appeared in search results.
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:
Export to HTML: Scripture reference links did not contain the correct filenames.
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.
Verse of the Day: Mark 8 v 34 was not coded correctly, leading to the whole of Mark 8 being included in a verse of the day.
Handle non-breaking hyphens in USX verse ranges, in case we have used Changes to replace all hyphens by non-breaking hyphens.
Scripture 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).
Scripture 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.
Deep links when sharing images
If deferred deep linking (using Branch) is enabled and the app user shares an image, a deep link will be added under the shared image, e.g. as an image caption in WhatsApp.
Updated libraries
Latest Firebase libraries.
Latest Bloom Player plugin (version 1.1.69).
Full support in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal)
Aeneas is now included.
iOS Template app built with Xcode 11.4.
Bugs Fixed:
In the Android app:
The Verse Share popup menu did not display with the right orientation or padding when using a right-to-left interface language such as Arabic.
The verse reference was displayed incorrectly in the Verse on Image editor if non-continguous verses were selected.
Shared audio and video clips which included the final verse of a chapter could be truncated for some types of timing files.
Before sharing verses as audio or video clips, the app needs to ask for permission to access external storage – if it has not done so already.
After getting permission for access to storage before sharing images or image videos, the app should continue and create the image or video for sharing, rather than the user needing to tap the share button again.
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.
Audio was not stopping when the Contents button was pressed.
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.
The chapter selector in Export to HTML included unwanted empty chapter buttons when the last chapter in a book was non-empty but the second-to-last chapter was empty.
If a non-breaking space character was specified in Changes using the Unicode “u00A0” it would not appear in the resulting HTML.
The Background images link on the Features > Verse on Image tab did not take you to the correct Images tab.
When using SAB for Mac on previous versions of macOS (prior to Catalina), the mobileprovision file could not be read correctly and could not sign IPA file.
When running SAB for Linux on Ubuntu 16.04 and 18.04, the text fields did not have enough padding. We finally found a work-around for this issue.
Scripture App Builder 7.0.3
Release date: 28 April 2020
New Features and Improvements:
Building Apps documentation: added sections on Verse of the Day and Verse on Image.
Bugs Fixed in the Android app:
Added more checks in code that was causing the app to crash on rare occasions.
Scripture App Builder 7.0.2
Release date: 27 April 2020
Bugs Fixed in the Android app:
Markdown links, e.g. [this verse](EPH.2.8), did not work in footnotes.
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.
Scripture App Builder 7.0.1
Release date: 27 April 2020
New Features and Improvements:
Sharing video: better quality video output.
Bugs Fixed:
When creating multiple APKs, version codes needed to be different in each APK.
Ensure that Gson library is included in Android app and added more ProGuard rules for Gson.
Scripture App Builder 7.0
Release date: 24 April 2020
New Features and Improvements:
Verse of the Day notifications (Android and iOS apps)
User can turn on/off the verse of the day and set the time in the app settings.
See Notifications > Verse of the Day to configure this feature in the app builder.
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.
Verse on Image (Android app)
See Features > Verse on Image to configure this feature in the app builder.
In the app, users can do the following:
Select background image from a gallery of built-in images, or select a custom image from the phone’s image gallery.
Choose the font, font color, font size and style (bold and italics).
Share Audio: shares an audio clip of the selected verse(s).
Share Video: shares a video clip of the selected verse(s), with each phrase on a separate slide.
This feature requires synchronized text and audio (timing files) and the use of the FFmpeg media processing library (which increases APK size by at least 13 MB).
See Book Collection > Sharing to configure this feature in the app builder.
Adding deep links to shared verses (Android app)
If deferred deep linking (using Branch) is enabled and the app user shares a verse, a deep link will be added under the shared verse.
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 and iOS apps)
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.
Progressive Web App (beta) support added to Export to HTML on book collection
Upload generated HTML and files to a web server that use HTTPS.
Mobile users will be able to Save to Home screen and use as an app including using it offline without having to install through an App Store.
Desktop users will be able to install as an app.
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.
Multiple Android APK files
If you are using the Crosswalk or FFmpeg libraries, you can choose whether to compile a single APK containing libraries for all device architectures or whether to create separate APKs for each architecture.
See App > APK for more details on this setting.
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 iOS app:
Start up book with no chapter specified caused issues to the app.
Start up in dual pane mode specified could crash on startup.
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].
Sending files to Scriptoria was including all files in the project folder. Only send project.appDef file and project_data.
Known Issues:
The Verse on Image editor does not support fonts that require Graphite font rendering.
Sharing video from selected verses: quality decreases towards the end of longer videos.
Default Verse of the Day verses are based on English Bible versification.
Scripture 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.
Scripture 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.
Sharing or copying text with ruby glosses contained formatting codes rather than showing the glosses in parenthesis.
Scripture 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. You will especially notice a difference if you have multiple book collections with associated audio files.
Book collection restrictions
The rights holder of a Bible may give you permission to include their text in the app with certain restrictions. For example, they might ask that it is shown only alongside another translation, or that you disable copying and sharing.
You can now configure these settings on the new Restrictions page for each book collection.
Improved reference selector (Android)
When you have chosen a book and have moved to the chapter selector, the app bar book name will be updated to be the book you have chosen.
When you have chosen a chapter and have moved to the verse selector, the app bar chapter number will be updated to be the chapter you have chosen.
Improved layout configuration dialog (Android)
Instead of showing a combo box for the single pane view book collection selector, a list view is shown instead, making changing the language faster and more obvious.
Improved USFM 3.0 and USX 3.0 compatibility
rb for ruby glossing (used as pronunciation guides in Chinese, Japanese and Korean texts).
fig using word attributes.
sup for superscript text.
wg (Greek word list entry), wh (Hebrew word list entry), wa (Aramaic word list entry).
png for geographic proper names.
Export to HTML
The export now includes an index.html file, which starts at the initial book and chapter reference.
