Change Log

A red line that was wrong about the verse, and a third column with nothing to say

On every verse of John 1, the cockpit warned that the chapter is numbered differently in Hebrew. John is Greek. The reading view had always asked the right question — it passes whether the book is Old Testament and lets the answer decide — and the cockpit asked no question at all: it declared the text Hebrew and let everything follow from that. So the notice was in the wrong testament, printed in red, on every verse, about a fact concerning the whole chapter and not the verse in front of you. The underlying claim was not even false: Tischendorf really does divide the King James’ John 1:38, and fifty-two against fifty-one is true. It was simply no answer to the question a reader was asking, which is what does this verse say.

Behind it sat a standing ruling that had outlived its reason. The rule was disclose, never correct: where the original numbers its verses differently, say so, and refuse to claim which original verse matches which English one. That refusal was right when it was written, because the app had no way to know. It has one now. Both columns are tagged with Strong’s numbers — that is what makes the word-tapping work — so the match between an English verse and an original is not a guess, it is an overlap score. The rule has been overturned, and only because something better than an opinion replaced it.

It was measured before it was believed. A hundred and thirty-five verses across five chapters picked to disagree with each other. Acts 1: twenty-six verses, all aligned. Genesis 1: thirty-one, all aligned. John 1: thirty-seven aligned, thirteen shifted, one merged. Psalm 3 shifted by its title, the way the Hebrew psalms do. Psalm 51 shifted by two — the case that proved a search window of one was too narrow, found by measuring rather than by reasoning about it. The merged verse is the part worth reporting: John 1:38 scores 0.38 and 0.52 against the two originals taken separately, and 0.82 against both of them together — and a merge correctly loses on verses that are merely aligned or shifted, which is what makes the score trustworthy rather than eager. Below 0.45 the app abstains and discloses exactly as it did before, so the restraint survives everywhere it is still earned, and the one sentence a reader now sees is the one that is useful: this verse is divided in the original; these are its first words.

The same Greek word was being defined in three places at once. Tap In in John 1:1 and its entry appeared in the word panel, again in the lexicon card, and again in the strip beneath — three surfaces, one fact, and a screen so crowded that the verse itself had stopped being the biggest thing on it. There is one lexicon card now. The interlinear strip stayed exactly where it was, underneath the English and linked word-for-word by Strong’s number, because that is the one place the repetition was doing work.

And the left column now asks the four questions you would ask out loud. Who is acting, where and when this is happening, what is actually going on, and why it lands on you. Four of those five asks turned out to be answered already — collapsed behind a strip at the bottom edge of the screen where nobody had reason to look. Only what is happening was genuinely missing. Most of this work was not inventing answers; it was moving them to where the question gets asked, and setting the words that matter in type that arrives before the definition rather than after it.

The notes box went, and not to make room. Nobody composes in three rows. Real note-writing already lived in the reading view at full height with the chapter in view, and the dock was a worse copy of it occupying the one piece of the screen this app had never given anything to: standing in front of a room with it. In its place are Present this verse at room size, Read aloud, a teaching outline, and questions to ask. The first two are instant and work offline on purpose — a teaching panel that spins in front of people is worse than no teaching panel — and only the last two carry the gold badge, because that badge means a model wrote this and it has to keep meaning only that.

The dock could only go once the box was one control away, so the toggle shipped with it. Read and the cockpit are now two views of one passage: a chip in each direction, the verse preserved across the crossing, and the address bar carrying it, so the verse you leave is the verse you land on and either view can be linked to directly. The hand-off goes through the address bar for a reason. The cockpit does not write the app’s state — it never has — and the first draft of this crossing did exactly that, in three fields. Three separate suites independently said no. The codebase was right and the design was wrong, and the fix was to hand the passage to the reading view the same way a link does and let its own router do the work.

What was proved and what was not. A hundred and twenty-seven suites pass on every build, and the alignment scoring is pinned to a fixture generated from the live text rather than to numbers typed by hand. The suites also caught three things in this work that no amount of reading it would have: new reading surfaces that took the reading typeface without joining the comfort spacing list, three that fixed a line height instead of multiplying by the reader’s, and surfaces that ignored the text-size setting altogether — handing back the size a reader had deliberately turned down. The crossing was driven in a real browser at 1440×900 and watched rather than reasoned about: arrow to verse 38 in the cockpit, confirm the reading view’s own state is still untouched, press back, land on John 1:38 with the cell focused. What no suite can say is whether four model answers earn a whole column. That button has deliberately never been pressed here, because every press spends four real calls on Ed’s account — and neither has Present this verse ever faced an actual room. Both are a week of real teaching, and they are Ed’s to judge.

The notch, the sideways phone, a version you can reach — and a cockpit you can steer

Added to the home screen, this app was running underneath the Dynamic Island. The clock sat on top of the reference, the translation chip was hidden behind the island completely, and the share and listen buttons lived under the wifi and battery icons. It existed only in the installed app, which is the one configuration a browser cannot reproduce. In a Safari tab the strip at the top belongs to Safari, so the inset the app is told about is zero; launched from the home screen it is sixty-two pixels. Measured both ways on the same iPhone minutes apart: a tab is 402×714 with no insets, the installed app 402×812 with 62 above and 34 below. The app already carried twelve rules that respected the home indicator at the bottom and not one that respected the notch at the top. The header now pads by whatever the device says is unsafe, and the three things it pushes down move with it — otherwise a taller bar simply covers the text instead of the clock. On anything without a notch the arithmetic comes to exactly what it was, so a browser, a desktop and an older phone are unchanged to the pixel.

A phone turned sideways is still a phone, and until now it was not treated as one. The rule that decides the one-pane phone layout looked only at width, at 640 pixels — so an iPhone held in landscape, 852 pixels wide, fell out of it and got the full desktop: four columns at 277 pixels each in a viewport 393 pixels tall, the app quietly folding a translation away, and the cockpit door advising you to turn your iPad sideways on a phone that was already sideways. Width alone cannot tell those apart, because 852 sits between a phone standing up and a tablet lying down. Height can, and it is now asked as well — together with whether a finger is being used at all, so a desktop window dragged short stays a desktop.

