Olive Tree Blog » Stephen J.

BibleReader on iPad Sneak Peek

Stephen J. — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 20:02:18 +0000

Unfortunatly, BibleReader for iPad was not available for the launch of the iPad. While we wait for it to become available, here are some screenshots to give you an idea of what is coming.

Here is a video showing BibleReader on iPad (Sorry for the bad audio).

Blog Comments

Stephen J. — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 19:10:58 +0000

We have enabled comments on the Olive Tree blog! We are going to enable comments for a trial period on our blog. We currently interact with users through technical support, the forums, and twitter. If the spam load gets too high or we are not able to provide adequate responses we will have to turn off comments.

Stephen

iPhone BibleReader In-App Purchases and Price Change

Stephen J. — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 17:14:29 +0000

We are adding In-Application purchases to iPhone BibleReader. This will let you purchase books directly from within BibleReader using your iTunes account. In-Application Purchases will make the process of purchasing books much easier. Apple requires that all applications with In-Application Purchase be for sale. To meet this requirement we are going to start changing $.99 for BibleReader. We have submitted a new app called BibleReader Free that has all of the features of BibleReader without In-Application Purchases and will remain free. We choose to make BibleReader $.99 instead of adding a new app for this since this will give everyone who has already downloaded BibleReader the update for free.

Currently Amplified Bible for BibleReader has the In-Application Purchase. The rest of the iPhone BibleReader apps will have this functionality with version 4.09. The In-Application Purchasing requires each book to be approved by Apple for each reader. Most of the books are still in the Apple review process.

Stephen

Edited to Add: Since this post, Apple has changed some of their requirements, and no longer requires apps with in-app purchasing to be for sale. At this time, BibleReader and BibleReader – Free both allow in-app purchasing. BibleReader – Free comes with the ASV and KJV Bibles. BibleReader comes with the ASV and KJV Bibles, plus Matthew Henry’s Concise Commentary on the Whole Bible and the Jamieson, Fausset, and Brown Commentary. Features and functionality for BibleReader and BibleReader – Free are the same, unless their version numbers are different. (Different version numbers occur when Olive Tree has submitted a software update that has been approved for one app but not the other. Usually, the second app is simply waiting for update approval and will be updated shortly to the newest software version.) Updated 8/30/2010.

Split Screens in iPhone BibleReader version 4.06

Stephen J. — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 14:49:19 +0000

Here is a video demonstrating the new split screen feature in the iPhone BibleReader version 4.06.

How to use the ESV Study Bible on the iPhone BibleReader

Stephen J. — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 17:24:40 +0000

Here is a short video showing how to use the ESV Study Bible on Olive Tree’s iPhone BibleReader.

Olive Tree is Hiring

Stephen J. — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 22:34:36 +0000

Olive Tree is looking for people with a passion for mobile Bible software. See our job postings at http://www.olivetree.com/careers.php.

Stephen

Help Direct Olive Tree’s BlackBerry BibleReader

Stephen J. — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 21:30:01 +0000

See this blog post for how Olive Tree decides where to spend engineering time.

We would like your help to direct where we should spend our time in the BlackBerry BibleReader.

Click here to take the survey.

Stephen

Help Direct Olive Tree’s iPhone BibleReader

Stephen J. — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 23:24:52 +0000

We are so excited about the level of enthusiasm and interested in Olive Tree’s iPhone BibleReader! We gets lots of excited users asking us when will feature XYZ be in the iPhone BibleReader. I want to explain a little about how our engineering process works and then give you a chance to help us decide what features to include.

Most engineering teams follow an established work process that was established for a 6-36 month time period with milestone deliverables throughout that process. Most of the time the schedulers underestimated the amount of time the project would take and so the engineering team is almost always behind schedule. (As a side note I usually way underestimate the amount of time something would take. Most projects look “easy” until I am faced with the reality of making something that barely works into production level quality.)

At Olive Tree we take a different approach to scheduling. We know what we are currently working on, we know what we will work on next, and we have a list of things to work on after that. The list is only partially prioritized. When it is time to pick the next item to work on we look a number of factors like what people have been requesting, what we feel is important, what we need to publish certain books, etc to decide what to do next. This allows us to be flexible and quickly change our engineering to meet demands, market shifts, and capture opportunities with vendors or publishers.

This does mean that it will difficult for us to say when we will have feature XYZ done since we don’t actually know ourselves. We do know if that feature appears higher on the to do list that means it will get done sooner, but we haven’t actually scheduled that feature for engineering yet.

We had one of these meetings today for picking the next features. There are so many important features to work on we wanted to get more of your feedback to help us decide. We created a survey you can fill out to help us decide what you would like to see us work on next.

Click here to fill out the survey.

Thank you for your support, help, and enthusiasm!
Stephen Johnson
Senior Software Engineer

Olive Tree Twittering

Stephen J. — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 21:17:11 +0000

You can now following the latest and most up to date news at Olive Tree on Twitter. Our Twitter username is OliveTreeBible (http://twitter.com/OliveTreeBible).

The blog is still a great way to keep up with what is happening at Olive Tree. We will continue using the Olive Tree blog in the same way we have been using it. Twitter will accompany the blog with the most up to date postings about what is going on at Olive Tree.
If you are not sure what Twitter is, check this out http://twitter.com/.

You can also follow some of the Olive Tree employees on Twitter. My username is RearCog (http://twitter.com/Rearcog). You can follow Matt in book formatting with matthewlhudson (http://twitter.com/matthewlhudson) and you can follow Mike in tech support with mrborgs (http://twitter.com/mrborgs).

Stephen,

Software Engineer

Free and Early Release Products for Bloggers

Stephen J. — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 16:22:51 +0000

Are you a blogger? Would you like free and/or early release products from Olive Tree? We are looking for bloggers who would like to write about the BibleReader. We will give you free and early release products in exchange for you writting about them. You can say what ever you want about the products, good or bad. We only ask that you write at least 200 words.

Right now we are looking for bloggers to write about our new BlackBerry BibleReader beta and our new iPhone beta. If you are a windows mobile, Palm, or Symbian user you time will come (patience is a virture)

If you are interested please email stephen@olivetree.com with a link to your blog and the device you have. If you are a BlackBerry user can you let me know what product(s) you would like to write about. If you are an iPhone user we have just one beta with a lot of Bibles and books in it.

Stephen