Gospel Library 4+

I wanted to adjust my review so I don’t discourage people from trying it. Issues aside, the app itself and all the content it gives you access to are amazing. You can cross-reference scriptures, conference talks, church magazines, hymns, and any other church published content. You can also create links and notes. I highly recommend giving it a try. Hopefully they are able to fix the sync \ crashing issues.

Current Issues:
The tiles on the new home screen are too big pushing most of the content down the screen and when I try to scroll below it, the app crashes. I’ve restarted, deleted and reinstalled and nothing fixes it. It still crashes when scrolling below the tiles. Tiles were the worst thing Microsoft ever did. please don’t follow their lead. Please give me the option for the old home screen. I use this every day for my scripture study but it is unusable right now. I’m on ipadOS 17.6.1 on a 12.9” 5th gen ipad.

The thing I liked best about using this app to study over my hard copy of the scriptures was the experience I had when scrolling through the text. The last font, spacing and layout was very well done from an aesthetic point of view. It was pleasing to the eyes and made for not only a great tool but also a pleasing experience. Now the text is small and harsh and goes to the far extreme of both sides of the screen (where are the margins?). Yes it provides more content on one page but that content is too small and difficult to use. Yes you can manually change the size of the text in tools but that only works for that one chapter. You have to repeat the process every time you advance a chapter. The irony is when you pull up the footnotes they are in the old font and size while the main text is in the new aesthetically challenged font. It makes me want to read only the footnotes. Why can’t we have the best of all worlds, more info, pleasing aesthetics, pleasing font and for heavens sake some margins. All I know is that my study was more rewarding and spiritually focused in the last version. Isn’t that what we are striving for?

I look forward to an improvement in the next version. That or let those who want revert back to the old way or at least have that option.

I am so grateful for those people who had the vision to create this app, for those who originally created it and those who are working on improving the app. This app has improved my gospel study, conversion to Christ and improvement of my relationship to Heavenly Father.
The tab and note functions have allowed me to easily do things which would have taken years to do with paper scriptures. An example is first searching The Book of Mormon for each occurrence of “Repent” and it’s variants, tagging each occurrence, being able to make notes at each occurrence of the word to identify and categorize the major usage of the word and then making an index in the Notebook identifying which verses can be classified under each major usage category. Using the split screen function on a tablet allows me to have one side open to the tags and the other screen open to the Notebook allowing easy classification of verses into categories. This has been a most enlightening exercise in the mercy and love available from our God.