And the things a finger lands on were measured rather than assumed. Apple’s floor is 44 points and the audit found a tier of controls well under it on every iPad in both orientations — the footer links rendering fourteen pixels tall, the chapter arrows, the column controls, the two-up button. Raising the worst of them exposed the next tier, which is the honest shape of this kind of sweep. One number was deliberately not raised on sight: the top bar had been set to 42 with a reason recorded beside it, so the constraint was re-measured at both values across four iPads before it moved. The row count turned out identical either way, so the reason no longer held and the floor went to 44 — with the new measurement written down next to it, because a number that changes without one is how the first one got lost.

The version, and the check for updates behind it, had no door on a phone at all. The chip in the footer is the only way into the About panel, and the phone layout hides the whole footer — so on a phone there was no way to see which version you were running and, more to the point, no way to find out you were running an old one. That matters more than it sounds: an app added to the home screen keeps serving its own stored copy after a new version is published, so it cannot discover it is out of date by looking at itself. The panel answers the question by asking the server directly, and that panel was unreachable. It now sits at the foot of ⚙ Settings as About & updates, with the version beside it. Closing it also puts you back on the control you pressed, which on a phone it previously could not do.

And the cockpit could not be told where to go. It was built on the assumption that you arrive from the reading view already on the passage you want — so the arrows stopped at the ends of the chapter, the occurrence list only ever pointed inside it, and cross-references were the single door out. Wanting Romans 8 from Acts 17 meant leaving, navigating and coming back. There is now a go to box in the bar above the verse. It takes what the reading view has always taken: John 3:16, Rom 8, 1 jn 2, abbreviations and all — and if what you type is not a reference at all but a sentence of Scripture, it lands you on the verse that sentence came from, offline, from the text already on your device. A chapter with no verse lands on its first. A reference inside the chapter you are reading moves the verse without fetching anything.

The row of dots beside the reference was never a control, and it looked exactly like one. One dot per verse, showing what you have read, where you are and what is ahead — and every reader who tried to tap it got nothing, because the dots had no handler at all. They do now. The dots are deliberately not made bigger: they sit seven pixels apart so a hundred and seventy-six of them fit a psalm in one row, and a target generous enough to be comfortable would overlap its neighbours — which would not merely miss, it would take you to the wrong verse. So each one is exactly as wide as the gap and taller than it looks. On a Mac the arrow keys now page the verse too, left and right, and they stay out of the way of anything you are typing into.

What was proved and what was not. 122 suites pass on every build, and the notch fix carries twelve of its own, deliberately tested against five ways of breaking it — including tidying the bottom insets away and dropping one line from the page header, either of which would silently return every inset to zero and leave the rest looking perfectly correct. The notch itself was verified on the device rather than reasoned about: the fixed build was installed to the home screen beside the live one and launched. What no test here can say is whether a phone held sideways is a good way to read at all, or whether the version belongs in Settings rather than somewhere you pass more often. Both are a week of real use, and they are Ed’s to judge.

A way in, and three pickers that can finally shrink

The cockpit had two doors and both of them needed an address bar. /cockpit and index.html#cockpit are the only ways in it has ever had — and installed to the home screen or the Dock, this app runs with no address bar at all. So in the version most likely to be on your iPad, the Verse Cockpit has been unreachable since the day it shipped. Not hidden, not awkward to find: unreachable. There is now a Verse Cockpit switch in the settings panel, beside Strong’s and Shared notes, and it is a real switch rather than a preference that waits for a reload — ticking it takes you in, unticking it brings you back, and the ← Read chip does the same. What you chose is remembered for next time.

It behaves differently at three screen widths, and the middle one is the point. On a phone the row is not there at all — the cockpit is a landscape view and cannot run in that space, so offering it would be a control whose purpose is not obvious. On an iPad held upright it is there, greyed, saying turn the iPad sideways. That is deliberate: a feature that vanishes when you rotate looks broken, and a feature that explains itself costs one line of text. Sideways, and on any Mac, it is live. An installed app on a Mac also gets a “Verse Cockpit” shortcut on its icon; iPads do not implement those, so there it does nothing and costs nothing.

And the three translation pickers could not shrink, so on a phone you lost them. A dropdown is as wide as its longest option, and “YLT — Young’s Literal Translation” makes that 518 pixels. Measured on a 375-pixel screen, the third picker ended 157 pixels past the right edge — and because the page does not scroll sideways in pocket mode, it was not merely off to the side, it was cut off with no way to reach it. The fix is one line of CSS letting them narrow, and the row now wraps the way it always looked as though it should. Checked at seven widths from 320 up.

And on a phone, the settings panel was opening underneath the bar that opens it. Not partly — the three pickers A7 had just made fit were all on screen and all of them were behind the desktop-controls bar, so a tap landed on the bar instead. What you saw was the panel’s tail, the theme switch and pocket mode, with nothing above it, which reads as a panel that simply has fewer controls on a phone. It does not. The overlay now steps out of the way as the panel opens, because once you have used it to get here it has done its job.

What was proved and what was not. 116 suites pass on every build, and the new door is held to the same rule the cockpit itself uses — move the threshold and the switch moves with it, or the tests go red. Both changes were driven in a real browser at real screen sizes, and the screenshots were looked at rather than trusted: the first run of them photographed a loading screen while every assertion passed. What no test can say is whether one verse in the middle of the screen is a better way to study than the page you already have. The door only makes that question askable on the iPad; answering it is a week of real reading.

Words that have moved, and the rail taught to ask in order

The King James is 1769 English, and some of its words have quietly changed sides. Not the ones you expect — holpen and peradventure announce themselves, and you look them up. The dangerous ones are the words still in daily use that meant something else: let meant to hinder, prevent meant to go before, conversation meant your conduct, quick meant living, and “I shall not want” means I shall lack nothing. Nothing signals the misreading, so a reader can hold one of these backwards for a lifetime. The cockpit now marks them in the verse with a wavy underline — deliberately not the dotted gold rule that means “this word carries a Strong’s number”, because those are two different claims — and a card in the left column says what each one used to mean.

