You can now see screenshots and a video of the forthcoming WORDsearch Bible app for the iPad now. I’m really looking forward to WORDsearch iPad App because I have a bunch a books in my WORDsearch library that I’d rather read on my iPad than on my laptop. Here’s the video.
Below you can see the Book, Chapter, Verse selector. It looks like a great navigation tool. Tap the book and chapter button at the top and a list of the books of the Bible drops down. Scroll to your chosen book and tap it. The chapter flies out to right.
Here’s the library function. It will let you buy new books directly inside the app.
And here’s the search function.
The app looks like it’s primarily a book reading tool. That said, it seems like a nice start and I can’t wait to get ahold of it.
A flurry of updates came out of Bellingham, Washington as Logos updated, not only their desktop Bible software application, but their iOS app as well. The big news: Highlighting and Notes! Finally! See the demo of the new app from Logos below:
After a more than two years, two of the most important mobile Bible software tools finally found their way into the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch Logos app. As you can see from the image below, a screenshot from my iPad, that I’ve highlighted Philippians 2:21.
You can use multiple highlight styles by selecting some text and then choosing Highlight from the menu that appears.
Once you select the Highlight option, a menu pops up offering a number of highlighting tools.
The top section offers recent highlighting styles used. The second section lists all the styles you can use to highlight text. Tap one of those items to see the options under that style. Below you will see the various options.
Above you see the Emphasis Markup and Highlighter Pens list. Below you see the Solid Colors and Inductive options.
Finally, the update also brings Notes to the app. I’ve looked forward to this update more than any other. I take a lot of notes when I study the Bible. I love to record all of my observations from various commentaries, language study, etc. in a notes file attached to my Bible software. The Logos notes feature was useless till the updates of this week. We get great notes tools in both he desktop and the mobile app all in one week. Feels like Christmas came again!
To add a note do the same as you would with a highlight. Select some text and a menu pops up. Choose Note and then start typing. Notes and Highlights work the same way. Highlights are blank notes with special markings associated with them. They will sync with your desktop app almost immediately thanks to the more robust Sync 2.0 infrastructure added to the Logos app and the desktop software.
Below you will see some notes and highlighting (I added underlining the same way) that came over to the app from my desktop application via sync.
To open a note, just tap the icon next to the verse and you get your note window superimposed over the text.
It feels greedy to ask for more when we just received this long-awaited update. I’ll do it anyway. I’d rather have my notes in a parallel window so that I don’t have a note section superimposed over the text and so that I can keep editing it with the second window pane always showing the note.
Right now, to edit a note you must tap and hold your finger over the note icon and choose Edit Note. If you do, you will see the following.
You can change the note by typing in the title or content box. You can also choose a new highlight or note icon and color. Altar the style or delete the note entirely.
This is a great update! It took far too long to arrive and I wonder how many customers Logos lost in the process of waiting.
If you left Logos for this reason, it’s almost time to come back. We only lack one more important feature – bible reading plans that actually work properly! That should be coming very soon. When it does, the Logos bible app for iOS will be a 5-star app! Today it jumped from a 2.5-star app to 4 stars.
I posted earlier about the new Logos 4.5 Highlighting and Notes update, which drastically improves the software suite’s notes and highlighting. One of the awesome features that I’m pretty sure didn’t exist beforethat I never discovered before since the notes and highlights were so abysmal is the new highlighting shortcut key. You can now add yellow highlighting by pressing the Y key or some other letter of the alphabet as per your preference.
As you can see above, when you hover over the arrow next to your chosen highlighting style, you will see a popup menu. The Shortcut Key item has a fly out menu showing the letters of the alphabet. I assigned the yellow highlight to the Y key. Now all I have to do is select the text I wish to highlight and hit the Y key on the keyboard. It adds the highlighting. Nice!
I’m planning to add a bunch of other highlights to other keys to make it quick and easy to add highlighting in Logos 4.5.
Logos 4.5 was released today bringing an improvement to the notes, highlighting and sync features of the Bible Study Software suite. We hope the new Logos 2.0 mobile app will follow soon along with a fix for the broken reading plans that haven’t worked for months.
The application doesn’t look significantly different on the outside. Most of the improvements come under the hood. I can assure you that the performance of the notes function improved greatly in this version. In other words, you can actually use it!
Strangely, Logos chose to change the way highlights are stored. You now get a new note file that is named for the highlighting pallet you use. For example, my highlights were added to a new note file called “solid colors.” It behaves just like a notes file, so you will want to be careful about how you work with highlights.
To upgrade your version of Logos, just open it and it should pull the update automatically within a few minutes. If not, then type Update Now in the command box.
Mac users will also enjoy some new gestures. Use your mouse and click and drag left to go back or right to go forward. They added a bunch of these and they’ll be useful if I can remember to use them.
Finally, you get a ton of bug fixes. See the list not he page linked above.
I’m pretty excited about this update. I’ll be singing praise songs when the reading plan debacle ends. Right now, if you want to sync your reading plans with the desktop app and your iOS app. you better not open it on the desktop app. I did and now my reading plan is all messed up. People have been dealing with this for months, but I’ve only had trouble for the last several weeks. It’s quite annoying and ridiculous that Logos let it go this long. Our long national nightmare nears an end!
