v1.1 Posted to Apple

I pulled an all-nighter and finally finished v1.1. I polished up some bugs and added some necessary features. The most major being the remaining four volumes of Tanya, and a fully implemented perpetual calendar. Making that calendar took pretty long and taught me way more than I ever expected about how the Hebrew calendar works.

I also added a "Reverse" button which will reverse the direction of the Hebrew text for those people who are experiencing reversed text (or are using iPhone Beta 3.0).

Features on the horizon:

Adjustable font-size (and other saved preferences)

Place-saving (e.g., when you get a call)

Footnotes in text

Better date browser for daily portion

Swipe to go to next chapter

Streaming audio lectures

Personal notes

If you have any other ideas, please let me know.

Update is taking a while

Sorry to all those people who I told that an update was coming out soon. It still is; it's 99% ready right now... I'm just getting bogged down in school work. I'll try to push it out whenever I get a free moment.

Reversed Hebrew

A very weird new bug just popped up on my radar. Two people just emailed me from Israel saying that the Hebrew was reversed. I intentionally reverse the text in the app because the iPhone doesn't flow text properly from right-to-left (this is fixed in 3.0). Do phones in Israel display Hebrew correctly?

Alternatively, I think they were both jailbroken, because I don't think the iPhone is officially available in Israel. Maybe the jailbreaking (correctly) fixed Hebrew support.

Either way, I'm adding an option to reverse Hebrew into the next update.

[Update]: Just tried it on my friend's jailbroken phone, and it worked fine. Must be something specific about international phones. Maybe the unlocking procedure? Very weird...

Bugs...

Well, the first bug was spotted today – and this one was pretty embarrassing: I misspelled Tanya. I spelled it with a Hey instead of an Aleph.

I've made that mistake a lot in the past. Maybe I transcended my nature for a second there and attached to Reb Meir. In Bereishis, our Torah has written that G-d made "coats of skin (עור)", but in Reb Meir's Torah, they found "coats of light (אור)." You say it's Tanya (תניא), "it was learned." I say it's Ten-Y-a (תני-ה), "G-d, give."

G-d, give me the knowledge and presence of mind to stop making typos...

Please keep those bug reports coming! I'll send out an update as soon as I'm able.

Released!

Tanya.app just showed up in the AppStore. I added the link to the top of the page

"Ready for Sale"

Woohoo! The tanya.app is "Ready for Sale." Unfortunately it still isn't in the App Store. Maybe I need to wait a little bit longer...

Also, I just got iPhone OS 3.0 Beta installed, and it looks like Apple finally fixed Hebrew support. For those of you who haven't tinkered with 2.0, Apple included the Hebrew fonts, but did not support the right-to-left flow that Hebrew requires. To get the text to render correctly, I had to reverse the text, which was really annoying. It looks like now the iPhone fully supports Hebrew, so I can just display the text as-is. We'll see.

I'll try to get support for 3.0 together soon, along with the other 4 volumes of Tanya. I need to make sure they get released before Chitas catches up with me.

It's in Apple's hands now

[sigh] just uploaded it to the App Store. Certificates are a real pain... every time I have to set them up, it always turns into a huge hassle. But, it's done.

Now we pray that Apple approves it speedily... in our days.

Finished the Tanya app

I finally put the finishing touches on the Tanya app. It took a lot longer than I expected, but I'm very happy with it. G-d willing, it will be in the App Store soon!