It only speaks where it is sure, and that cost something. One hundred and eighty-five words ship, and every one carries a verse citation checked against the King James text the app itself displays: two citations turned out to be wrong and were dropped rather than tidied. More importantly, most of these words mark only at the verses where the older sense actually stands. Let appears fifteen hundred times in the King James and means hinder in about three of them — so marking every let would not merely fail to help, it would teach you something false. Fourteen words whose old sense is their only sense in the King James are marked everywhere; the rest are marked where they were verified and nowhere else. It is quieter than it could be, and every mark is true.

Nothing about it is AI, and that is the point of where it sits. It is a lookup in a small file on your device: instant, free, working offline, and incapable of inventing a meaning. It sits in the left column with the green “your device” chip rather than behind the gold AI badge, because that badge means a model wrote this and it has to keep meaning only that. On a modern translation the card is simply absent, which is the correct answer.

The AI layer now asks in the order the method teaches. It was seven questions in a flat row that mixed three different kinds of thing. It is now three groups — Observe, Interpret, Apply — the inductive order this whole platform is built on, so a reader who uses the rail is learning the method by using it. Choosing a group costs nothing and is remembered; opening a question is still a fresh call and is still never remembered, because that is the one that spends money.

Five new questions, and every one of them is allowed to say “there is nothing here”. Antecedents answers the commonest comprehension failure in reading Scripture — “these were more noble”, but who is these? — and it must quote the verse where the noun actually stands, so you can check it in two seconds rather than take it on trust. Flow asks what the verse before sets up and the verse after concludes. Culture asks what a first-century reader knew that we do not, which is a different question from where and when. Prophecy asks whether the verse predicts or fulfils anything — and where it does, it says plainly that it is answering from this tool’s stated position, and where a reader who holds another view would read it differently. Application is promoted out of being one question inside another, and must quote the clause it draws from.

Each question is now handed only the text it needs. Every segment declares its scale — verse, paragraph, chapter, book, canon — and that declaration is what decides how much passage it is given. A verse-scale question used to receive the whole chapter and then be asked in the prompt not to drift onto it; it now receives the verse and its neighbours. Handing a model less text is a better instruction than telling it to ignore what you handed it.

And the second column becomes the ASV. Only two English translations carry Strong’s numbers at all — the King James and the ASV — so making the ASV the standing alternate means word-tapping survives when you switch to it, which it would not with any modern version. The NASB moves along to the third column and still reads in parallel. If you do choose an untagged text for the first column, the picker now tells you which two are tagged and what to do instead, rather than letting the underlines vanish with no explanation.

What was proved and what was not. Every citation in the dictionary is checked against the shipped King James on every build, and the build refuses to write the file if one does not hold. Five rigs drove the new work in a real browser at four screen sizes. The cost of the rail was measured rather than guessed: the doctrine frame every answer carries is about four-fifths of each question’s bill, so opening all twelve on one verse costs roughly ten times the single most expensive one. What no rig can say is whether the marked words change how the King James reads to you, or whether twelve questions is a better rail than seven. That is a week of real reading, and it is Paul’s to judge.

The Verse Cockpit — one verse in the middle, every help around it

A second way to read, on a route of its own, and nothing about the old one has changed. Go to /cockpit and the screen rearranges itself around a single verse: the verse large in the middle, the Greek or Hebrew beneath it word by word, and the helps in columns either side. The reading view you already know is exactly where it was — same address, same behaviour, same keystrokes. The cockpit is opt-in, it is a landscape view for a Mac or an iPad held sideways, and below that width it says so and hands you back to Read rather than guessing at a phone layout. This release changes the version number and adds a door; it takes nothing away.

The ring. The verse sits in the middle with its chapter arc above it and the version pills beneath. Every word the translation tags with a Strong’s number is dotted; tap one and the whole screen answers at once — the word lights in the verse, its chip lights in the interlinear strip, a dotted line joins the two, and the left column fills with the original word, its transliteration, its number, its lexicon entry and every place it stands in the chapter you have open. Tap a chip in the strip instead and the same thing happens from the other end. Switch the version and the selection stays put, because what is selected is a number, not a word: the English changes underneath it and the number does not.

What is around it. Down the right: cross references from the table already on your device, each one quoted so you can see whether it is worth following — and it is followable, the whole ring moving to the passage. The same verse in your other two translations, with the selected word marked where a translation happens to use it. A commentator’s note on the verse, which says whether it is a note on this verse or on the paragraph the verse falls inside, because a note written about verse 10 shown silently under verse 11 is a small untruth about who wrote what. And Guzik as a link to his own site, which is the whole of what his permission letter allows.

Your own work, in the same place it always was. A note on the verse in focus and a colour for the whole verse, both written into the very same study the reading view writes — the same field, the same file, the same one place on your device. The cockpit is not a second notebook. The chapter’s O·I·A note is not editable here on purpose: it belongs to the study pane and one line says whether there is one, with a door to where it is written.

The AI, one gesture away. At the foot of the screen is a single gold strip. Left alone it costs the verse nothing. Tap it or swipe it up and seven questions appear — setting, structure, contrast, thread, text note, coach’s questions, a teaching outline — each one a fresh question to the Study Partner about this verse, under the same doctrine frame every answer in this app carries. Every answer says so underneath: which engine, which seat, and that none of it came from bolls.life. Nothing is asked until you ask it; nothing is asked when you move to the next verse; and each answer is kept until you leave the verse, so comparing two of them costs one of them. The strip remembers whether you left it up.

The camera, and the Hebrew. Where a camera exists, a small green door in the top bar opens the reader v43 and v44 built — the same one, nothing new underneath — and a verse it finds does not merely appear in the middle of the screen, it arrives: it lifts in and the ring glows once behind it, because a verse that changed while you were looking at a book, not at the screen, has to be seen to change. And the Old Testament strip now carries Strong’s numbers where it carried bare consonants, running right to left as Hebrew does. Where Hebrew and English number a chapter differently — most of the Psalms, where Hebrew counts the title as verse 1 and English does not — the app says so above the strip, and the dotted line that joins an English word to its Hebrew one is not drawn, because across that gap it would be joining two different verses.

