Hia folks,
Did you see the new update on the app store? 😮
We appointed Margelo as consultants and they started working on PB in October. The master engineer given to us was Christian Falch. This man created the technology that PB is coded in. 🧑🚀
I could immediately see he was a professional and knew his craft very well. That’s why they were so expensive. You pay for quality — and I’m all for paying for quality work. In fact — I believe it’s a Godly principle.
We first discussed scaling Pencil Bible to different devices, screens and formats.
This went on for a while behind the scenes while he got to know the code and the product. I won’t bore you with too much detail, but here is a summary:
- Scaling: In the end, we realised once an annotation is made you can’t change text size or spacing. If you do the annotation will look out of place. There is no way for an annotation to scale with the text. It’s impossible. Imagine you have Bible text on a piece of paper & you draw circles around words and write notes next to some texts. What would happen if you suddenly increased the size of the text — so much that you have to start on a new paragraph for some sentences? The circles and notes will be in the wrong space, the wrong size and the wrong place. So in the future, we will zoom out/in on different devices to make the text and annotations readable. We will though give the option to change the text size and font (the user will have to accept the thought that some things will be out of place).
- Our foundation. Christian found the foundation not to be adequate. The best thing would be to rewrite it to make space for future features, like more tools, copy & paste, layers, zoom, export, pixel eraser, smooth page transitions etc. This is not a whole rewrite, but rather a refinement of how we use SKIA (the technology he wrote). He assured me current annotations will be safe.
- The rewrite will cost a ton. So we will have to save some $$$’s for a couple of months (at least).
He did fix the following which is great for users:
- Unlimited CANVAS — no more limit on long Bible Chapters.
- Rounded and smooth lines
- No more corner line (took only two hours for him to fix 😅)
- What he could not fix as we reached budget limitations was the flashing that happens now and then.
- The do/undo not being ideal in the way it works.
Still — we are so much closer to a polished product. The work he did costs almost $10k. 😅
BLACK FRIDAY
I did not want to do this — but with a new enthusiasm to raise $$$’s so I could hire more of Christian I thought why not do a BF deal?
The deal?
$49 for a lifetime subscription. Once off. Simple.
I will run it from Thursday lunchtime until Tuesday (after Cyber Monday).
Please share with friends and family if you want. My hope is for 1000 users to take the offer. This should be enough to cover Christian’s work to redo the foundation.
Good news— I’m so happy with how things are going! 😀
Happy Thanksgiving to my American Friends. Without you, PB wouldn’t exist.
I will send a Christmas update next month. So this isn’t the last you will hear from me in 2023. 🎄🎄🎄
Thanks for reading. 😄
Erin
P.S. Remember the deal. $49 for a lifetime subscription. Once off. Simple.
Download link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pencil-bible/id1612587185