Finally!

A new version of Relight. Now that this is out, I'll be working pretty much entirely on making Relight a downloadable app.

Here's what's new:

Changelog

• Fixed Belgic Confession backslash-in-text issue
• Fixed duplication of questions on Heidelberg Catechism
• Fixed (I think) the issue of chapter/section titles not showing at the top and bottom of content in dark mode
• Fixed cross-references not showing
• Upgraded to a later version of SASS (developer-ese that maybe some of you will understand)
• Relight should now automatically switch to/from dark mode when your device switches to/from dark mode (if you haven't selected a manual theme)
• Bumped font-size for study resources when you open the Lightbulb icon slightly
• Added letter name headings to Psalm 119
• Fixed an issue where studying the Hebrew text would display the works left-to-right instead of right-to-left.

Plan for Future Releases

The next release will upgrade the software that Relight is running on like I talked about in this post . That will come with some other improvements that will subtly make Relight feel a little less like a website and more like a native application—by this I'm referring to refining animations and UI interactions, making certain UI elements more consistent, and adding some support for gestures (like I'm hoping you can two finger tap anywhere on the screen to use the Omnibar, for example). I may also choose to release a small new resource, but I'm not sure on that.

After that, I'll be working on building the native app. Once I have something usable, I plan to release a beta for iOS/iPadOS. That will probably be pretty bare-bones and not significantly different from just doing the "Add to Homepage" approach—but improvements will come iteratively as the beta moves forward, with things like tab support coming before I launch to the App Store.

A few bugs have been bugging me, so I decided to fix them. There should be more features in future releases, but I didn't want the bug fixes to be held up by features.

Changelog

• Fixed an issue with invisible play buttons (or nearly invisible) on dark mode.
• Fixed the omnibar taking you to the index when you tried to search Calvin's Institutes. IE, you can now type something like calvinst fish to search Calvin's Institutes for fish.
• Some fussy typography/layout tweaks.

Besides a native mobile app, the ESV has definitely been our most requested feature for Relight. We think a lot of existing users will be really excited, and we’re hoping it encourages a lot of people who previously weren’t interested in Relight to check it out.

Changelog

• Added the ESV to Relight
  • You can type esv and then a Bible text to look that verse up in the ESV. This will not change your default translation.
  • You can see and use the ESV in the library on the homepage. Using this will not change your default translation.
  • In the lightbulb icon on a given verse, you can see that verse in the ESV (similar to how the Read Greek Text or Read Hebrew Text links work). This can be useful for comparing the KJV/ESV on a given text. It does not change your default translation. If your default translation is the ESV, this link will change out for one that lets you read the verse in the KJV (again, for comparison).
  • You can go to settings and change your default translation to the ESV. When you do that, you’ll see the ESV pretty much everywhere on the site, including when you click on a verse reference to expand it. The only exception is in resources where the author is quoting the KJV (or another translation) specifically. That will remain a KJV quote.
• Added a helper tooltip to help people discover the study options that are revealed when you tap the lightbulb icon.
  • This will show until it is closed, then it should never show on that device again.
  • We added this because we’ve been surprised that a small number of people never notice you can click/tap the lightbulb icon and have thought that Relight is just a reading app.
• Fixed an issue where navigating to a specific verse in the omnibar sometimes would not scroll you to the verse properly.
• Fixed an old bug on iPads without a hardware keyboard that was making the omnibar autocomplete list pop up after you navigated to a new location using the omnibar.
• Fixed an old bug that was causing misalignment of the share button when studying commentaries.
• Fixed an issue that caused the wrong chapter number to be displayed in the headings for Calvin’s Institutes.
• Fixed issues with the site auto-scrolling you to the wrong location if you have study content opened.
• Fixed an issue where we were accidentally saying the Hebrew Old Testament was from Scrivener.
• Fixed a bug that occurred in some cases when sharing from Matthew Henry’s Commentary on the Westminster Shorter Catechism.
• Fixed a number of layout issues.

In this release, we’ve added support for reading and studying the Hebrew Old Testament. We also added audio for the 1689 London Baptist Confession and Keach’s Catechism.