What was proved and what was not. Six rigs drove the cockpit in a real browser at four screen sizes, including an iPad with a real iPad browser and a finger: the route, the one-screen height, the ring moving as one, a version switch keeping the selection, the connector appearing and refusing to appear, a note really landing in the study file and surviving a reload, a real photographed page read by the camera and landed in the middle, and the Hebrew running the right way. What no rig can say is whether one verse in the middle of the screen is a better way to study than the page you already have. That is a week of real reading, and it is Paul’s to judge — which is why the cockpit is a second door rather than a replacement, and why nothing about the reading view moved to make room for it.

The Mac as the pane of glass, and which Greek under the verse

v43 said a Mac never shows the camera button. v44 takes that back, for a reason. A Mac has no finger on its screen, but it can have an iPhone standing beside it: with macOS Ventura and iOS 16 or later, the same Apple ID and Bluetooth on, Apple’s Continuity Camera offers the iPhone to every browser on the Mac as an ordinary camera, with nothing to install. So the button now appears on any device that can see a camera — and when it does, the iPhone is the lens and the Mac’s screen is the pane of glass: the printed page large, the verse lit on it, the Greek beneath. When more than one camera exists — the Mac’s own and the iPhone — a small picker in the bar under the picture chooses between them, prefers the one whose name says iPhone, and remembers your choice with the rest of your settings. Nothing about the picture leaves the room: Continuity Camera runs between the iPhone and the Mac, and the reading runs on the Mac.

Which Greek. The Bible on the desk was translated from one Greek text or another, and the Greek beneath the verse should be that one. Under the Greek now sit three chips — Textus Receptus, Tischendorf, NTGT — the same choice the settings gear makes for the Originals column, one tap instead of a trip to the gear. A King James or Young’s reads against the Textus Receptus; an ESV, NIV or NASB against the critical text, of which Tischendorf’s 8th is the nearest the app carries; the World English Bible against the Majority text, to which the Textus Receptus stands close. Strong’s numbers ride natively on Tischendorf’s 8th, so on that text a tapped word opens the Lexicon by its number; on the Textus Receptus and NTGT, which carry no tags, a tapped word looks itself up by its spelling. The transliteration — how each word is said — is there on all three. The Hebrew side has one text and no chips.

What was proved and what was not. The rig proved the door, the picker’s arithmetic and the chips in a Chromium with one synthetic camera: the button shows on a desktop that has a camera, hides on one that has none, the picker stays hidden with a single camera, and the Tischendorf chip switches the words under the verse and the gear together. A Chromium can be given only one camera, so switching between two, and the iPhone itself on its stand, are the reader’s checks, not the rig’s. The manual’s section 5.7 says how to set the iPhone up, and what to do when the Mac picks its own camera first.

Hold the camera over the page — nothing to press

v42 asked for a shutter. v43 does not. The first camera worked, and its first reader said sorta: he wanted to hover, not to press. So now, while the camera is open, the app watches whether your hand is still, and the moment it is, the strip of the picture under the gold guide is read on the device and the verse lights on the page — a soft line under each printed line — with the reference, the verse in your own translation, and the Greek or Hebrew word by word beneath, each with how it is said. Move down the page and the next verse follows. Move quickly and the outline fades until you stop; the verse you had stays. A sure reading changes the verse at once; a doubtful one has to be seen twice; a miss never takes away what is there.

The shutter freezes the page and maps it. Every verse the reader can find on the page becomes a box you can tap, and the strip beneath follows your finger — 3 verses on this page, tap another. A photo you already took, opened with 🖼, is explored the same way, with no Bible in reach. And every Greek or Hebrew word in the strip is a door: tap it and the Lexicon opens on it.

What it costs, and what it does not. The reader loads once, about six megabytes, the first time a page is read, and the service worker keeps it; live reading is paced — the guide’s strip, not the whole picture, never two readings at once — so the phone stays cool. The picture never leaves the device. What v43 does not do, on purpose, is glide the outline with the page as you sweep the camera across it; that is tracking, the next step in The camera plan in the repository, and it waits for this to be used on real pages first. The manual’s section 5.7 describes all of it, with a figure taken by the app’s own camera with nothing pressed.

Point the camera at a printed verse

The Bible on the desk, the camera in your hand. v41 taught the app to land on a verse from its words, however they reached the clipboard. v42 takes the words off the page itself. On an iPad or a phone a 📷 sits beside Open — in the picker, on a phone — and opens one full-screen sheet with one shutter. Fill the guide with a verse, hold still, tap. The page is read on the device: by the phone’s own text recogniser where the browser has one, and otherwise by a reader the app carries with it, about six megabytes that load the first time you press the shutter and never again. The picture never leaves your hand. Then the still stays on the screen with the verse the app found outlined on the page, line by line, and beneath it the reference, the verse as your own translation has it, and the Greek or Hebrew word by word — the same words the Originals column shows. Open in the Dashboard takes you to the chapter with that verse in focus; Another verse raises the camera again.

What it asks for, and when. The browser asks for the camera the moment the sheet opens and at no other time; a Mac, which has no finger on its screen, never shows the button at all. Nothing is loaded at boot. A page the app cannot match says so and offers the paste door instead. Live text drawn over a moving picture — the third step of this idea — is not in this version, on purpose: it is worth building only once this one has been used on real pages.

The library describes it. The manual has a new section 5.7 with the first figure ever taken by the app’s own camera — a printed page read by the rig, the verse outlined — and the four documents are current to v42 the same day.

Paste a sentence, land on the verse

The Bible on the desk, and the app in your hand. The stretch goal was a camera on a printed page — point the phone at a chapter and get the interlinear. This is the first half of it, the half that needs no new permission and no new library: copy a sentence of Scripture from anywhere — a web page, an e-mail, or a printed page through the phone’s own Live Text — paste it into the reference box on a computer or the picker on a phone, and the app lands on the verse it came from. It works across translations, because it is not a phrase search: the sentence is reduced to its words, stemmed just enough that believeth and believes agree, and every verse carrying its rarest words is scored on how many of the rest it carries and in what order, against the three Bibles already on the device, your own first. A sure match lands and says so — Landed on John 3:16 — 9 of 11 words, KJV; a near miss lands and calls itself a guess; a miss says so plainly and nothing moves. A word or two still goes to Search, and Search is still Search.

