Google Productivity Pad: Gospel Library 3.4.5 update

Friday, August 29, 2014

Gospel Library 3.4.5 update

Yesterday there was an update to Gospel Library for iPhone and iPad.
The changes were as follows:

  • Refined Search, including having exact phrase and keyword results display
  • Adjusted Screens to have newly added screens display at the top
  • Added role-based content capability (e.g., if you are serving in a bishopric, you can now access Handbook 1)
  • Fixed various bugs and stability issues
After updating and looking around the app here are my thoughts:

First off I was very happy that this update did not go back to causing the headache of redownloading all of the content you might have downloaded before. This update appears to have kept all of the data stored in the app previously. 




Refined Search
When I saw this listed I got excited, because I hate the search function on Gospel Library, and I have submitted feedback to the team many times telling them exactly what they need to do to make it better. Unfortunately it does not appear that they took my suggestions seriously. They have not added the ability to search on pages (like control f), nor have they added the ability to search items not downloaded if you are online. Both of those features would have been useful improvements.

So what did they do to search?
Not much from what I can tell. I thought there would be an option to click that would say Exact Phrase, but there isn't. What you need to do to get tho narrower results for exact phrase is put the phrase inside quotes, just like you would on Google. The problem is there is no instruction on this in the app or the update details, so you would never know unless you guessed like I did.

Other than that search appears to function in exactly the same way. Searching everything downloaded whether you want it to or not, and not searching anything that hasn't been downloaded.


Adjusted Screens to have newly added screens display at the top
This is a nice little addition, I thought it was weird that they were added to the bottom before, so now things make a little more sense.

Added role-based content capability
Since my role does not give me access to any specific content I can't vouch for this one, except to say that I still can't see handbook 1 which if it is working is what should be happening.

Fixed various bugs and stability issues
This is always hard to tell, but I did not experience any crashes while playing around with it.

There were a couple new unlisted features that I did discover though:

Advanced under settings
When you go into the settings portion there is now an advanced option at the very bottom. Clicking this gives you two options:
View Source and Show Obsolete Content. Both of which are off by default but can be turned on.

I tried to figure out what View Source was but could not find any difference when I had it turned on.

Obsolete Content allows you to find and download materials that the church is no longer producing, such as the YM/YW curriculum that was replaced by Come Follow Me. I also saw that the classic talk "Only and Elder" by Bruce R. McConkie was available as obsolete content under "Melchizedek Priesthood" section.

Self reliance section added
A new section of the library has been added called "Self Reliance." However the only subsection is "Self Reliance Videos" and while there are a bunch listed none of them contain any content that I could find.

Well that is about it for 3.4.5. If you find anything else in this update please let me know about it in the comments below. Thanks for reading, and remember, live better.

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