Gospel Library Android 4.0.3

Gospel Library 4.0.3 is now available on the Google Play store and will be available on the Amazon Appstore in the next few days.

Here are some of the improvements:
• Highlight colors are now indicated in the sidebar for user-created notes.
• Added button for switching between a user-created note and full related content in the sidebar.
• Links in D&C headings jump to the verse instead of opening the side drawer.
• Fixed issue where some chapters were skipped when downloading all audio files for a book.
• Fixed issue where Chromecast popup appeared while reading.
• Bugs fixes and stability improvements.

sbradshaw wrote:Gospel Library 4.0.3 is now available on the Google Play store and will be available on the Amazon Appstore in the next few days.

Here are some of the improvements:
• Highlight colors are now indicated in the sidebar for user-created notes.
• Added button for switching between a user-created note and full related content in the sidebar.
• Links in D&C headings jump to the verse instead of opening the side drawer.
• Fixed issue where some chapters were skipped when downloading all audio files for a book.
• Fixed issue where Chromecast popup appeared while reading.
• Bugs fixes and stability improvements.

Glory, hallelujah!

Now let's hope the next one includes a way to exit the app without having to hit the back button through every page you've been to since opening the app.

lmcguire wrote:Now let's hope the next one includes a way to exit the app without having to hit the back button through every page you've been to since opening the app.

Could you describe what you're seeing, and what you'd expect? I just hit the home button to go to the home screen, or the overview button to switch to a different open app...

sbradshaw wrote:

lmcguire wrote:Now let's hope the next one includes a way to exit the app without having to hit the back button through every page you've been to since opening the app.

Could you describe what you're seeing, and what you'd expect? I just hit the home button to go to the home screen, or the overview button to switch to a different open app...

Apparently you like having 12-billion apps running in the background on your phone. Android has a nice little utility you can use to see the number of open apps (and switch to them, or force them to close). I prefer to close my apps, so that the ones I really am using run best, and the ones I'm not using don't use up resources, including battery.

In the old version of GL, go to the main library page, and use your device's back button (the curved, sideways U with an arrow at one tip), and it would exit the app - not just take you to the device home screen, but also exit the app. In the new version of GL, it will do that, but only after doing a web-browser style back up through every page you've been to. If you go deliberately to the GL main screen, hoping to use the back button to exit, that just adds one more hop to the list of pages you have to navigate back through to get out of the app. So if they're going to change the app to work like a web browser, the least they can do is add an exit option to the menu or somewhere so I don't have to choose between:

a) Hitting the back button dozens of times
or
b) Forcing close on the app (from that nice little utility that tells me what apps are running)

I have used in-app feedback to email them a long list, including this item.

lmcguire wrote:I prefer to close my apps, so that the ones I really am using run best, and the ones I'm not using don't use up resources, including battery.

Ditto. As lmcguire said, in earlier versions of the app, it would rightly step back through the menu I followed from where I was reading to return to the Library screen (i.e., 4 Nephi, Book of Mormon, Scriptures, Library (home screen)). But I could bypass that by selecting the dropdown at the top and jumping directly to Library. From that location, a press of the back button always exited the app.

With the latest version, If I have gone through the Library page several times to read several different books, the back button takes me back through the entire trail, including several times through the Library screen, when I would have expected it to exit the app at the first appearance of the Library screen.

I would like to see that again. I need to close the app, not just leave it to jump to another app.

lajackson wrote:I would like to see that again. I need to close the app, not just leave it to jump to another app.

Generally 'closing' an Android app is over-rated. Most normal (non-game) apps will not use up battery when in the background and will be closed down by Android automatically when it needs memory for other apps.

However, if you feel you do need to shut it down, just select the overview button and then swipe left or right. That will close it down with just a couple actions which is likely less than using the back button.

eblood66 wrote:Generally 'closing' an Android app is over-rated. Most normal (non-game) apps will not use up battery when in the background and will be closed down by Android automatically when it needs memory for other apps.

You and my Android phone should have a little chat. Mine does not close apps graciously to regain memory.

But I am off topic here. I will do some online research into the matter. Thank you for the pointer.

eblood66 wrote:

lajackson wrote:I would like to see that again. I need to close the app, not just leave it to jump to another app.

Generally 'closing' an Android app is over-rated. Most normal (non-game) apps will not use up battery when in the background and will be closed down by Android automatically when it needs memory for other apps.

However, if you feel you do need to shut it down, just select the overview button and then swipe left or right. That will close it down with just a couple actions which is likely less than using the back button.