A loop cannot spend the sync budget. The 10 September question could this be hacked? had one cheap answer: the sync route checked everything about a backup except how often one address sent one, and the free tier allows the whole site a thousand writes a day. Now it is thirty syncs from one address in ten minutes, then a plain sentence and a wait. A nuisance closed, not a breach — the server still cannot read what it stores.

The library describes all of it. The four documents were brought current to v40 the same day v40 shipped — the peek, the whole verse, Tonight, the way back, four new figures shot against the live site — and to v41 the same day again, with this door in the manual’s top bar and picker sections.

Hover, the whole verse, and your evening in one sentence

The peek, on a mouse. The phone has had a peek before a commitment since v37 — tap a word, get a card, the full entry one tap further. The Mac now has its own: rest the pointer on a Strong’s number or a Greek word and, after a quarter-second, a small card shows the lexeme, its transliteration and one line of meaning; on a marked phrase, the colour, what it means in your legend and how many marks of it are in the chapter; on a 📝, the verse note. It adds no control and stores nothing, it can never take a click, and an iPad or a phone never sees it.

A mark on the whole verse. A phrase mark lives in one translation’s wording. Triple-click a verse and the palette opens with ¶ already on — or tap ¶ yourself, which is the way on a phone — and any colour marks the whole verse, in every column and in any translation, the Greek included: a tint of the colour and a pencil-line down the margin, or U̲ for an underline of the verse’s text. It is anchored to the verse, not to words, so the exports say the whole verse and the word analytics count nothing from it.

Tonight, in one sentence. At the foot of the Notes pane, 📋 Tonight: Acts 17 — 41 minutes. You marked 5 phrases — 3 Command / instruction and 2 Key repeated word, marked the whole of 1 verse, wrote 214 words of Observation and 40 words of Application, wrote 1 note on a verse, looked up G1537 and G4160, read John Gill, opened the cross references 2 times, asked the Partner 2 times and ran 1 search. Every number is counted on this device as you work; nothing leaves it; nothing is written for you — the app counts your work, it does not do it. A session ends after half an hour away, the last thirty are kept, and the .md export carries the log.

The way back from Guzik and Blue Letter Bible. Their pages are links and only ever links — Enduring Word’s letter permits a chapter URL and nothing more, Blue Letter Bible invites linking and forbids the rest, and a test holds that line — so nothing of ours is drawn on their pages. What is ours is how the link opens, and it now decides by how you are running the app: on a phone or tablet in a browser tab the link opens in the same tab and Back returns you to the verse you left, scroll position and all; installed to the home screen, the phone opens it in its own in-app browser with Done drawn by the system, which is the one party allowed to draw it; on a Mac or PC it opens a second tab as before, but a named one, so ten taps on Guzik reuse one tab instead of piling up. Each trip out says what it did, in one line. The Dashboard’s own tab is titled Berean — Acts 17, so it is easy to find among many, and the phone’s gear sheet lost its duplicate Guzik on this chapter row — Deeper is where the commentators live. Written on 6 September as its own release and held while sync shipped; it lands here.

The phone’s marking palette is sized for a thumb. Every dot was 20 pixels and every button about 15 since v37, the one surface pocket mode had not sized; found when ¶ joined them. Dots are 30 with a halo, buttons 44, and the palette wraps inside the screen. The four documents in the library were brought current to v40 the same day — figures reshot against the live build, then the prose, then the badge.

Your notes on more than one device — and the desktop and iPad brought up to the phone’s standard

Until today every note lived in one browser, on purpose. That was the contract, written in the repository’s own rules: no account, no server copy, by design. It was changed today, in writing, and the terms are written where the code is. ☁ Sync to my other devices sits at the foot of the Notes pane, shut. Open it, choose a passphrase of twelve characters or more, and use the same one on every device. Your studies, notes, marks and legends are sealed on the device before they leave it — the server stores a blob it cannot read, and the passphrase never goes anywhere. There is no reset. No e-mail, no account, no recovery: forget the passphrase and the backup is scrap, and the app says so before it takes one. Pictures and each device’s own settings do not travel, and it says that too.

When two devices change the same note, both are kept. A study journal that settles a conflict by timestamp will one day discard the paragraph that mattered and never say so. Instead the two are joined under also written on your other device, counted, and named in the message you get after a sync. Untidy and recoverable beats tidy and not. Deleting a study on one device deletes it on the others; a name you delete and later recreate survives, because a deletion only outranks an edit that came before it.

The desktop and the iPad were audited the way the phone was in v37, live, at four widths, with screenshots. Nine things were wrong and nine are fixed: the Welcome card is a real dialog with a close button and a way out on the keyboard; the top bar breaks at a chosen point instead of wrapping ragged; on an iPad held upright the fourth translation column was 208 pixels off the right edge, and the grid now folds to the columns that fit with a chip at the foot saying which are folded; the seven hundred tiny speakers under every Greek word show only on the word you hover or the verse you focus; the pencil sits out of the text instead of on it; the Notes pane’s clutter is folded behind one ⋯ so the writing box gets the height; the Lexicon and Partner voice controls fold shut; and on a wide monitor a tap on a verse number opens the commentary in a column beside the Bible instead of over it. That last one is a change to a decided default and can be turned back with one tap.

A note on a verse. Not every thought belongs in the chapter’s Observation, Interpretation or Application. Select a verse and press 📌 on the marking palette, or open 📌 Verse notes at the foot of the Notes pane, and write a note that belongs to that verse alone. A small 📝 after the verse number says there is one; tap it and the note opens. On the phone the verse sheet shows it under the versions. They go into every export under their own heading, the note search finds them, the Study Partner reads them, and they travel with sync like everything else — because underneath, a verse note is simply one more field of the chapter’s note, and nothing in the app had to learn a new shape.

Cross references are on the bench. 344,756 of them, from openbible.info under CC BY 4.0, at the top of the Deeper tab as one line you open when you want it, following the verse you have focused — and each one shows its verse text from the Bible already on your device, so you never leave the passage to find out whether a reference was worth following. That is the part Blue Letter Bible does not do. The table is fetched the first time you open Deeper on a verse and cached after; it is not loaded at install.