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 book collection 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 FCBH Analytics, use the English app name in the summary when possible (instead of the current localized app name).
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
Switching to a two pane view from a contents view sometimes resulted in the second book collection not displaying.
Added divider in book list for non Scripture books. Now separates books with no group (such as appendix, glossary, song books etc) into a separate section rather than having them appear as part of the New Testament.
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 for book collections.
Scripture 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 and note text entry.
USX 3.0 Import:
Supports USX 3.0 files, generated from Paratext 9.
App Publishing:
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. “SAB”, “RAB”.
Search for the keystore in the current user’s keystore folder if the full path of the keystore is not found.
Fonts:
Padauk font updated to version 4.000.
Abyssinica SIL font updated to version 2.000.
Bugs Fixed:
In the Android app:
Selecting a verse that was part of a verse range did not go to the selected verse, e.g. selecting verse 13 did not go to the verse range 12-14.
Book name buttons in the book selection popup should take up all the available width, otherwise the book name could be truncated.
USFM Markers +xt….+xt* and +w… +w* were not handled correctly.
Use of the book-wide cl chapter label marker before the first chapter marker c should produce a label before each chapter number in the book.
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).
Downloading audio from FCBH Digital Bible Platform was blocked on Android 9.
Audio file downloads were not working on Android 9.0 (Pie) when downloading from FCBH Digital Bible Platform.
Analytics events for listening to audio were not being sent correctly.
FCBH Analytics events for listening to audio are sometimes reporting back large number of minutes. Add details for sessions and plays if the number of minutes is more that the reporting duration.
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.
Verse Selector and 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.
Problem with app on iPad when in split screen mode. Popovers display as full screen without cancel buttons. Make sure cancel buttons appear in those cases.
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.
Multiple subtitle files were not being written if the audio files were not found.
Export to HTML failed when glossary links were found inside footnotes.
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.
Scripture App Builder 6.0.2
Release date: 28 August 2019
Bugs Fixed:
In the Android app:
After upgrading an app, the app might crash when it was launched. This could happen if FCBH Analytics is enabled.
Scripture App Builder 6.0.1
Release date: 21 August 2019
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.
Scripture 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.
Additional app interface languages: Korean and Telugu.
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:
If cross references were specified as whole chapters without verse numbers, no verses would be displayed in the popup.
If the popup was displaying text in a different book collection (from a link), pressing the launch in main screen button did not change the book collection.
The first time a user opened the Audio playback speed selection window, no items were selected. The default item, Normal, should be selected.
If using FCBH analytics, the app could crash sometimes when it was first run after it was updated to a new version.
If using FCBH analytics and user registration, the first run event was not getting sent.
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 Jesus Film and 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 or book collection.
The information on the Layouts page was not getting initialised or saved correctly, leading to repeated book collections appearing in the dropdown combo boxes.
If books are removed, any corresponding Contents menu items should also be removed.
In the Create Slideshow Videos wizard, subtitle filenames were truncated if they contained additional period characters before the extension.
If Published chapter characters (cp) contained certain special characters such as quotes, ampersands or angle brackets, they were not encoded correctly in the app project file, leading to projects not being fully saved and loaded.
Scripture App Builder 5.6
Release date: 05 July 2019
New Features and Improvements:
Subtitles for Slideshow Videos:
When slideshow videos are created, subtitle files in both SRT and WebVTT formats will also be created.
These can be used to provide subtitles for YouTube videos or when using media players such as the VLC media player.
To launch the Create Slideshows wizard, right-click on a book or book collection and select Create Slideshow Videos…
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.
This allows you to collect contact information, for example to connect people with Bible reading/listening discussion groups.
See App > Security > Require each user to register with their details, and the Configure Registration button.
Fonts:
Awami Nastaliq font updated to version 2.000.
Bugs Fixed:
In the Android app:
In two-pane view, if you selected a chapter from the toolbar, the top pane would be appear blank until you swiped between chapters.
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.
Scripture App Builder 5.5
Release date: 14 June 2019
New Features and Improvements:
App Builder Interface in Russian
All of the Scripture 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 July 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.
Keyman keyboards can now be used when adding and editing notes.
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 Android app:
If you included multiple Keyman keyboards, e.g. for searching in different book collections, the app would crash on startup.
Audio file and timing information for introduction chapters was not being saved for the app.
In the iOS app:
Apply fonts to search bar text and special characters buttons.
Remove chapter selector from task bar when in Glossary or Song book.
Support going to First Chapter specified in app Features/Navigation tab.
Handle problem with navigation in books where scattered chapters are present.
Fix font issue on initial start up when First Chapter has been specified.
In the app builder:
In the Publishing page, the Google Play Title length has been increased from 30 to 50 characters.
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).
Publishing files to Scriptoria now handles files as case insensitive.
When publishing to Scriptoria, the login times out after 24 hours. This is now handled and the login button is enabled again.
When publishing to Scriptoria, use the new authentication account (languagetechnology.org instead of dev-sillsdev.auth0.com).
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.
Scripture App Builder 5.4
Release date: 6 April 2019
New Features and Improvements:
Keyman keyboards are now specified using Keyman package files (.kmp), many of which can be downloaded from the Keyman website, without needing to use Keyman Developer.
Additional German translations have been added for the app interface.
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:
The first time you built a new app, the verse layout and verse number settings were not included for the Settings screen.
If verse number markers (v) appeared in the middle of a line which did not begin with a marker, they would not be interpreted correctly as verse markers. The marker code would be displayed in the text.
Custom styles could not be deleted.
Scripture App Builder 5.3
Release date: 20 March 2019
New Features and Improvements:
Preparations for the release of Scriptoria (the new app publishing service).
Bugs Fixed:
In the Android app:
If ‘Allow long press text selection’ is disabled, long press text selection should not be allowed in footnotes, search and annotation screens.
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 Settings > Interface should just be English, French and Spanish.
Scripture 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.