If I understand what you're saying, then what you are doing only cleans out the list of apps you can easily switch to, it does not actually close the app nor release memory. Your only options in all the years I've been using multiple Android devices are:

1) Use the app's way of closing
or
2) Force close (using that utility I mentioned)
or
3) Leave it running in the background

I hear people constantly talking about how they have to charge their phone every night - when I first got mine, it was closer to once / week. Now it's about once every 3-4 days. I also hear people complaining about phone problems or performance - I don't have such problems. Maybe the difference is that I close my apps. Or maybe I'm just lucky, don't really care, I will close the app, one way or another, and it is not unreasonable for me to request an easier way to close the app.

I think I understand what you're suggesting now. There are two opposing use cases.

What if you follow a link from a manual to 1 Nephi 3:7, then want to go back to the manual? You wouldn't want back to take you to 1 Nephi, then to Book of Mormon. The way it's functioning currently, you can follow a scripture chain from one scripture to the next, then go back to the original scripture.

Another example: You want to see how a word is translated in Spanish, so you switch to the same chapter in Spanish, then press back – you wouldn't want the back button to take you through the Spanish content hierarchy.

How did the previous version of the app handle these cases – did the app history reset every time it hit the main library? I imagine it must have been some sort of hybrid between the two use cases.

lmcguire wrote: If I understand what you're saying, then what you are doing only cleans out the list of apps you can easily switch to, it does not actually close the app nor release memory.

That all depends on the app. Most apps will close when swiping. However, an app can keep background services running if it wants to. But the same is true if you 'close' in the app itself. If it wants to keep running background services it can do it until either Android forces it closed to gain resources or a Force Stop is done from settings or from another utility (assuming you have one that actually does something--many don't do much because of changes in how Android manages apps). But for the most part you get the same benefit from swiping that you do from closing from inside an app itself.

sbradshaw wrote:I think I understand what you're suggesting now. There are two opposing use cases.

What if you follow a link from a manual to 1 Nephi 3:7, then want to go back to the manual? You wouldn't want back to take you to 1 Nephi, then to Book of Mormon. The way it's functioning currently, you can follow a scripture chain from one scripture to the next, then go back to the original scripture.

Another example: You want to see how a word is translated in Spanish, so you switch to the same chapter in Spanish, then press back – you wouldn't want the back button to take you through the Spanish content hierarchy.

How did the previous version of the app handle these cases – did the app history reset every time it hit the main library? I imagine it must have been some sort of hybrid between the two use cases.

In the old app, if you follow a link from a manual to 1 Nephi 3:7, the back button would take you back to the manual. If you went from the library home to Scriptures > Book of Mormon > 1 Nephi > 3, the back button would reverse that for you. That was what I wanted and is still something I would want. I am NOT asking to change that.

In the old app, the ONLY time the back button would exit the app is if you were on the library home page. If they don't want to change that functionality, fine, just give me another "Exit" option. Put it in the 3-box overflow menu, add an X icon somewhere, or whatever, I don't care which mechanism they use so long as I don't have to go back a zillion pages before the app will exit (it will exit via the back button now, but not until you've traversed back through all the pages you've visited since opening the app).

It's just avoiding going back through every page that I want.

sbradshaw wrote:Gospel Library 4.0.3 is now available on the Google Play store and will be available on the Amazon Appstore in the next few days.

Here are some of the improvements:
• Highlight colors are now indicated in the sidebar for user-created notes.

Nope, not really. In the scriptures, the little tiny verse number has the highlight color as its background, but in a manual, for example, where there is no verse number, there is no color in the related content pane. And that little tiny blot of color on the verse number isn't exactly easy to see. They need a bar the height of the footnote (like it was before), or the background or border color of the footnote box, or something along those lines to have a color to match the highlight.

Further:
I put three new highlights on a verse (not overlapping). On the third, I added a tag. When I returned from the tag window, the two non-highlighted tags (which were in different colors), were gone. I'm now going back to add them again, and we'll see what happens. It worked if I added a tag or note as I added the highlight.

PS: The new color selector for changing highlight colors stinks. I used to be able to see 8 colors in each of two options (highlight / underline) all at the same time. In the new version, despite tons of available screen space, I only see 4 highlight colors and one underline color, and I have to click the pallet icon to see more, which then hides the whole dang screen - with a mostly empty page with 10 colored boxes taking up a tiny fraction of that space in the middle. Seriously? Sorry, but someone needs to go back to GUI school. No device out there has fewer pixels than my tablet (except watches maybe), and it had tons of space for showing more on screen at once. This new policy of hiding stuff down under more taps when it could have been on the screen, is not user-friendly.

lmcguire wrote:I put three new highlights on a verse (not overlapping). On the third, I added a tag. When I returned from the tag window, the two non-highlighted tags (which were in different colors), were gone. I'm now going back to add them again, and we'll see what happens.

