Beta 2021.13b: Quality of Life Improvements

Announcements
#1

Some small updates with more to come in this particular update:

Changelog

  • Verse references are now displayed in a more human-readable and consistent way, thanks to a third party library called the Bible Reference Formatter.
  • When using a non-Bible resource with footnotes (like a catechism or confession), the verses will now be ordered a bit more correctly. Previously, if Psalm 2:1 through Psalm 12:11 were referenced, you’d get a bizarre behavior where they would be listed Psalm 2:1, Psalm 2:10, Psalm 2:11, Psalm 2:2 because of weird computer science-y things (waves hands).
    • This is actually part of a larger effort to get verse ranges to show as: Psalm 2:1–11 and to expand to open up to the first five verses in the range when clicked/tapped. I hope to get this done for this release, but it’s a fair amount of work and it might not go into a future release if it’s holding things up.
  • Update: Support for next/previous button when you come to the end/beginning of a Bible book respectively. So when you are on Psalm 150, the next button will show and take you to Proverbs 1 if selected.Likewise, if you’re in Proverbs 1 and tap Previous, you’ll be taken to Psalm 150. This will be useful if you keep a Relight tab open in your browser for things like personal of family devotions.

Forthcoming Before Launch

  • As mentioned above, better support for verse ranges, at least when using non-Bible resources like the confessions and catechisms.

Not a lot super exciting, just some things that were bugging me and/or we got requests to fix or tweak.

Try the Beta

#2

Update: Just added support for next/previous button when you come to the end/beginning of a Bible book respectively to the current beta. So when you are on Psalm 150, the next button will show and take you to Proverbs 1 if selected.Likewise, if you’re in Proverbs 1 and tap Previous, you’ll be taken to Psalm 150. This will be useful if you keep a Relight tab open in your browser for things like personal of family devotions.

1 Like
#3

Updates

  • Fixed a bug where selecting an Omnibar autocomplete option added two spaces after the option, resulting in problems with quick navigation.
  • Introduced a new “Try Even Harder” button to the Related Content area. This works by trying to find pieces of content that have similar words and expressions to what you’re currently reading. It currently works with all resources except commentaries and Scripture.
    • Please play around with this and tell me how often the bottom-most results are less than useful. I can dial in the sensitivity and I’m hoping to get lots of testers helping me do that. Right now, I’m occasionally getting results that don’t seem relevant at the bottom, but I’m also frequently finding the vast majority of them to be interesting connections.
    • Also any suggestions for a better name would be much appreciated.
  • I’m still working on getting better support for verse ranges as mentioned in the OP.
#4

One more update for today

  • Typing 'b ’ is now a shortcut for typing 'Bible ’ in the Omnibar. This makes it way quicker to just search the Bible.
#5

Fantastic!

#6

Initial thought is why even have it distinct from the other related content? I’d hypothesize that to the user, they see it as the same, though of course from a dev point of view it’s quite different. Perhaps if it starts getting excessively long, perhaps you could implement some sort of “more” button to reveal a full list.

#7

Also, the experience for the Sproul book is not ideal since there is no footnote data.

#8

Thanks for the feedback. I agree it will be better to have all the results show at once. It’s funny how being a developer can make you think about constraints and challenges on the development side as making intuitive sense to the user.

My plan is to launch the feature as is now, and get a fair amount of feedback on the relevance of the results. If the results are mostly consistently useful and valuable, then I’ll merge the two methods of getting related content into one in a future update.