Insert 61 JESUS film video clips into Luke’s Gospel in a language of your choice.
Select ‘JESUS film clips’ on the first page of the Add Video Wizard and follow the instructions in the subsequent pages to select country, language and titles.
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 chapters and verses of a book to include in an app.
This could be useful if only part of a book has been consultant checked for publication.
See the bottom of the Book tab.
More translations:
Added more Spanish translations to the App Builder interface.
Added app translations in Hindi and Telugu.
More images:
Added more icons, borders, splash screen and navigation drawer images.
Updated font:
Annapurna SIL version 1.204.
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:
Pressing the ‘Back’ button while in the calculator screen caused the app to crash.
Using the markdown link format in the About box to link to a Scripture reference caused the app to crash.
The Book, Chapter and Verse tab titles in the reference selector were always shown in CAPS. They could not be changed to lower case in the Interface translations.
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.
Scripture 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.
Select a keyboard to use on the book collection > Styles tab.
Current limitations: choosing a mix of Keyman and system keyboards will not work well. Add Note screen keyboard not supported yet.
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.
With videos links included in the app, selecting a glossary item caused the app to crash.
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.
In the app builder:
In standard Russian, the books of John are abbreviated like this: ‘Ин.’, ‘1 Ин.’, ‘2 Ин.’, ‘3 Ин.’ but a reference to John’s Gospel Ин. was never included in any reference links.
Scripture App Builder 5.0
Release date: 8 January 2019
New Features and Improvements:
Improved support for embedding videos in the app
Added ‘Videos’ page in the App Builder.
Online videos: support for streaming MP4 files and video clips hosted on services such as YouTube, Vimeo and JESUS film.
Offline videos: MP4 video files can be packaged in the app assets, read from a device folder or downloaded from the internet.
Thumbnail images for each video: for page load performance, videos are shown initially using a thumbnail image. The video is loaded, streamed or downloaded when the user taps on the thumbnail.
Full screen videos: When playing an embedded video, tapping the full screen button in the video player controls will make the video display in full screen mode.
Video placement: you can choose to embed a video before or after a given verse, or on the top or bottom of a page, without adding any code within the Scripture book files themselves.
Video Settings: show titles under videos, use full screen width, enable full screen.
More images to choose from
30 new icons have been added to the Icon Gallery. See the ‘New App’ wizard and ‘Choose from Icon Gallery…’ on the Images > App Icon for Android page.
Border image gallery with 17 images to choose from. Click ‘Choose from Gallery…’ on the Images > Border page.
Splash screen image gallery with nine (9) sample images to choose from and adapt freely. Click ‘Choose from Gallery…’ on the Images > Splash Screen for Android page.
Navigation Drawer image gallery with nine (9) sample images to choose from and adapt freely. Click ‘Choose from Gallery…’ on the Images > Navigation Drawer page.
Improved font handling in message dialogs
Message dialogs (such as asking whether or not to download audio) and progress dialogs (such as during file download) have been rewritten to use the chosen interface language font for titles, text, checkboxes and buttons.
These new dialogs can use the Crosswalk viewer component to display complex Graphite fonts.
Bible Slideshow Videos
Added ‘Create Slideshow Videos’ wizard to create Bible videos from templates and audio timing information, with the help of PhotoStage software.
Right-click on a book or book collection and select ‘Create Slideshow Videos…’
To use this feature, you will need the slideshow templates. Information on how to obtain a set of sample templates can be found on the Resources page of this website, under the heading Slideshow Video Templates.
Added user setting ‘Show Glossary words’
The app user can choose whether or not to see glossary words underlined in the text and linked to their definitions.
Contents menu translations
Contents titles and sub-titles can be translated into one or more interface languages, so that the Contents menu is displayed according to the current interface language.
Display HTML Files for Books
If a book is defined using HTML files, the associated files are displayed in a new ‘HTML Files’ tab, found after the ‘Book Names’ tab.
This contains html, JavaScript, style sheets and image files.
App interface translations
Added Arabic and Azerbaijani translations for the user interface in the app.
Android compiler upgrade
Upgraded to compile with the latest version of Android, 9.0 (Pie) and the latest Google libraries.
The minimum Android version on which the app will run is now Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich). It will no longer run on the older Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) phones.
Now using Gradle compiler version 4.10.3.
You will need to update your Android SDK libraries. Go to Tools > Settings > Android SDK and click ‘Install Packages…’
FCBH and S3 Analytics
Analytics summaries are queued and then sent whenever the device is connected to the internet even if the app is not running or the device has been rebooted.
Timing file headers
Book, chapter, level and separator information is added at the top of each timing file as it is created.
Optimization
Reduced the size of configuration information in the app.
Additional documentation
Fonts: explanation of Crosswalk viewer.
Video: new section on including videos, and how to insert them into the text of an app.
Borders: how to select an image from the Border gallery.
Bugs Fixed:
In the Android app:
When searching for an audio file on the device, display a progress dialog rather than freezing the screen so that the user knows that something is happening.
The device back button was not taking the app back to the Contents menu.
Settings screens were not handling right-to-left interface languages correctly: the text should be aligned right and check boxes and radio buttons should be on the opposite side.
Subtitles were not showing for all pages in landscape picture story books.
Go straight to the Audio playback speed dialog when tapping the menu icon on the audio toolbar, rather than showing a single menu item to tap.
Allow use of the \fp marker for new paragraphs in footnotes.
Scripture reference links with multiple words, such as ‘Apostles Works’ were not matched where there also was an abbreviation ‘Works’ (#60983).
Scripture reference links containing books with multiple periods and certain Unicode letters were not matched.
If selecting a reference link within a popup where the link should open in the main viewer, any open popups should be closed.
No verses were shown in cross reference popups for references with a single verse number (rather than a verse range).
In the app builder:
When parsing USX files, the tag was not being interpreted correctly, resulting in missing verses in the output.
The Share App for iOS help text had an incorrect description (#59069).
