Gospel Library 4+

I love the access to so much inspired content. I use this app every day. If it wan’t for the content I would have given it a 3. My two biggest frustrations are. 1) It has a lot of problems downloading the audio files. This has happened on all of my devices. We live in the country and I travel around the world and often don’t have a signal, so when it will not let me download offline content, I miss out. I drive a lot, and don’t always have a signal. I would love it to work with CarPlay. Needing to look at your phone to choose content or change it is not safe, so then I just listen to something ells. If it worked with your car stereo, it would be a huge upgrade, especially if you could download all content for offline use. Third, I wish all of my tabs would be synced between devices.

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’ll leave my original review as it stands. I fixed the search results. When you type a search keyword, the results that pop up are as I stated: hymns, topical guide, and dictionary. However, if you tap on return, the true search completes. This pop up info is what has been introduced with this version. Changing app behavior like this is incredibly confusing. The release notes don’t even address this change in behavior. I find this change in search behavior more complicated and less intuitive than before because the new contextual shortcuts appear to be search results. I can’t be the only person confused by this change.

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I don’t care about the GUI update. Search has either been severely hampered, or it’s broken. I have come to rely on the power of this app to find all references to a keyword in every downloaded document on my device. Now search only shows results for hymns, topical guide, and bible dictionary, or it shows results for articles not downloaded yet, but it shows NO RESULTS for scriptures. This is stepping us back over ten years, which is how long it’s been since I used the Topical Guide to find a scripture. Surely, search isn’t meant to be this useless now?