I'm guessing you tapped and held to make your second selection while the first highlight was still selected, having never been saved. You'll need to tap off of the first highlight so it can save, then you can tap and hold to create the second highlight, and so forth. This is a known bug that will hopefully be fixed soon.

eblood66 wrote:Generally 'closing' an Android app is over-rated. Most normal (non-game) apps will not use up battery when in the background and will be closed down by Android automatically when it needs memory for other apps.

However, if you feel you do need to shut it down, just select the overview button and then swipe left or right. That will close it down with just a couple actions which is likely less than using the back button.

I'm about 99.9 percent the screen you are referring to does nothing to close apps. Apps on that screen may or may not be running. I have a standard utility (standard on my Samsung devices anyway) that will close running apps, I can force close every app, and that screen will still show them. That screen can have apps listed I haven't used in weeks, and have rebooted multiple times since I last used them, and these are apps that don't auto run to display notifications or things like that. I have one app that provides no method to close it and the only way it ever closes is if I do a force close or reboot.

There are plenty of apps that use significant battery while running in the background that aren't games. I don't have any games on any of my android devices. But making sure all apps are closed does improve battery life. On of the most common things I do with my phone is to play music through a Bluetooth speaker. Bluetooth requires a modest amount of CPU power to compress the audio stream in specific way before transmitting it. This is why there is always a delay when playing sound through Bluetooth. Often when I'm playing music via Bluetooth, there will be momentary, but very annoying, hiccups interrupting the music. The cause of this is insufficient CPU to compress the audio stream in real time. I have an older phone (Samsung Note 3) so this happens more often than I like, but if I remember to force close all the apps running in the background, it happens much less often. So clearly the Android OS is far from perfect in its allocation of resources that use the CPU and therefore also ram and battery. For any one who is about to reply and say the hiccup could be caused by RF interference, that is possible, but I am an amateur radio operator and know how to minimize the affect of RF noise and have done sufficient testing, in the right environment, to know it is NOT RF interference in my case.

Chris W

cdw3423 wrote:I'm about 99.9 percent the screen you are referring to does nothing to close apps.

I don't want to get way off topic so I'll just point to this article concerning what swiping does do: http://www.itworld.com/article/2693446/ ... -does.html

sbradshaw wrote:I think I understand what you're suggesting now. There are two opposing use cases.

In the previous version there was a "home" button in the top left corner that would take you directly to the main catalog page, from there, a single press of the device back button would exit the app.

Chris W

I just tested the old version of the app (3.2.14) on an Android 4.1, Android 5, and Android 6 device. As described above, if you're on the main library screen in the old version of the app, pressing back will return to the home screen. This is different from the new version of the app. However, pressing back does not kill the app or even remove it from the Android overview screen. I couldn't find any other apps that do this, either. So, in Android 4.1, 5, and 6 pressing back to close the app is the same as pressing the home button to close the app. I didn't test in Android 4.0, and it's possible there are differences. it's also possible that different manufacturers' devices behave differently. But killing the app by pressing the back button doesn't seem to be standard OS behavior.

sbradshaw wrote:I just tested the old version of the app (3.2.14) on an Android 4.1, Android 5, and Android 6 device. As described above, if you're on the main library screen in the old version of the app, pressing back will return to the home screen. This is different from the new version of the app. However, pressing back does not kill the app or even remove it from the Android overview screen. I couldn't find any other apps that do this, either. So, in Android 4.1, 5, and 6 pressing back to close the app is the same as pressing the home button to close the app. I didn't test in Android 4.0, and it's possible there are differences. it's also possible that different manufacturers' devices behave differently. But killing the app by pressing the back button doesn't seem to be standard OS behavior.

There is a difference.

First, figure out for your device what you need to do to show "Active applications" - on mine, there's a widget you can put on your screen to show the active application count, and tapping on that shows the active applications (and allows you to switch to them, or force close), also holding the home button down until something pops up gives me a "Task manager" option (and others) at the very bottom (in addition to the equivalent of your "overview screen"). Choosing "Task manager" takes me to that list of active applications.

Once you've figure that out, with the old GL, open it, then hit the back button until it disappears. Go to Active applications - it's not there. Now open GL and hit the home button. Now go to Active applications - GL is there. That's the difference. Backing out of the app gets it out of Active applications, and that DOES free up resources. Just hitting the home button, or toggling to another app leaves GL running in the background and using resources.

All of my apps except the built-in web browser work the same way - back button exits them, home button leaves them active.

Again, tell me tough luck, tell me you disagree, tell me you think I'm an idiot for caring - fine, I don't mind any of that. But don't try to convince me the two are the same when Android is clearly telling me they're not the same, and don't try to tell me it's not using resources when Android is clearly telling me it's using resources, and don't try to tell me to to make a request that the new app have a corresponding feature, cuz I'm making the request whether anyone else wants it or not.

Verizon Samsung Galaxy Note 3 with Android 5.0 on it and the latest system updates.