Found on the way, and worth saying. The read-aloud tick-box in the Partner was set before your saved choice was restored, so a reader who had chosen it came back to answers read aloud under an unchecked box; fixed. And the first draft of sync reused two function names the app already owned for merging notes between two windows of one browser — every test passed, and a rig driving two real devices caught it in one line. Every name is now distinct, and a new test holds that no name in the app is declared twice. The four documents in the library were brought current to v39 the same day — figures reshot against this build, then the prose, then the badge.

The phone, emulated — pocket mode on a Mac or an iPad, on purpose

Pocket mode was automatic on a phone and half-built everywhere else. The settings row has carried a Pocket mode tick-box since v37, but on a wide screen it gave you the phone’s header and strip wrapped around the desktop’s four-column grid — seventeen-pixel type in twelve-hundred-pixel lines. Tired eyes on an iPad were the reason for the switch, and the switch did not deliver.

Now it becomes a phone. Tick Pocket mode in the gear row on a Mac or an iPad and the app draws itself as a centred phone-sized frame — the same one-version page, the same verse sheet, word sheet, Settings and More, every sheet the width of the frame and not the window — remembered on that device until you say otherwise. ⇖ Back to the full layout waits at the top of the gear sheet. The trick underneath is one CSS rule: the page’s body becomes the phone, and because it carries a transform it is what every bottom sheet and bar positions against. Nothing inside pocket mode had to learn that a frame exists.

Nothing changed for anyone who did not tick the box. The desktop grid, its columns, marks and highlights are as they were; a real phone is exactly as it was in v37. The only rule that now applies at every width is the one that folds the grid to a single column while pocket mode is on — which on a phone it already did.

The phone finally reads like a page — one version on screen, every version one tap away

On a phone the app had been the desktop folded in half. The four columns that sit side by side on a Mac stacked one on top of the other, so every verse was KJV, then NASB, then Young’s, then the Greek — nearly a whole screen per verse, and a chapter of Acts twenty-two thousand pixels tall. The text was small, every King James word carried a small blue Strong’s number, and every Greek word carried a spelling-out and a little speaker underneath it. It was all there. None of it could be read.

Now you read one version, and the others wait one tap away. The chip at the top says which — KJV, or Greek · TR — and tapping it switches instantly, because nothing new is fetched: every version you have chosen is already on the page, only folded out of sight. Tap a verse number and that verse opens in every version at once, Greek or Hebrew first, with the arrows or a swipe to walk to the next verse and buttons for the commentary, your notes, and the Study Partner. That is what a parallel Bible can mean on a screen four inches wide. The same chapter of Acts is now under five thousand pixels.

The text got bigger and quieter. Seventeen-pixel type with room between the lines; Greek and Hebrew larger still. The Strong’s numbers fold to a small dot that still opens the word when tapped — and if you want the numbers back, Settings has a switch. The spelling-out under each Greek word is a switch too. Tap any word and a card shows the word, how it is said, its number, and one line of what it means, before offering the full dictionary entry.

Settings exist on the phone now. Text size, light or dark or follow the device, which versions load, Greek and Hebrew on or off, the two switches above — behind the ⚙ at the top of the screen, first row of the sheet it opens. That sheet also holds the Manual, the Field Guide, the Inductive Guide and this Change log, so every document is one tap from wherever you are reading. The bottom strip is eight panes — Read, Lexicon, Deeper, Notes, Search, Partner, Blog, Patterns — and it scrolls, fading at whichever edge still has more, so the strip looks like a strip instead of a bar with things missing off the end. Deeper, Search, the Blog and the Patterns Lab sit under the ⚙ as well: either road reaches them. Tap the reference at the top and a real picker opens: type John 3:16, or choose a book, a chapter, a verse, with the last five places you went as chips.

Two small things you would have noticed without knowing why. The King James text sometimes ended a verse with a stray note — whom: or, whom, said he, I preach — that belongs in a margin and had been read aloud as scripture; it is gone. And a space had been creeping in before commas and full stops after every tagged word; it is closed.

On the Mac, nothing here changed. Every one of these is a phone-only rule. The desktop grid, its columns, its marks and highlights are exactly as they were in v36 — and so are the fixes that landed quietly since then: the About panel’s manuals, the ELS Explorer, the Teacher seat beside the Coach, and the Daniel 9 study published at /studies/.

Corrected 6 September 2026. This entry first described a bottom strip of five tabs with Settings under a More tab, which is what v37 shipped with on the morning of 5 September. Later the same morning the strip went back to being all of the panes and learned to scroll, and Settings moved to the ⚙ in the header — the paragraph above now describes what is actually on your phone. The strip you can see is the one that counts; this page had been describing a screen that existed for about two hours.

The Patterns Lab stopped asking — the Hebrew and Greek now ship with the app

It was never slow. It was being turned away. Pressing a book in the Patterns Lab used to take several goes before it finished, and the reason was not the size of the book. The Lab asked for every chapter at once — a hundred and fifty simultaneous requests for Psalms — and the server it asks quite reasonably refused some of them. One refusal killed the whole run. What made it eventually work was that the chapters which had arrived were kept, so each press got a little further. That is why it felt like it needed several presses: it was resuming by accident.

Now one press finishes the job. Five chapters are fetched at a time instead of all of them; a refusal waits and asks again rather than giving up, and honours the delay the server asks for; and you can watch it — Fetching Psalms — 37/150 chapters. If something genuinely cannot be fetched, the Lab says which chapters are missing and refuses to scan a part of a book, because half a book gives an answer that looks exactly like an answer.

And the text now comes with the app. The whole Hebrew Bible and the whole Greek New Testament ship as part of the download — 23,213 Hebrew verses and 7,957 Greek ones — so the Lab no longer has to ask another site for the words at all. It is quicker, it works with no signal, and it stops leaning on somebody else’s server to do our counting.

Some counts have changed, and this is the part worth reading. The page’s whole argument is that the arithmetic is yours to check, so it cannot quietly start counting something different. Two things were wrong in the Hebrew we were reading before. Where the manuscript records a word written one way and read another, the old text wrote both, tagged with the letters כ and ק — and those tags are Hebrew letters, so they were being counted as scripture. And a few words had lost their first letter altogether. Both are fixed, which means letter counts, gematria totals and equidistant-letter findings in the affected chapters are now different, and more nearly right.

