A few questions, what is the 'content delivery' function you describe? Is that how the content is delivered to the app like new conference talks every 6 months, etc?
The content delivery we're talking about is basically twofold. There's a team that works on creating content that the Gospel Library applications on iOS, Android, and Windows, as well as lds.org can see. This is the stuff you get to download for offline use. Their preparation of the content is what makes it possible to create, store, and synchronize any annotations you have for a piece of content to your LDS Account. As new content gets created and older content gets updated, the apps receive a notice that some piece of content needs to be updated or made newly available. For example, just in the last week, the content team made the Gospel Topics Essays available in the application. These now show up and you can access them, annotate them, etc.
What is going on--and what is causing our team as much grief as it is--is that the content team is drastically changing how it delivers content and, as a result, how it synchronizes your annotations. This does have many benefits, but is putting quite a burden on the developers. Ideally, users won't have much of an idea that anything has changed, and indeed, I believe the iOS and Android teams are basically aiming to have an app that looks and operates basically the same way when that new content is finally available. However, the code change requirement for the Windows version of the app is so substantial that it was drastically easier to just start our entire app from scratch. This, compounded with some much-needed user interface changes (like replacing the radial menu with something easier to use for most users), have necessitated a new app--what we've interchangeably been calling the "Windows 10" version of the app (as it will require Windows 10) and version 3.x. This app is in development, spreading our already small development team even thinner. In order for us to launch this new app, not only to do we have to have the app working with the new content (this is done), we have to also reach feature parity with the
current version of the application. This is probably our biggest struggle, as the current app has quite the number of features. In addition, the new app will introduce several much-requested features at launch, including a "Download All" feature.
At some point in the not too distant future, we will most likely make "Gospel Library Preview" available for public consumption, even before we reach feature parity with the current version of the app, but for now, we've kept the admittedly very rough 3.x app only available to internal testers so that we can work out the particularly egregious bugs before we take it to the public.
Is the beta app available in the Microsoft store the most up to date preview?
It is the most current publically available version of the app, yes.
Any way non-coders like myself can contribute to the activity?
Yes. You can join the Gospel Library Windows project here at tech.lds.org and join our Saturday morning meetings. We can assess the skills you bring to the project and see how you might best contribute. Some people are testers that help to reproduce bugs, find bugs, others are helping with localization, etc.
Once again thank you very much for your service developing and upgrading this app!
Thanks for your thanks!