The documentation for ‘Installing and Building on Mac’ had outdated information on testing with the device on iTunes. This was updated on how to use Xcode.
Changes in the app name Translations dialog were not reflected in the app name edit box after closing the dialog.
In the About box, the country name, PNG, was being wrongly interpreted as part of an image filename (#60232).
The number of audio files in the status bar at the bottom of the Audio Files table did not always show the correct number (#60772).
Corrected the link in Settings to the Android SDK Command Line Tools download website.
Audio file duration was not calculated correctly for 11kHz MP3 files (#59969).
Markdown links were not processed correctly if there was a phrase surrounded by square brackets earlier in the text which was not part of the link (#59722).
Scripture App Builder 4.7
Release date: 12 September 2018
New Features and Improvements:
Open Multiple App Projects
Allows you to open several previously created app projects from your App Projects folder.
See File > Open Multiple Apps…
App Project Groups
Allows you to group related apps together in the tree view on the left of the App Builder screen.
See ‘Project Group’ on the App > Project page, or the ‘Project’ page of the New App wizard.
Right-click on a project group folder and select ‘New App…’ to add a new app to that project group.
New App wizard improvements
Added ‘Default Interface Language’ and ‘Interface Languages’ pages.
Zip files of Icon images
When adding icons on the Images > App Icon page, you can select a zip file of icon images (e.g. as downloaded from Android Asset Studio) rather than needing to unzip the file and add each of the images separately.
Importing Digital Bible Library (DBL) texts
Read DBL metadata 2.1, including book names and copyright information.
Handle nested elements in USX files.
Identify chapter-verse separator used in references.
USFM 3.0 support
Handle word level attributes in glossary links, e.g. \w angels|lemma=”angel”\w*
Allow turning off Full Screen mode on double-tap
See Features > Formatting > Go to Full Screen when the user double-taps the text.
Original source of book file
Right-click on a book row in the books table and select ‘Show Original Source’ to display the path to the original location of the book file (the one that will be used if you select ‘Update from Original Source’).
More Color Schemes
Added Dark Orange, Chocolate, Asparagus Green, Dark Olive Green, India Green, Pakistan Green.
More Interface Translations
Added missing app interface translations in Indonesian.
Bugs Fixed:
In the Android app:
Search whole words was not finding words preceded by or followed by certain punctuation and spacing characters: quote marks, colon, semi-colon, zero-width space, and zero-width non-breaking space. (#52796, #55748, #56430).
Main titles (\mt, \mt2) were not being displayed in the first chapter of a book (#58912).
Published chapter character (\cp) was not being handled correctly.
Song indexes were not displaying the published chapter character.
Legacy USFM marker \st was not styled properly using \mt2 styling.
App crashed when there was an empty book, such as an empty glossary book.
In audio-text synchronisation highlighting for right-to-left scripts, opening and closing quotation marks were not highlighted with the correct phrases.
In the book-chapter-verse selector, if the book names were in a right-to-left script, the list of book names was not fully right-aligned.
If Contents item or screen titles included ampersands (&), the contents menu would not be saved or loaded correctly.
In the iOS app:
For the iPad, if using ‘Show chapter selector immediately after the user selects a book’, nothing happened after selecting a bok.
In the app builder:
If books in different book collections had the same filenames, the app builder would only put one of them into the app and so the wrong text would be displayed.
Handle images in About box with spaces in filenames.
If you use File > Open… to open an already open project, the builder should select this existing project rather than opening a second instance.
Export to HTML included a link to the stylesheet tooltipster-shadow.css which does not exist (#58841).
Export to HTML glossary entries would not show in chapters where there were no footnotes or cross-references.
Scripture App Builder 4.6.1
Release date: 15 August 2018
New Features and Improvements:
Make History screen optional
See Features > History > Enable the History screen.
Word documents to SFM
Added ‘Export…’ button to the Source page of a book created from a Word document, to export the book as a text file with SFM markers.
Bugs Fixed:
In the Android app:
Text was not showing underneath images in picture story books if the page had not been fully loaded.
Do not show the chapter selector in the book selector if the book is a song book (which will have its own index page).
The user’s choice of downloading audio automatically was not saved if the ‘Audio file download’ setting was not enabled for the Settings screen.
In the app builder:
If you enabled Firebase Crashlytics, the app would not build because of a missing library repository.
Reworded the check boxes in Features > Navigation > Chapter and Verse Navigation to be clearer.
Remove the Viewer tab from app builders in Linux, due to incomplete support of Java FX.
A valid JDK path in Linux, java-1.8.0-openjdk-amd64, was being reported as invalid.
Book content was not updated when changes were enabled/disabled.
Changes were not applied in books with HTML content.
Scripture App Builder 4.6
Release date: 10 August 2018
New Features and Improvements:
Book-chapter-verse selector
After selecting a book, the book selector can now prompt the app user to select a chapter and verse, instead of the user needing to tap on the chapter selector separately.
This is an optional setting, ‘Show chapter selector after selecting book’, which can be enabled/disabled on the Features > Navigation page.
Optimised chapter loading
Moving between books could be slow in the app, especially with larger books (such as Psalms or hymn books), and when using two-pane or verse-by-verse layouts. This has now been optimised, with the app loading chapter by chapter when needed rather than a whole book at a time.
Contents Menu
The ‘Contents Items and Screens’ page in the builder has been rewritten to make it more user-friendly.
Added Navigation Type setting to the ‘Contents Settings’ tab: you can choose for the app to show either an arrow or a menu (hamburger) button after the user selects from the contents menu.
Added Image Width setting to the ‘Contents Settings’ tab (a percentage of the screen width).
Added a ‘Viewer’ tab which allows you to visualise how the contents menu will look in the app.
Documentation: a new section about adding items and screens to the Contents Menu has been added to the ‘Building Apps’ document.
Versification
See the ‘Versification’ tab for a book collection.
