iOS 6.0 and iPhone 5 (4" screen) updates for Hebrew Bible, Yiddish Bible, and Biblical Hebrew apps now in App Store

Over the past 2 weeks, Apple has approved updates for my apps. The latest updates to these apps provide support for iOS 6.0 and the larger (4 inch) screen of the iPhone 5. There were also some minor bug fixes. Here are the links:

• Hebrew Bible Version 6.1
• Yiddish Bible Version 2.2
• Biblical Hebrew Version 1.6

The new version of the app is now available on the Apple App Store and I recommend that all current users download the upgrade (it is a free upgrade for existing users of the app).

My Yiddish Bible app has been reviewed in The Forward!

This is Super Cool! My Yiddish Bible app has been reviewed in The Forward (Forverts)!

Here's a screenshot capture of the article:

iOS 5.1 updates for Hebrew Bible, Yiddish Bible, and Biblical Hebrew apps now in App Store

The following updates address the database compatibility issue in iOS 5.1 that affected my apps:

• Hebrew Bible Version 5.3
• Yiddish Bible Version 2.1
• Biblical Hebrew Version 1.5

After installing the update, you should make certain that the app isn't running in the background. If the app was running in the background when you downloaded the update, the "old" database location will still be the one that is being used. If the app is running in the background, you should do one of the following:

1. Close the background app (double-press the home button, press and hold the icon of the app until it starts to "wiggle", press the red "-" to remove it from the background).
2. Do a full power off and power on of the device (hold down home button and power button and slide the slider and the power back on again).
3. Delete the app from your device and re-install it from iTunes.

Options #1 and #2 are faster and easier to do but may not work in all cases (depending on when you took the iOS 5.1 update and a number of other factors). The solution that will work in every case is #3. So, it's best to delete the app from your device and reinstall it from iTunes (after you've downloaded the latest update with iTunes). Here are step by step instructions for doing this (in these instructions, I talk about the HebrewBible app but the same approach works for the BiblicalHebrew and YiddishBible apps as well):

1. Attach your device to the USB sync cable and start up iTunes.
2. Click on the "Apps" icon (in the left-hand sidebar) and then click on the "Check for Updates" link (in the bottom-right of the right-hand pane of the iTunes window). Download the HebrewBible app update to your Mac/PC.
3. Click on your device icon (in the left-hand sidebar) and then click on the "Apps" tab (at the top of the right-hand pane of the iTunes window).
4. Scroll down through the list of apps on your device until you see the HebrewBible app. It will have a check mark next to it (showing that it is installed on the device). Remove the checkmark and click the "Sync" button (at the bottom-right of the iTunes window). This will remove the HebrewBible app from your device but will keep it in your iTunes repository.
5. Once you have verified that the app is no longer on your device, you will reinstall it from iTunes. To do this, you repeat the above steps except, this time, you add the check mark to the HebrewBible app in iTunes. After the "Sync", the HebrewBible app will be reinstalled.
6. Disconnect the device from iTunes and the USB sync cable.
7. Startup the HebrewBible app. The first time it starts, there will be a delay while the startup "splash" screen is being displayed. During this first startup, the app copies some files and does some initial setup. This will only occur the first time you start the app. Don't cancel the startup - just wait until it completes.

The new versions of the apps are now available on the Apple App Store and I recommend that all current users download the upgrades (they are free upgrades for existing users of the apps). Once again, my apologies for any inconvenience this has caused.

Compatibility issues with new iOS 5.1 release

I've just found out that a change in the way Apple stores databases in iOS 5.1 (the version of iOS that was released this week) causes a problem in my apps (the words/dictionary functionality won't work). Therefore, if you use my Hebrew Bible, Biblical Hebrew, or Yiddish Bible apps, you should hold off upgrading to iOS 5.1 until Apple has approved my next version of these apps. I've submitted the fix to Apple and hope that the new versions will be available early next week.

My apologies for the inconvenience.

HebrewBible Version 5.2 now available on the Apple App Store

I've released a version 5.2 update. This update changes the default font from Times to Ezra Sil SR in order to provide better display of cantillation. There are many alternative fonts provided (change them via the Settings app) but many users never change the default font so this change provides an improved "out-of-the-box" experience.

The new version of the app is now available on the Apple App Store and I recommend that all current users download the upgrade (it is a free upgrade for existing users of the app).

YiddishBible Version 2.0 now available on the App Store

Normally, when I provide incremental upgrades, I just increment the version number by ".1". However, this second version of the Yiddish Bible application has so many enhancements, I have made it a "2.0" release. I'm quite excited about the new functionality and hope current users will be too. The new version of the app is now available on the Apple App Store and I recommend that all current users download the upgrade (it is a free upgrade for existing users of the app). The following changes were made in this version:

• In the Bible display, touching any Yiddish word will bring up a pop-up window with the English definition of that word. For people who are not fluent in Yiddish, this is an extremely useful function!
• In the 2-letter word search, the app will first bring up a list of ranges of word matches which, when one is touched, will display the individual words and their definitions. This greatly speeds up word searches.
• A different font has been chosen for the display of Yiddish words. With this font, "pasekh tsvey yudn" and "khirik yud" character combinations are displayed with "raised" vowels (as is customary in Yiddish).
• Improved access to an Internet copy of the 1910 edition of "Harkavy's Yiddish/English, English/Yiddish Dictionary" is included as part of the app.
• The font size has been increased in the word search displays to improve readability.
• Some minor bug fixes and cosmetic changes were made.

