Switched Keys

Smartphones can handle quite a lot, power wise, but because space is limited, if an app is very powerful you can't have menus for everything without making it look cluttered and difficult to use. The solution is to use gestures to provide multiple functions from each selection, button, or view. That is what And Bible does.

Gestures are what you do with your fingers on the screen. Most folks understand tapping (or clicking) an icon or button and using the back or home button. But there are other gestures that can apply to a button, section of the screen, or whole screen. Following are the most common gestures.

• Click (or tap)
• Scroll (touch and move your finger before lifting)
• Double click (rapidly tap twice)
• Long press (tap and hold for a second on two)
• Swipe up, down,  left, right (basically the same as a scroll but in different directions)
• Fling (rapidly touch and move before lifting)

You can see all of these in use on the And Bible main screen. This is a preliminary catalog of gestures that apply to different items.

Device screen and windows

A few gestures apply to the device screen in general.

• Swipe from the left margin to show the application menu (This is the same as tapping the three line main menu).
• Swipe back to the left to hide application menu.
• Double tap anywhere on the screen to switch between standard and full screen. In full screen the taskbar, the document icons, the Android status bar, and the software navigation buttons are all hidden.
• Touch or tap to select a window and make it active. The icons at the top work on the active window.
• With multiple windows shown, press and drag the separating bar to resize the windows.

When multiple documents are loaded there are document icons at the bottom right of the screen. Tapping will restore that document/window if minimized or minimize it if already displaying. See Document icons later.

When a window is active you can tap and move up or down to scroll through the document.

Bible text windows

When a window displays the text of a Bible a number of gestures are available to speed the navigation.

• Swipe left for next chapter,  right for the previous.
• Touch or tap in a selected window for bookmarks, notes. A dialog box will be shown to allow you to select a function. Press the X to close the dialog.
• Long press to select text. When you do, the text markers will be shown and a dialog box will ask what you want to do with the selected text, or if you want to select the whole verse. Here you can drag the markers to select more or less of the text before interacting with the dialog box. Press somewhere else to cancel.
• Touch or tap on a superscript within the text for footnotes or x-refs in a pop-up. Yellow letters generally refer to cross references while purple numbers refer to footnotes, explanations, or alternate translations. Colors may vary with your color scheme.

Commentary text windows

When a window displays a commentary, the text covered is displayed at the top. Usually, the commentary refers to the synchronized Bible verse, though it could refers to a section of multiple verses. The gestures vary from the Bible text windows but they are intuitive.

• Swipe left for the next verse or section, right for the previous.
• Tap on a reference in blue to open in special window.
• Long press on a reference in blue for option to open in current or new window. 
• Long press on text in the window to copy, share, etc.

Note on synchronization: When the Bible window is synchronized with a commentary, when you navigate with one window the other window goes to the matching verse.

Icons

The controls and icons at the top of the screen are generally intuitive. They change the verse, the Bible version, or the commentary for the active window, but there are other gestures you can use for them.

Verse reference

The most common use of this element is to Tap to select a new passage if a Bible is displayed, or section for other documents. This is how you select different maps if you are looking at an atlas. There are three other gestures you can use on this element.

• Long press to select a different document (any) from the document screen.
• Swipe up or down to select a workspace from the screen.
• Swipe left or right for previous,  next workspace.

Strong references

When some Bible versions are shown, Greek or Hebrew letters make up the next "icon". This refers to the Greek and Hebrew words in Strong's Concordance that are represented by the text. Tapping, the most common gesture will rotate between showing strong references as an underline, showing strong references as numbers, or not displaying either.

Alternately, you can long press on the icon to show a menu to select the mode you want.

Bible icon

The Bible icon lets you select a different version of the Bible from a dialog menu that uses abbreviations. Alternately you can long press to select a Bible document from the document screen with more information about that version.

Commentary icon

Like the Bible icon, the Commentary icon lets you select a different commentary from the menu. Long press to select a commentary document from the document screen with more details.

Options menu

The three vertical dots at the top right is commonly called the Options menu. That is where you select a variety of options, including formatting that apply to the all windows. (Actually, if a particular window overrides the option, it is ignored). The only gesture is a click.

Window menu

The window menu is a faint button icon at the top right of each active window. It has options to maximize, minimize, close, pin, or synchronize that window. This menu also allows you to override the main program settings for formatting. While you can tap to select options, there are other gestures you can use here.

• Long press to minimize the window
• Swipe down to minimize the window
• Swipe up to maximize the window

After you maximize the window there is an icon at the bottom right corner that lets you restore it to the original size.

Document icons

I call the icons for each window document at the bottom document icons, though technically they may be window icons. You may remember that windows are either pinned, unpinned, or special windows. Pinned windows are shown independently and you can view as many as you want. Unpinned windows share a visible window so only one is visible at a time. They are grouped together and displaying one minimizes the currently active window.

• If a window is showing, tapping the icon will minimize it. If it is not showing, tapping will display (restore) it.
• Long press the icon to show the window menu.

Show me more

If you know of other gestures that may be useful let me know and share it.  Yes there are other gestures that can be used in other sections of the app; this only covers the main screen.