Book collections in the app may have different versification systems. For example, Psalm 3:1 in one collection might correspond to Psalm 3:2 in another. In such cases, you can now import a Paratext versification file (.vrs) so that the app can match verses between collections correctly, e.g. in verse-by-verse layout.
App writer progress bar:
After you launch a build with ‘Build App’, a progress bar is displayed.
Book Viewer
There is a new ‘Viewer’ tab which allows you to visualise how each chapter will look in the app after interpreting all the formatting codes and styles.
About page
There is a new ‘Viewer’ tab which allows you to visualise how the About page will look in the app after interpreting formatting codes and variables.
Documentation: a new section describing the About page has been added to the ‘Building Apps’ document. This includes a list of allowable formatting codes, such as how to add images, change styles and fonts.
Footer
The footer at the bottom of chapters now respects any line breaks you have included in the builder.
Custom Styles
You can now add custom formatting styles. See Styles > Custom Styles.
These will allow you to use custom markers in SFM books for paragraph and character styling.
Additional USFM markers recognised, some of which were added in USFM 3.0 (April 2018)
\po – Opening of an epistle/letter
\cls – Closure of an epistle/letter
\qd – Hebrew note
\lh – List header
\lf – List footer
\sd# – Semantic division
\usfm – USFM version number
\fw – footnote witness list
\xta – Target reference(s) extra / added text
Firebase integration
See the App > Firebase page.
You can enable Firebase Messaging for push notifications.
You can enable Firebase Crashlytics for crash reporting.
Audio download
Option of writing .nomedia file to audio download folder
Timeout and show error message if waiting more than 10 seconds to connect to audio download server
Audio Files table
Added File Size column.
Added a status bar at the bottom of the table containing the number of files, total size and duration.
Translations of app interface
Added translations in German.
Added more string translations in Russian.
Runs on Windows with Java version 10, as well as versions 8 and 9.
Fonts: updated to Alkalami version 1.100.
Bugs Fixed:
In the Android app:
If there were no timing files for a chapter, pressing the back or forward section buttons on the audio toolbar would not move reliably to the previous/next chapters and between books.
If all annotation features were turned off, tapping on a verse would result in a blank toolbar appearing and the verse would be underlined. No toolbar should appear in such a situation and the verse should not be underlined.
If the selected text toolbar was shown while the audio toolbar was showing, a double shadow appeared at the top of the toolbar.
The user’s choice of ‘Download automatically from now on’ was not being saved (#55444).
Picture story books with multiple audio files per page (e.g. Bloom books) were crashing when starting to play audio.
App stopped if changing screen orientation when viewing a picture story book with multiple audio files per page.
Scrolling of the text could fail on some devices when highlighted phrases were after an embedded image (#55445).
If only French was enabled as an interface language, English could be selected in the app if the device was in English. The app should only allow selecting an interface language if it is enabled.
Non-breaking spaces (~) were not handled in Contents menu titles and subtitles, meaning that the tilde character appeared.
Send FirstRun event in FCBH / S3 Digest Analytics to capture first launch.
The number of sessions was not reported correctly in FCBH / S3 Digest Analytics (always reporting 1).
Report audio event in FCBH / S3 Digest Analytics even if not FCBH Audio (damId = unknown).
Include App Name in FCBH / S3 Digest Analytics.
In the iOS app:
Use IPA Version Name in About box when using version-name (#57176).
In the app builder:
The app builder program would not start on Windows machines using the Java 10 runtime environment.
When reading Scripture books from USX files, the <ref loc=…> elements were not recognised.
Handle \iex for introduction explanatory or bridge text, and allow section heading to come before it.
On the Audio page, tabs and tables were disappearing off the bottom of the screen.
Extract Audio wizard: not selecting audio sections properly when the text contained verse ranges.
Convert Audio wizard: remove the sampling frequency option since changing it caused problems, and added -write_xing 0 to the ffmpeg command to ensure file duration is read correctly.
Non-breaking hyphens could not be used in verse ranges.
Handle non-breaking hyphens inserted in Word documents (using CTRL+SHIFT+HYPHEN on Windows or CMD-SHIFT-HYPHEN on macOS).
If a paragraph in a Word document (docx) has a manual first line indent, \p should be used rather than \m.
When using initial content in a Word document to set the book name, truncate intelligently at word breaks rather than cutting in the middle of a word.
Word documents which had a space at the end of their filename, before the docx extension, could not be imported.
Component resizing problems at the bottom of the Features pages.
Story page > Picture and Motion tabs: images should be resized according to the available screen height (#58212).
If, when attempting to build an app, there was a warning about missing About page information, the builder was not going to the correct page after the warning message.
Writes a .log file of the build output to the Output folder (Mac & Linux – due to difficulty in copying the output from the build window on Linux).
Scripture App Builder 4.5
Release date: 16 April 2018
New Features and Improvements:
Improved support of Word documents
Paragraph and character styles are imported.
You can create links to other books and chapters by selecting a word or phrase in the document and adding a hyperlink. The hyperlink format is “MAT.11.28” (Matthew, chapter 11, verse 28), or you can include the book collection code, e.g. “KJV/LUK.15” (Luke 15 in the KJV book collection).
Additional app interface translations:
Vietnamese
Farsi
Allow user to opt out of sharing usage data (analytics)
See the Analytics page or Features > Settings.
New version of Gradle compiler, 4.6.
This will require an internet connection when you build your next app.
Updated font: Awami Nastaliq 1.100.
Ubuntu: Support LTS 18.04 (Bionic Beaver)
Aeneas: Updated to version 1.7.3.
Bugs Fixed:
In the Android app:
If a Scripture reference popup was shown from a link in another popup (e.g. glossary), the ‘launch reference in main viewer’ button did not behave as expected. The previous popup remained on the screen.
Share App was crashing the first time when using newer versions of Android.
Corresponding verse ranges were not being handled correctly in the verse-by-verse view.
About box: Email and telephone markdown links were not shown.