Changelog

• Added support for reading and studying Hebrew Old Testament – behavior is so similar to Greek New Testament as to not be worth diving into.
• Added audio support for the 1689 London Baptist Confession and Keach’s Catechism.
• Fixed an issue that sometimes resulted in the modal for Bible book chapter navigation being blank.
• Fixed an issue where using the omnibar to navigate to the current chapter in a different Bible (for example, going from Matt 5 in English to Matt 5 in Greek) would not take effect without refreshing the page.
• Fixed an issue with backlinks and related content for Confession Articles having a somewhat broken "See Context" button.

We’ve added audio support to Relight!

For right now, it’s just the Westminster Standards, but we are planning to (somewhat slowly) add this feature to every resource we can, including commentaries and Scripture.

Video

Changelog

• You will see a play button in the title area for resources that support the audio feature (currently just the WCF, WLC, and WSC). Tap or click on it to play.
• You will also see a play button when you tap the lightbulb icon on an individual section for resources that support the audio feature. Tapping or clicking will begin playback at that section.
• There is an interface for playing audio with features like skipping/seeking, play/pause, and (when clicking on the chevron), controls like playback speed and playlist selection.
• You can control whether Relight automatically scrolls you to the article it is currently reading by toggling "Follow Along." You can control whether Relight automatically advances to the next chapter by toggling "Auto-Advance Chapter" (this feature does nothing on resources with no chapters, like catechisms).
• Omnibar navigation may now be snappier.
• Fixed some search bugs relating to the Required References feature.
• Fixed some missing resources in the Omnibar autocomplete menu.

Please give the feature a try and let us know how it can be improved.

We’ve added a Greek New Testament to Relight! This is The 1894 Scrivener text with accents, and with Strong’s tags, and grammar info for each word. The following information is for Greek nerds:

• Strong’s means that each word is connected to its Strong’s number.
• Parsing is information that will tell you about the form of the word you are seeing, for example it will indicate whether the word is a noun or a verb, and things like what tense a given verb is.
• Accents are useful for a few reasons. First the text looks weird without them. Also, sometimes the accent changes meaning, so having them can be clarifying. It’s also helpful in guessing the meaning of a compound word. Lastly, tenses: the accent usually moves one way when a word goes into the past, and the other way when into the future. Lots of study tools that have Greek manuscripts unfortunately omit these and they can cause a similar level of confusion to in English if you were to skip punctuation or capital letters.

To summarize, this is not unlike the features you’d find in a copy of the NA28 for higher end Bible software (often $100 or more), but this is the Textus Receptus—the Greek manuscript that was used for the translation of the Geneva Bible, KJV, NKJV, and MEV. It therefore doesn’t omit a lot of the stuff that you would find missing in the NA27 or NA28 Greek manuscripts (and thus the ESV, NASB, NIV, etc.).

We do plan to offer a Hebrew Old Testament and a Septuagint in the not too distant future, as well.

Changelog

• You will now see the Greek New Testament in the library!
• You can also quickly navigate to a passage in Greek by typing something like gnt rom 3.
• The lightbulb icon for verses in the New Testament now shows an option called “Read Greek Text” that lets you look at the Greek for just the verse you’re reading. Probably more useful for people who know a little Greek but don’t want to be overwhelmed. Or for when you are reading in English and just have a quick question about the Greek.
• The lightbulb icon for verses in the New Testament now also includes an option called “Study Greek Text.” This shows you the Greek text in a similar way to how the Word Study feature works with the following differences:
  • The words are in Greek instead of English (duh).
  • The words follow the order of the Greek text, not the English (which sometimes varies from the Greek).
  • Morphology codes are shown.
  • Clicking on a word gives you similarly expanded information to that of when you do so in the Word Study section, but this shows a great deal more information about the particular form of the word you are studying (parsing information)
• Some minor bug fixes.
• Performance for looking up individual verses in places like cross-references should now be a bit quicker.