The Greek changed too, and that one is not a correction. The Greek is Tischendorf’s 8th edition, now from a public-domain source we can name. It replaces a different digitisation of the same edition, and the two disagree slightly — by a letter or a few in about half the chapters we compared. Which of them is faithful to what Tischendorf actually printed is a question for his own apparatus, not for this page. So Greek counts have moved, and unlike the Hebrew we cannot tell you the new ones are more correct — only that we can show you where the text came from and on what terms. The Textus Receptus option is untouched.

Joel and Malachi are numbered differently in Hebrew than in English, and the Lab now follows the manuscript: Joel has four chapters here and three in most English Bibles, Malachi three here and four. This also fixed a real gap — the Lab had been reading only three of Joel’s four chapters, so nearly a third of that book was never counted at all. A reference like Joel 4:5 is the Hebrew numbering and will show as Joel 3:5 in an English Bible. The page tells you the two disagree; it does not pretend to know which verse equals which.

The notes grew up — undo, search, typeface, pictures, mind maps

There is an undo. Until now there was none of any kind, and the browser’s own could not help: the app rewrites the note box every time you change field, chapter or study, and that wipes the native undo stack. So the app keeps its own, per field, surviving every one of those switches — and it covers the losses worth mourning as well as the typing: deleting a study, clearing a chapter, wiping a set of marks. One button, and ⌘Z, and it takes back whichever you did last.

You can search your own notes. The note manager listed which chapters held notes; it could not search what was in them, so finding a half-remembered sentence meant opening chapters one at a time. Now type in the manager and only what matched shows — with the sentence you wrote shown in place, so you can recognise a note without opening the chapter at all. Two words must both appear; “quoted text” stays whole. Your marked phrases are searched alongside your notes, because where did I mark covenant is the same question as where did I write about covenant.

You can choose the typeface. A−/A+ has always sized the text and Comfort text has always opened up the lines, but both picked one face for everybody — and the face that unlocks a page for one reader is not the one that works for another. Five now, each saying who it helps, Verdana among them as the one most often recommended for dyslexia. Hebrew and Greek are never changed.

You can put pictures in a note — a photo of your page, a map, a chart — pasted, dropped, or chosen. They are kept in a store of their own, deliberately apart from your writing: notes live in a space of about five megabytes, one phone photo would fill it, and the write that failed would be the write that saved your notes. Kept apart, a picture that cannot be saved costs a picture and never a sentence. Large photos are scaled so the page stays quick on an iPad, and the ⬇ .md export now carries every picture inside the file, so a backup is a whole backup again.

And a mind map. O·I·A notes were always a tree — study, chapter, field, then each point — and a tree is the one shape a page cannot show. 🧠 Mind map writes a real .xmind file: chapters as branches, your marked phrases grouped by colour under your own legend wording, each with its verse. Written by hand rather than by adding a library, so the app is still one file that works with no signal.

One real bug went with it: deleting a study did not delete it. You confirmed, the app said “Study deleted”, and the study came back — notes, marks and all — on the next save. The app was re-creating it a fraction of a second later while tidying up, and stamping the copy as newer than the deletion. Deleting now sticks, and if it was a mistake, Undo brings the whole study back.

Choose the Originals column’s Greek

The Originals column’s New Testament side is now yours to choose: Originals · NT in the settings gear offers the Textus Receptus (the KJV’s foundation), Tischendorf’s 8th (the critical-text family, Strong’s-tagged natively), or the plain Tischendorf text. The Hebrew side stays the Westminster Leningrad Codex, untouched. The Septuagint and Delitzsch’s Hebrew New Testament are on bolls’ shelf too — but they are translations, not originals, so they belong in the translation columns, where the Septuagint can already be read today beside the Hebrew it renders.

The Variant Lens — see where the foundational texts differ

Put two Greek editions side by side (TR and TISCH is the classic pair), flip Δ Variant lens in the settings gear, and every word one text carries that the other lacks wears a dotted gold underline — open 1 John 5 and verse 7 stands marked in the TR with silence opposite it. Whole verses absent from one text say so plainly, and a summary line counts the chapter’s differences. Spelling conventions never light up — only real presence, absence and substitution. The lens describes; it never judges: these are the very deltas beneath the King James and the modern translations, shown rather than told. The diff runs locally on the chapters already on your screen — no server calls, no new data, works offline.

Type the word, get the number

Type the word, get the number. Search church and a gold bar now offers its Strong’s number above the results — one tap to every occurrence, every spelling. Search love and the bar shows all four numbers the KJV renders as love, each with its count — choosing between them is the word study. Measured from the tagged KJV itself, so charity finds G26 though no modern translation says charity at all. The bar offers; it never substitutes.

Phrase search by the numbers

Phrase search by the numbers. Select a phrase — fear not — and the palette offers 🔍 by the numbers: the Strong’s numbers riding inside your selection become the search, and the numbers never inflect, so one tap finds the phrase in every spelling and every rendering. Hebrew al-tira (H408→H3372) stands in 74 OT verses where the English wording showed 63. Two honest modes: together in one verse, or side by side in original order (a particle between words never breaks it, and a two-word pair tries Hebrew’s reversed order for you). Type sequences too: H408 H3372. All matching is local, from shipped indexes of the tagged WLC and Tischendorf.

Every-occurrence Strong’s search — the roadmap’s oldest promise, kept

Every-occurrence Strong’s search — the roadmap’s oldest promise, kept. Tap any word, open its dictionary entry, and tap 🔍 Every occurrence: every verse in Scripture where that number stands — every spelling, every rendering. Church, churches, and Acts’ assembly are one G1577, and now one search; the number is the “or” you always wanted. Type a number straight into the search box too (G1577, H430). Results show in your translation where its text ships with the app, the found word wears gold on the tagged display, and the headline carries the same exact figures Word analytics counts.