If user changes the interface language in Settings, the app bar title should be updated to use the selected language.
Links with verse ranges for single-chapter Bible books, e.g. “Jude 4-13”, were not parsed correctly.
Major section reference markers, \mr, should not be parsed as Scripture reference links.
Give more space to book collection names in the Layout configuration dialog.
Improvements to Security by access code.
Optimise moving back to a song book from reading a Scripture book.
In the iOS app:
Display the book name in the search index at the right even if there is only one book. (#54357)
Display the book list, book grid and book button text with the size specified in the UI Style.
Show the book button text with the font specified for the book collection.
Reduce the startup time by eliminating some duplicate processing (config and glossary).
Leave full screen mode when interacting with content (e.g. adding note). (#55378)
In the app builder:
Ken Burns effects (pan and zoom) were not getting saved for a new picture story book.
Contents menu: Could not edit those items which did not have an image. Double-clicking on the item did not do anything.
Contents menu: “Other” layout was not being displayed properly.
Contents menu: When adding a contents item, the default title was not coming from the chosen book collection.
Story book: the maximum image height was not being saved if we had not moved the focus outside of the spinner text box.
If all apps were removed from the builder, the title bar needed to be updated to remove the last app project name.
Extract Audio Wizard: start and end times were not being written correctly.
Add/Edit Change: the dialog has been made wider.
Changes with “\\t” were replaced by tab characters, instead of allowing SFM table markers such as \td and \tr.
Remove USFM optional line break, “//”.
Thumbnail images were not being generated correctly for book-specific illustrations, where filenames were the same for different illustrations in different books.
Audio Files table: Waiting too long before displaying the timing file during aeneas synchronisation.
Scripture App Builder 4.4
Release date: 15 March 2018
New Features and Improvements:
App Analytics
Added three more Analytics engines:
Firebase Analytics
Amplitude Analytics
S3 Digest Analytics
Please see the Analytics section of the Building Apps manual for more details.
Launch Scripture reference in main viewer
The Scripture reference popups now display a launch icon. Users can press this to launch the reference in the main window.
For example, the user is reading Matthew 1 and taps on the reference link to Luke 3. A popup appears with Luke 3. Tapping on the launch icon will select Luke 3 as the reference in the main viewer.
Translations
Corrected Spanish translation of the App Builder interface.
Added additional Chinese translations for the app.
Book-specific footers
Footers (displayed at the bottom of each page) can be defined at a book level.
Go to the book Features tab, select ‘Use book specific setting’ for Footer, and specify the footer text in the Footer tab which appears.
Additional book names for matching Scripture reference links
See the ‘More…’ button next to the Book Name field.
About box codes for copyright and licensing details
Text copyright information for a book collection, C01: %copyright-text:C01%
Audio copyright information for a book collection, C01: %copyright-audio:C01%
Text license information for a book collection, C01: %license-text:C01%
About box code for inserting an image
Use the markdown code: !(alt text)[image.png]
Audio speed
Added 0.7x as one of the selectable speed options.
Convert Audio Files
Launch the Convert Audio Files wizard from the right-click menu on the Audio Files table.
Change bitrate, sampling frequency and number of channels for selected audio files.
Includes converting MP3 files to smaller 3GP files.
Extract Audio Files
Launch the Extract Audio Files wizard from the right-click menu on the Audio Files table.
Extract specific verses and verse ranges as separate audio files.
Includes splitting an audio file by section headings.
Allow setting the Maximum Gradle Heap Size to increase or reduce memory use when building the app.
See Settings > Build Settings.
Enhancements to the iOS app from previous releases
Audio playback speed (4.3)
Settings: Playback speed (4.3)
Show history (4.3)
Setting: Keep screen on (4.3)
Honor “Allow long-press selection to copy/share individual words and phrases” setting in Features > Annotations Page
Bugs Fixed:
In the Android app:
Fixed crash in two-pane view when moving to an introduction in pane 1 where pane 2 does not have an introduction.
Handle exception when changing audio player speed.
Remove the last element from glossary entry if it is a section heading.
Do not show the chapter selector for the glossary book if there is just one chapter or introduction.
Add borders between items on the song list index pages.
If reading an OT book, and user changes book collection to one that does not have any OT books, show the first NT book rather than the first book (which might not be a Bible book).
Clicking on a Scripture reference link would sometimes crash before the popup was displayed.
Scripture references were not parsed properly in some cases where book names contained Unicode characters.
The ‘~’ character was showing in the search results.
When sharing files on Android 7.0 and above, the app crashed sometimes because of a Uri encoding problem.
When using Crosswalk, the universal APK (containing both ARM and x86) was not working reliably on all phones. Creation of the universal APK has been disabled.
Incorrect CSS was being generated for Graphite font features and language. Use font-language-override and font-feature-settings.
If you rotated the screen when in the Settings screen, and then pressed the Back button, the app would crash.
In the iOS app:
Play from the selected verse when tapping the play icon in the selection context menu. (#54318)
Make search results consistent with Android implementation including showing the number of results at the bottom of the screen. (#54357)
Perform substitutions in About dialog.
Do not show the chapter selector for the glossary book if there is just one chapter or introduction.
In the app builder:
Changes to the interface language order (by dragging rows) were not saved and not reflected in the Settings screen in the app.
The Timing Start column in Audio Files table was showing .00 rather than the actual decimal places.
The Browse button was not visible on the Files tab in the Settings dialog.
The iOS IPA filename was shown at the start of the batch file when building an Android app, and app version information was repeated.
The ‘~’ character was showing in the song index tables.
In Changes, the \w character in regular expressions was not matching unicode characters.
In Export to HTML, Scripture references were not parsed properly in some cases where book names contained Unicode characters.
The app builder toolbar could be detached by double-clicking, and it was not obvious how to get it back in position again.
On the Aeneas Phrase Boundaries page, the box for setting a percentage was not completely visible in the dialog.