Yiddish/Hebrew font display differences

Sometimes the little things take the longest time to get right. After release #1 of my Yiddish Bible iPhone/iPad app, I started to get some feedback on things people liked and things they thought could be improved. Refoyl Finkel pointed out that the Ezra font that I was using for the Yiddish text didn't "raise" the vowels in the traditional Yiddish manner. Both the Hebrew and Yiddish languages use the same Hebrew Unicode character set (the range x0590 - x05ff). However, in Yiddish, for the "pasekh tsvey yudn" and "khirik yud" character combinations, the convention is to "raise" the vowel. This is done for Yiddish only, not Hebrew (which displays the pasekh and khirik in the same "lowered" position all the time), and these 2 character combinations are the only ones that are traditionally displayed differently in Hebrew and Yiddish. The following illustrates the correct positioning for Hebrew and for Yiddish:



However, getting this right wasn't simply a matter of changing fonts! In order to display the vowels in a "raised" manner for Yiddish text in a standards-compliant manner, the following should be done:

1. When you want to display the characters in the Hebrew (lowered) manner, you need to specify 'lang="he"' for the text that is being displayed. When you want to display the characters in the Yiddish (raised) manner, you need to specify 'lang="yi"' for the text that is being displayed.
2. The font that you are using needs to support different glyphs for Hebrew and Yiddish, differentiated by language.
3. The browser that you're using needs to be able to display the correct glyphs from the font based on the lang attribute that is specified.

So, #1 was just a simple matter of programming; however, #2 and #3 were a bigger issue. The problem is that very few fonts support different glyphs for the "pasekh tsvey yudn" and "khirik yud" character combinations. Also, until recently, no browser correctly displayed the different glyphs even if they were supported in the font.

Refoyl and I experimented with a number of different fonts. The GNU FreeFont fonts were one of the few fonts that actually had different glyphs to support display of both raised and lowered pasekh/khirik vowels. I chose the FreeSans font that is part of that package. However, although the FreeSans font did raise the pasekh in the "pasekh tsvey yudn" character combination, it didn't raise the khirik in the "khirik yud" character combination. I did some hacking on the font and came up with a fix that always raised the vowels for the "pasekh tsvey yudn" and "khirik yud" character combinations. This worked ok for me because I was only going to display Yiddish text with the font. However, it wasn't suitable as a general-purpose fix because the font (with my fix) would display the "pasekh tsvey yudn" and "khirik yud" character combinations with raised vowels all the time (regardless of whether the language was Yiddish or Hebrew). I therefore submitted my problem along with my hack as a bug report on the FreeFont bug list (see here for the details). After some exchanges with Steve White (the primary FreeFont developer), Steve came up with a fix. So, I now had solutions for #1 & #2. The browser issues still had to be resolved though as no current browser would correctly differentiate between Hebrew and Yiddish based on the 'lang' attribute.

Steve had previously submitted a bug report for Firefox for this issue (his bug report related to the use of different glyphs for Cyrillic text with Serbian/Macedonian instead of the usual Russian ones; however, the issue was the same as the Hebrew/Yiddish issue). So, he added my comments to his bug report (see the comments at the end of the Firefox bug report here) and I'm please to be able to report that this issue is now fixed in Firefox 10.0! However, in order to use Steve's latest font mods in my Yiddish Bible app, I needed the fix to be done in Mobile Safari as well since I was using a UIWebView control in my app to display the Yiddish text. Since Safari is Webkit-based, Steve suggested that I submit a bug report to Webkit and he would back up my bug report. Therefore, I submitted the bug report and Steve submitted his related Cyrillic example and we are hoping that the Webkit fix will be forthcoming soon (the Webkit bug report is here).

So, although I now had a fix for the font and a fix for Firefox, I still didn't have a fix for Webkit (which I would need if I wanted to use Steve's latest font in my app). So, in the end, I decided to use my original hack of his font in my app as it would allow me to display Yiddish character combinations correctly and I wasn't going to use the font for Hebrew. I've made the necessary changes and Version 2.0 of the app (which contains a number of other enhancements that I'm quite excited about) has been submitted to Apple for approval. When it gets into the App Store, I'll post about the new features.

Since I've modified the font, I've posted my mods along with the original source code here: GNU FreeFont mods. You can see my mods by diff'ing the "FreeSans.sfd" file with the original "FreeSans.sfd~" file. The mods are also documented in my FreeFont bug report. So, if you're looking for a nice font for Yiddish and you need it now, feel free to grab my modified FreeSans font. If you can wait until Steve's next release of the FreeFont fonts comes out and browser support catches up as well, then that's going to be better long-term as I eventually hope to switch over to the standard font once Webkit is patched.

NEW: Yiddish Bible App for iPhone/iPad/iPodTouch

If you do a search on the Apple iTunes App Store for "Bible", you will see the (literally) hundreds of Bible applications that are available. If you narrow your search to "Hebrew Bible" or "Jewish Bible", you will still get dozens of results. However, if last week you had searched for "Yiddish Bible", you would not have seen a single Yiddish Bible application. Now, that is no longer the case - my Yiddish Bible app is available on the app store. With the ability to toggle between Yiddish-only and Yiddish/English, Yiddish/Transcription, Yiddish/Hebrew parallel formats and with a built-in Yiddish/English dictionary, it is also a very useful app for people who are either learning Yiddish or who are trying to improve their knowledge of Yiddish.

• More details (with a short demo movie): Yiddish Bible Web Site
• iTunes Store app information: iTunes Link
• Background: Open Siddur Project blog