The initial release of the word study feature was definitely a minimum viable product release. There were a lot of things I held back on doing because I wanted to get a release out quickly. I also was hoping that getting a minimal release out and using it (and hearing from people using it) would help inform feature and UX decisions. I think it definitely did. Although we don’t really do normal version numbers, you could probably call this release Word Study 2.0—or at least Word Study 1.5.

We’ve also made several quality of life improvements to the omnibar and to search.

Changelog

Word Study Improvements

• When looking at a definition or etymology of a word, you can now click any Strong’s numbers to study that word in a new tab. For example, ágamos is composed of á (meaning “not”) and gámos meaning “marriage.” When you are studying ágamos, clicking on the Strong’s number for either of those two root words will take you to study that word. Screenshot Tweet.
• You can now type a Strong’s number in the Omnibar to study that word. For example, typing G25 in the omnibar will take you study the word “agape.”
  • Admittedly, not many people have Strong’s numbers memorized (though I confess I accidentally memorized that one when first making the word study feature), but this seems like it could be handy for when you come across the Strong’s number elsewhere (like another website) and want to study it quickly.
• When you are looking at other places where a word occurs (the occurrences section), the word translated from the Greek/Hebrew word you are studying will be bolded. IE, if you are studying agape and you expand the occurrence in John 3:16, the word “loved” will be bolded.
• Word studies for common words (like “and”) should now be around 30% faster.

Omnibar and Search Improvements

• You can now skip the space between the omnibar shortcode and the address for most things. You can also use a period instead of a space. So for example, instead of typing wcf 3 in the omnibar, you can type wcf3 or wcf.3 and it will figure out what you mean.
• Typing just the omnibar shortcode now takes you to the resource’s table of contents. This is handy if you don’t know exactly what part of a document you’re looking for. So if you want to go to the Westminster Confession and look at the table of contents, you can just type wcf in the omnibar to be taken straight to the confession’s TOC.
• In most situations now, if you type a chapter number that doesn’t exist into the omnibar, you’ll be taken to that resource’s TOC. For example, the WCF has 33 chapters. If you typed wcf 35 or wcf 65536 into the omnibar, you’ll be taken to the WCF’s TOC. Previously typing stuff like that resulted in a sort of bizarre behavior, so this is a bug fix and a usability improvement.
• In most situations now, if you type a chapter number that doesn’t exist into the omnibar, you’ll be taken to that resource’s TOC. For example, the WCF has 33 chapters. If you typed wcf 35 or wcf 65536 into the omnibar, you’ll be taken to the WCF’s TOC. Previously typing stuff like that resulted in a sort of bizarre behavior, so this is a bug fix and a usability improvement.
  • The omnibar has become so intelligent at this point, we’re thinking of renaming it. Something related to skies (because it works in the cloud) and nets (because it catches your ideas in a big net of smartness) seems ideal. Let me know if you guys have any ideas.
• Setting search sorting to occurrence now correctly orders on things other than the Bible.

Bugfixes

• Fixed an issue on commentary pages where verse headings were missing and share buttons looked misaligned.
• Fixed a bug that would occur if you searched for something and then narrowed your search to a book of the Bible (without first narrowing your search to a Bible or commentary).
• Fixed a bug that was preventing “references to this” from showing.
• Fixed a production issue that could sometimes cause search filters to become unresponsive.
• Fixed some issues with transliterations of Greek/Hebrew words having funky typography (transliterations are where you spell a non-English word with an English spelling).
• Fixed a spelling error in the info/help section for the Word Study feature—also added a link to a helpful Ligonier article on word studies.

We’ve gotten a handful of “could you change this?” requests over the years, and many of them are good ideas—just not something we want to force all users into. The time has finally come to let users sort of grant these requests themselves! We’ve also made significant improvements to performance, and fixed lots of little bugs.

