Quote:
Originally Posted by MeSue
What about a split screen using Marvin's built-in browser? For a good example of what I mean by split screen in an app, see Olive Tree's Bible+ app.
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Thanks for the hint, Sue. That app uses internal split-screens a
lot.
Here is what I like best about Olive Tree's Bible+ app: you can open 2 books at the same time in it! See the first screenshot attached to this message. You can pull up the screen divider from the bottom, to determine how tall the second (lower) pane should be.
I think someone requested this ability from Marvin earlier in this thread: ability to open and display 2 Marvin books at the same time. To achieve that, I currently use 2 iPads. That's not necessarily "worse", because at least you can enjoy both books in full-screen mode. On many occasions, though, it would be more convenient to have both books displayed on the same screen.
It would be, for example, ideal if you wish to read a book in a foreign language you're learning. The upper pane would show the book in the original language, while the lower pane would display the translation of that same book in your native language. That would be a great learning tool! Olive Tree's Bible+ app is even so smart that when you flip a page in the upper section of the screen, it also automatically flips the page in the lower section of the screen, so that the same passage is displayed in both screen sections. (Naturally, that's easier to achieve for Biblical editions, thanks to the availability of numbered Bible verses, but Marvin might at least approximate something like that using the book's overall % as location.)
The second screenshot shows a map in the lower section of the screen, but that seems like Olive Tree's internal map, not a Google Earth map or Apple Map. So that it's the app's internal content again.
If Kris could somehow arrange for the content of a 3rd-party dictionary app to be displayed in that lower section of the screen, that would be great. So, ideally, what would happen, would be:
- You tap & hold a word in Marvin, and press the Translate button
- The lower pane would pop up from the bottom of Marvin's screen, to the exact height you prefer (= the custom height you set up previously); because enforcing an even, uniform 50% to 50% split every time would be dumb. The dictionary definition/translation would be displayed in the lower pane. At the same time, Marvin would ensure (by auto-scrolling, if necessary) that the word being looked up would be visible in the upper pane of the screen, in its full context. (This would avoid the issue with Apple's pop-up bubble dictionaries, where the bubble overlays the full context of the word being looked up.)
- The reader studies the dictionary definition/translation in the lower part of the screen. As soon as you're done, you'd just tap your finger anywhere in the upper part of the screen (in the book text, in Marvin itself), to dismiss the lower part of the screen, which would make the lower pane automatically slide away.
That would be ideal, wouldn't it?
Of course, those who prefer to read books in Marvin in the landscape format, might choose a vertical split of the screen, instead of the horizontal split. In such a case, the "dictionary pane" might pop up from the right side of the screen, and it would slide back from left to right after you no longer need it.
It's possible Kris could arrange for the Safari browser window to appear in such a way in the screen subsection. That's better than nothing, but generally, third-party iOS dictionary apps have a higher quality than free online dictionaries accessible by browsers like Safari.
The solution that would oblige everyone, would be if every user could decide for themselves, what it is that should appear in the screen subsection: a Safari window? Or the window of a 3rd-party dictionary app?
I'm afraid, though, that iOS makes the latter option impossible, at least for now. That is, I'm afraid it might be impossible to display the content of 2 different apps at the same time on current iPads, apart from that Safari (and perhaps also Maps) exception.
If Kris could somehow circumvent that apparent iOS restriction, that would be fantastic.