If border images have transparency, show in the image viewer with a white background.
Need to check that a valid JDK folder has been entered before trying to install Android SDK packages.
Export to HTML: Incorrect CSS was being generated for Graphite font features and language. Use font-language-override and font-feature-settings.
Font features were not always encoded properly for XML in the appDef file.
Update the tools used to get the list of iOS Simulators available to make it work on macOS High Sierra.
Scripture App Builder 4.3
Release date: 8 February 2018
New Features and Improvements:
Audio playback speed
Allow the app user to slow down or speed up the audio playback speed.
Available speeds: 0.4x, 0.6x, 0.8x, Normal, 1.2x, 1.4x, 1.6x.
See the new menu button (three vertical dots) on the right of the audio toolbar.
This feature is available only for Android devices running Android version 6.0 (Marshmallow) or higher.
History
The app keeps a record of which books/chapters you have visited.
The history can be viewed by tapping ‘History’ on the navigation drawer menu.
Tap on a history item to take you to that reference.
Clear the history by pressing the trashcan icon on the app bar.
New App Settings (for users of your app to modify)
Keep screen on (do not let the device go to sleep when you are using the app).
Audio file download setting (Always ask user before downloading, download automatically, or download automatically if using a Wi-Fi connection).
Audio playback speed (see above).
Changes Gallery
Press the ‘Add Change from Gallery…’ button on the app builder Changes page.
Select from a set of frequently used changes, such as “Replace / with zero width space”, “Replace << with «”, “Keep 2-letter word with previous word at end of section heading”.
Export to HTML
Allow links in popups (e.g. footnotes) to be clickable.
Optional limits to selecting and copying text
Limit the number of verses that can be selected for highlighting/copy/share.
Enable/disable the default copy/share text toolbar when long pressing in the text viewer.
You can configure these settings on the Features > Annotations page.
App interface translations
Added missing Spanish and Portuguese translations.
Added Hindi and Malayalam.
About page verification
The app builder will now check that there is text on the About page before allowing you to build the app.
Enhancements to the iOS app
Notes sharing feature: to allow reviewers in a 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. [Note: For iOS, you can only send all notes, bookmarks, or highlights, not individual items with the specified email address and subject. There will be an additional icon in the navigation bar. If the subject is specified, it will be set when sending individual items.]
Implemented “Use the current system language of the device…” and “Use this language”.
Right-to-Left layout.
Song book index page.
Added copy icon to the action bar when selecting text.
Share App feature (requires Apple ID from iTunes Connect).
Handle multiple audio files per page (for Bloom books).
Enhancements to Security by Access Code for Android apps
Added the option of adding customisable user details (first name, last name, telephone number, etc.) to the ‘Add User’ screen.
View users that have been added on the ‘Users’ screen (menu item on the navigation drawer menu).
Require administrator to enter a PIN code before accessing ‘Add User’ and ‘Users’ screens.
Share button to enable sharing the IMEI number from the welcome screen.
Share button to enable sharing the access code after a user is added.
Share button to enable sharing a list of added users (see the top of the Users screen).
App Builder interface improvements
Display the settings in the Features > Settings table according to categories.
Allow checking/unchecking checkboxes in tables using the spacebar.
Changed the title of the ‘About Box’ page to ‘About’ (since it is no longer a box in the app).
Bugs Fixed:
In the Android app:
If you had a contents menu and went into the Settings screen from the contents menu and changed a text display setting (such as turn on/off verse numbers), when you tried to leave the Settings screen you would get an indefinite progress wheel.
Handle right-to-left book grid layout in the book selection popup when using the Crosswalk viewer.
Audio clips in annotations were crashing.
If three book collections were chosen in verse-by-verse layout, and then this was reduced to two, when the app was restarted, three collections were shown.
In the chapter/verse selector, make sure we have a chapter number specified, if the user moves to the Verse tab and selects a verse number without selecting a chapter first.
If you pressed the Pause button when playing a chapter with synchronized phrases and if you paused near a phrase break, when you restarted the playback the next phrase was sometimes highlighted without clearing the highlighting of the previous phrase.
Search was crashing if the user interface language translation of the ‘Search_Number_Found’ string did not contain the %,d formatting code.
The USFM non-breaking space character ~ was visible in song indexes if it was used in song titles.
Song numbers in the song indexes were being displayed using the default numeral system, even when a different numeral system had been specified for the book or book collection.
In the iOS app:
Play audio clips in popups (e.g. when viewing a glossary definition) instead of showing the filename.
Display all languages in Interface Languages if there are more than two languages (the table was too short before).
Hide play button in action bar if timing information is missing.
Do not show empty chapters (#54319).
Use localizations of settings headings for when interface language is changed.
In the app builder:
Some fonts were missing in the Windows installer.
Building iOS apps and running the simulator requires Xcode 9 or greater to be installed. (#53578)
If a picture story book was specified in an SFM file, Export to HTML was not displaying the images in the web browser.
Stop generating 50×50 iOS AppIcon (warning in build output).
Handle quote characters in App Name when building iOS apps.
Limit characters that can be in IPA filename (#53662).
Require Explicit App ID in Provisioning Profiles when building for Apple App Store.
Report error if Wildcard App ID doesn’t match Package Name for non-App Store builds (#53662).
Scripture App Builder 4.2
Release date: 18 December 2017
New Features and Improvements:
Graphite font rendering with Crosswalk
Apps can include the Crosswalk viewer component and use it instead of the standard Android viewer.
Crosswalk is Graphite-enabled, so complex fonts which rely on Graphite rendering features can be displayed correctly.
See the Font Handling page in the New App wizard or Fonts > Font Handling > Crosswalk.
Apps built with Crosswalk require a minimum Android version of 4.1 and work up to the latest version (Android Oreo 8.1).
The following screens in the app can be displayed using Crosswalk: main text viewer, popups for footnotes, glossary and cross references, book selection popup, search entry, search results, annotation lists (bookmarks, highlights, notes), and note popup, about box, settings screen.