The bridge lights untagged Greek

The bridge lights untagged Greek. Mark church in Revelation on the Textus Receptus and εκκλησιας now colors with it — the untagged column borrows its Strong’s numbers from the tagged edition at render time, matched spelling by spelling, so count and color finally agree everywhere the counting already did. A spelling the tagged text uses for two different numbers is left uncolored rather than guessed.

Counting is exact in KJV, WEB and YLT — and quote-proof everywhere

Counting is exact in KJV, WEB and YLT — and quote-proof everywhere. The public-domain editions now count phrases from their own shipped text — the very words the app displays — so a count there is exact and uncapped, never a “≥ at least,” and it works offline. Type “I am” with or without quotation marks; both count now (quotes used to reach the server and come back empty, and the app wrongly said not once). Other editions still count through bolls, with punctuation cleaned from the query — and when the server refuses words outright, the app now says could not be measured instead of pretending it counted a zero.

The family total leads in gold

The family total leads in gold. Count a phrase family — “Fear not and its cousins” — and the grand total now stands first, gold and unmissable, above the wording-by-wording groups: said 107× in 103 verses, 5 wordings, in KJV. The first group’s count no longer steals the headline.

The Greek counts on any Greek

The Greek counts on any Greek. bolls’ Textus Receptus carries no Strong’s tagging, so on a TR screen the number rows had no tags to count and old Greek marks nothing to heal from. Now the analytics borrows tags from the tagged edition of the same testament (Tischendorf for Greek, the WLC for Hebrew) whenever the displayed text carries none — you keep the text you chose, the counting borrows the tags, and a line under the table says exactly which edition answered. A chapter with no tagged text anywhere says so with a dash, never a false zero.

The number rows

The number rows. Any word marked through the Strong’s bridge now gets a second row in Word analytics, labeled by its number and counted by that number — exact on any translation, the NASB included, because the tag does not care which English is in column one. Your English row keeps telling the truth about the English word; the number row beneath it answers for every spelling of the original. And an old Hebrew or Greek mark made before one-tap marking now finds its number from the tagged text on the spot — the dash only remains when the text itself cannot say which number is meant.

Word analytics tells the whole truth

Word analytics tells the whole truth. The OT, NT and whole-Bible columns are exact totals — for English words they come from a word table built from this app’s own text (so LORD and GOD, the small-caps renderings of the Name, are finally counted — god in the KJV is 4,556, not “at least 1,656”), and for Hebrew and Greek words the Strong’s number does the counting, gathering every spelling of the word under one count: mark אֶלֹהִים from its dictionary entry and the table says 2,606 across the OT, the reference count, exactly. The Book column is counted the same way.

Marking the Hebrew and Greek is one tap

Marking the Hebrew and Greek is one tap. Tap any original word as you always have — its dictionary entry opens, and the entry carries the six colors: pick one, and the word marks across the chapter with its English counterpart alongside. Also fixed: a drag that swallowed a Strong’s number no longer invents words like “GodH430”.

Hebrew and Greek are markable, and Word analytics becomes a table

Word study: the Hebrew and Greek are now markable — right-click an original word (or tap it in pencil mode) to color it, and its English counterpart colors with it through the Strong’s bridge. And 📊 Word analytics is now a table in the Notes tab, always visible: each marked word in its own color, counted in this chapter, this book, the OT, the NT, and the whole Bible — measured live, never guessed.

Word-study marking, with the originals linked

Word study marking: tap one word, and the palette offers all in this chapter — every occurrence colored at once — and, where the translation carries Strong’s tagging, it colors the Hebrew or Greek word behind it in the Originals column too. Then the 📊 Word analytics button under the marking legend measures every marked word: this chapter, Old Testament, New Testament, whole Bible — counted live, never guessed.

Comfort text

Comfort text: one switch in the settings row (the gear) gives the whole app a plainer typeface with taller lines and more air between words — for anyone who finds dense text hard work.

Shared notes across open windows

Shared notes across open windows. Open the Dashboard in two windows — the text in one, your notes in the other — and both see the same studies: a note saved in either window appears in both, and no window can erase another’s work. Your studies still live on this device only; there is no copy on any server.

Guzik one tap away, the Lab findable, an honest What’s new

Guzik one tap away, and the Lab findable. David Guzik’s commentary sits one tap away at the foot of the Deeper list — read on his own site, at Enduring Word’s request. The Patterns Lab got its own link in the footer and the About panel, so a page only the docs index knew about became findable from where a student actually stands. What’s new began telling the truth about each version, and search pages grew to 128 verses a page.

Six seats, one footer link

Guzik’s seat retired. The Deeper tab seats six commentaries — Gill, Matthew Henry, Jamieson-Fausset-Brown, Clarke, Keil & Delitzsch, and Tyndale’s open notes — with David Guzik linked per chapter rather than seated, honoring Enduring Word’s answer about their copyright.

Guzik linked, never hosted

Guzik linked, never hosted. Enduring Word answered our permission question: link, don’t host. The app honors it — every trace of fetched or cached Guzik text was removed the same day, and a test suite now stands guard so it can never quietly return. The policy is permanent.

The Study Partner measures before it answers

Counting questions answered by measurement. Ask the Study Partner “how many times…” and it uses the app’s own measured counts instead of guessing from memory — and the app as a whole learned to tread lighter on bolls.life, the free service that serves every verse.

The counter paced itself to death

Opening-night fix. The phrase counter fired requests fast enough to earn 429s from the server on its first real evening. It now paces itself, backs off when asked, and finishes the count it started.

Phrase analytics — how many times, in how many wordings

Search can count. Pick a phrase like “Fear not” (or type your own) and tap Count it to see how many times the Bible really says it, wording by wording, in any script — the first measured answer in what became the whole analytics family above.

The workbench itself

Before the analytics family, the Dashboard’s first dozen versions built the workbench: the reader with side-by-side translation columns and the Originals column; six-color word marking with the Strong’s bridge to the Hebrew and Greek; the Lexicon a tap away on every word; notes that live on your device and nowhere else; search across the canon; the Study Partner; the Deeper commentary seats; the Patterns Lab; the About & Docs library with Hebrew 101 and Greek 101; read-aloud for the English and the originals; and the offline-first install that makes it all work on an iPad in a room with no signal. Observation → Interpretation → Application.