Changelog

• Added a settings icon and menu to the navigation bar. Settings are:
  • Site Theme – just in case you want to rock Relight with a different theme than your other apps.
  • Navbar location – Useful for larger phones where reaching up to the top is annoying (only on mobile).
  • Search Default – We’ve gotten a few requests that the site, instead of defaulting to search all content on the site, default to search the Bible. Now you can adjust that yourself.
  • Show Chapter Summaries – Some people like the chapter summaries at the top of the page (pro tip: you can tap a verse number in them to scroll down to that verse), some people may not. Now you can toggle them off.
• Significant performance improvements thanks to optimized queries and allowing the database to uses a bit more RAM. I may find even more places to improve here, but the difference is already substantial.
• Fixes for some image and description content issues when sharing pages to social media.
• Study lightbulb icons for catechism questions now slide their content up and down nicely (it was just snapping like some sad 1980’s interface).
• Added translation info to the resource page for Calvin’s Institutes.
• Fixed an issue where share modals were kind of flickering if you used them and then turned off and on the lightbulb icon. I like to think this flickering was a sign that a Demogorgon was near—warning users of their imminent peril before it was too late. But Sarah insisted it was just a bug, so now it’s fixed. Sorry if you get flayed or something. Oh, also they fade on and off smoothly now.
• Fixed an issue where there was an option to do a word study on a chapter (word study only works on individual verses).
• Tweaked some fussy typography things.
• Fixed issue where KJV Bible link from homepage was broken.
• Fixed (I think) an issue that would sometimes result in the homepage candle video playing in full screen on iPhone.
• Lots of code cleanup. But you don’t care about that, do you? No. You were only thinking about yourself.

Back when we first started Relight, we said we wanted to eventually have Systematic Theologies. Today we announce that we’ve added our first systematic theology: The Institutes of the Christian Religion by John Calvin!

Changelog

• Added Calvin’s Institutes
• Fixed a weird layout bug when doing word studies on individual words.
• Fixed an issue with Word Studies that resulted in a chopped off drop shadow when studying an individual word.
• Fixed an issue with the Omnibus being unresponsive when going “back.” This issue was elusive because it only occurred on Safari, and I usually do my development work on Chrome (because reasons).
• Fixed issue with WCF footnotes not showing in when sharing.

We are introducing support for Word Studies through Strong's numbers in Relight. This will enable users to get a glimpse into the original languages. We see it as a pretty major step forward for Relight in terms of it’s usefulness in studying the Scriptures. Note that this feature is a work in process and we expect it to become more powerful over time.

Changelog

• Added a Strong’s dictionary and a Strong’s tagged Bible to the database. Each verse is connected to the root words it contains. These relationships should allow for some interesting possibilities in the future. We’re hoping building it like this will power interesting features for finding synonyms and getting more relevant search results.
• To do a word study: go to a verse you want to study, click the lightbulb icon, then click to do a word study. You’ll see each English word/phrase together with the Greek or Hebrew root word, the pronunciation of that word in English, and the Strong’s number. You can tap on a word to see more, including a definition, and tools to see everywhere that word is used in the Bible.
• If you’re unfamiliar with word studies, we’ve provided some guidelines for how to use them which you can access by clicking/tapping the info icon (the circle with an i in it).

Make sure to let us know what you think of this feature, especially any ways in which you think it can be improved.

In this release, we’re launching Charles Hodge’s commentary on 1 Corinthians. He has commentary on a few other books as well, and we intend to add them eventually, but the text for these commentaries is particularly messy and we wanted to get at least one volume out. We chose 1 Corinthians to start with because it’s particularly helpful in an age where the pentecostal view of spiritual gifts is the air we breathe.

When you read commentary from Calvin, Poole, and Henry on 1 Corinthians you’ll find that they don’t really address the exegetical arguments and presuppositions that you hear today; that’s mostly because the most of the pentecostals’ interpretations hadn’t been invented yet, or were at least exceedingly rare. Charles Hodge actually wrote at a time when these interpretations and views existed and were becoming more common, so he actually addresses them. As I studied the topic of spiritual gifts, I found his volume to be extremely helpful. Specifically, his commentary exposes and refutes a lot of presupposition that I shared with evangelicals and didn’t even know I had—even down to how the gifts themselves are defined.

Anyway, I’d definitely encourage you to check it out if you are looking to study spiritual gifts or if you find yourself getting into arguments discussions with others about them.

Changelog

• Added Charles Hodge’s commentary on 1 Corinthians
• Fixed some formatting around commentaries for individual verses.