The following screens are not yet shown with Crosswalk: navigation drawer menu, share app dialog, layout & language dialog, add/edit note. The search entry screen does not yet support input buttons.
App interface translations in Turkish.
Fonts
Updated the following fonts: Annapurna (1.203), Awami Nastaliq (1.000), LateefGR (1.200), Padauk (3.003).
Enhancements to the iOS app
The user can now change the user interface language (for menus and messages) within the app, via the Settings screen.
Styles
Allow the search entry text font to be set at a book collection level.
Bugs Fixed:
In the Android app:
Improve the handling of book and chapter selector widths on the Android app bar.
Do not show the search and text size buttons if there is not enough room for them together with the book and chapter selectors (#52254).
The image on the Share App dialog in the Android app was not coloured according to the app bar. It always appeared in grey.
Settings: Do not show the Book Selection setting if there is only one book.
Settings: Do not show the Show Verse Numbers, Verse Layout, Show Verse Selector settings if there are no verse numbers in the app.
Song book indexes crashed if there were fewer than ten songs.
In the iOS app:
Settings: Do not show the Book Selection setting if there is only one book.
Settings: Do not show the Show Verse Numbers, Verse Layout, Show Verse Selector settings if there are no verse numbers in the app.
Highlight the last phrase of a chapter when using point timing files (labels with the same beginning and ending values). (#52049)
Display the correct note when tapping on note icon in content view. (#52256)
Settings: Use the correct translation for headers (sometimes they were switched). (#52256)
Settings: Do not show empty space when no summary description is provided. (#52256)
Settings: Do not show “Highlight synchronized phrases” when no timing information is available. (#52256)
Settings: Do not truncate long (multi-line) summaries and titles. (#52256)
When showing the “Language & Layout” dialog in landscape mode, display toolbar with correct height. (#52256)
When a hardware keyboard is attached to an iPhone (happens most with Simulator), allow text to be entered in the Search field. (#52049)
When going to a verse from annotations or search, set the audio play position (if timings exist). (#52049)
In the app builder:
Word document import problems:
Failed to import document that did not have a default paragraph style.
Did not transform images that needed to be rotated.
If a book was set to ‘Picture Story Book’, it might be set to ‘Default’ when the book is reloaded.
Table column widths were not scaled according to the screen resolution.
Missing label translation on Book collection Footer page.
Refer to book collection ‘short name’ rather than ‘abbreviation’ in app build message.
Scripture App Builder 4.1
Release date: 05 December 2017
New Features and Improvements:
Image Viewer
Double-click on a row in an image table (illustrations, icons, splash screen) to see a bigger image, which you can resize to see more clearly.
The image viewer is also shown by double-clicking on the image in the Contents menu item configuration and in the Story Pages Picture tab.
Audio Files table
Right-click on the header of the Audio Files table to turn on/off columns.
New column: Timing file last modified date/time
New column: Start time of the first timing. This can help you identify those timing files which begin at 0.0 when you would have expected them to start a few seconds in.
Fine Tune Timings
The app builder can now watch for modified timing files saved in your browser Downloads folder and move them automatically to your project data folder.
To set the Downloads folder, see Settings > Files.
Settings
Added new user setting ‘Highlight synchronized phrases’ to allow user to turn on/off the yellow highlighting when the audio is playing.
This setting can also be turned on/off in the app builder. See the Audio > Audio Settings page.
Set the ‘Layout Direction’ user setting to be disabled by default for new apps.
Import of non-Scripture books
Support the import of Bloom books and improvements to the import of Word documents.
Images loaded from Word documents and html files are now stored in book-specific folders in the project data structure rather than all being copied to the illustrations folder.
Interface translations:
Added more translations in Indonesian.
Export to HTML
Improved styling of chapter number selector menu.
Book features
Allow chapter number position to be set in the book-level features.
Update iOS app to Android features
Updated Settings dialog (except for user interface language and app layout direction).
Added ‘Language & Layout’ in navigation drawer.
Added customisable landscape image in navigation drawer.
The audio toolbar can be turned on automatically when the app launches.
Bugs Fixed:
In the app:
Unable to select and highlight a verse with a verse range, e.g. 2-3.
Settings: do not show user interface language option if there is only one language.
Settings: do not show ‘Show Border’ option is there is no border.
Settings: after leaving the Settings screen, any text display changes, such as turning on/off verse numbers, were not applied immediately to the current chapter.
The font of the current interface language was not being applied to the navigation menu, app sharing dialog, layout configuration, annotation list menus or search screen.
Audio kept playing after pressing the device back button to exit the app.
If the audio was set to be on when the app launches and the audio on/off button was set to be hidden, then if you viewed a book without audio, the audio was turned off and could not be turned on again.
Border images were not shown in the correct positions when the app was in a right-to-left layout.
Tables not being displayed correctly if a table row was split across two lines in the USFM file with a verse number at the start of the second line.
When sharing selected text, the sharing screen title was not translatable.
When sharing selected text, the text selection toolbar did not get hidden afterwards.
Highlighted or bookmarked verses with the no-break tilde character (~) were displayed without the tilde being replaced by a no-break space.
Song numbers in the song list screen were sometimes split over two lines.
In the iOS app:
Fix crash on startup when installing on device.
Fix crash when including a glossary with no chapters (#52077).
Fixed margin around the switch language button in the upper-right corner of the text display (#51779).
Allow hiding empty chapters (#52076).
In the app builder:
Interface Languages:
Language name and font family were not being saved correctly.
English translations could not be edited.
Set font of editable column according to font of interface language.
Thumbnails of images that were short and wide were cropped in the first column of the image tables.
Missing interface string translation on the Phrases page of the aeneas synchronisation wizard.
Interface language names were written repeatedly in the .appDef project configuration file.
During synchronization with aeneas, the Audio Files table was not adding new timing files as they were created.