Olive Tree Bible Reader for Windows was finally released after releasing an Alpha preview earlier. Users can now install their excellent app for reading and studying the Bible on almost every popular operating system available including Mac, Windows, iOS, Android and others.
If you read my post about the Mac version or my Christian Computing Magazine article, then you already know what the app can do. If not, hit those links to learn more about the app. I won’t rehash all of that since the app behaves almost identically.
The good news: if you know how to use Bible Reader on another platform, you won’t find this Windows version much different. Paraphrasing Steve Jobs’ words about the iPad – you already know how to use it.
Great Bible app! If you build a nice library of language tools and commentaries you can do all you need to do right inside the Windows Bible Reader app from Olive Tree which you can get free.
Like their other apps, my biggest wish would be that they add automatic syncing of notes, bookmarks and highlights. I’ve been told it may be coming soon. Let’s hope that’s coming soon as you and I think of the phrase instead of the biblical coming soon which means it could happen time between now and the end of time.
Would you like to run BibleWorks on your Mac? I would!
Few Bible software companies produce Mac versions of their Bible software, BibleWorks included. Before my switch to the Mac a little more than a year ago, I was a frequent user of BibleWorks and recommended it to my friends and colleagues as well as readers. Not having native Mac access is my biggest disappointment. That could be changing.
In a BibleWorks forum pust, Mike Bushell of BibleWorks noted that a version running under emulation could come soon. Here’s what he said:
Just FYI we are now formally investigating the possibility of officially spporting BibleWorks running on third party emulators on Mac and Linux. So far what we find looks promising. Re the question of this thread, BibleWorks does run under CrossOver, whch does not rquire a Windows license. Crossover is not free but it is not expensive either. It does have some problems, specifically with CHM files, but we are hopeful that we will eventually have a good, supported solution for our Mac and Linux users. I can’t give any dates. The best I can do is tell you that this is something that we are now taking seriously.
This is both good and terrible news at the same time. I reached out to the folks at BibleWorks recently and they gave me the same canned response that most report receiving – “no plans right now” yada yada yada …
Run BibleWorks on Mac?
The above forum post by Bushell marks a change in philosophy. Because Macs are becoming more popular and grabbing a greater share of the computer market, Bible study software makers really have to at least consider this move.
Here’s the problem: running on emulation results in a slow and sometimes horrible experience. My first such experience with WORDsearch 9 on an emulator proved that I didn’t want to have to do that and pushed me to look at other options. Since that time WORDsearch improved the experience greatly and now, it’s usable even if not enjoyable.
I hope and pray that BibleWorks comes up with a workable solution. I also hope and pray they don’t make the same mistake WORDsearch made and release a kludgy and horribly painful version of their Windows software on an emulator. I really hope they don’t waist a lot of money on it and just port the app to OS X natively. This would require a big investment, but will also result in a large payoff, since the Mac Bible software market isn’t that crowded compared to Windows. Just ask the folks at Logos, Olive Tree and Accordance if Mac versions are profitable.
Until this happens, you can install it via something like Boot Camp, Parallels or other emulator software. It’s not ideal, but works. I think it is better than running Windows software inside a sandboxed emulator like WORDsearch did with their “mac” version.
The Mac version of Glo Bible received an update that adds the ability to sync reading plans between the iPad and iPhone app and the desktop Mac app. When you open Glo on your Mac, hover over the “glo” button in the upper right corner. The tabs will zoom out onto screen. Beneath the tabs you will see the Bible Reading Plan app in My Apps. Click it to create your reading plan. I just used the one year reading plan for the purpose of this post. There are others.
You can customize the reading plan with how long your wish to read and how many times per day or for how many days you want to finish. You do this by clicking the Edit button. Once you’re done customizing the plan, click Start Today’s Reading.
Glo will open to the first reading of the plan. You will see a “Start” button at the begin and the “Stop/Next button at the end of the chapter. Click Next to go to the next reading in the day’s planned reading. After you’ve read all the passages for that day, then when you hit Next it will open the windows telling you how well you’re doing with the plan and you can choose to finish or keep reading by clicking one of the two buttons.
The plan you’re reading currently shows up at the bottom of the screen (see the second arrow in the image above). Click that little tab and a screen flies out from the bottom with passages from that day’s reading.
You can also create your own reading plans. The link showing how is at the bottom of the list of reading plans.
The best new feature in this reading system is the sync with the iPad app. Your reading progress automatically shows up on the iPad and iPhone if your the device is online. At first it didn’t look like my reading plan was updated. I marked a two days read on my Mac and then opened the iPhone app. At first it looked like I hadn’t started the reading plan on the iPhone. When I tapped to open the reading plan it correctly went to the third day of the reading plan. You just have to trust it until the Glo folks fix this little problem.
Olive Tree released Bible Reader of the Mac a while back, but today allowed the public in on BibleReader for Windows version in Alpha so you can get a preview and start using the app even though it isn’t quite ready for prime time.
I downloaded the Alpha of BibleReader for Windows, which you have to do by first logging into your Olive Tree account. They make a big deal about this, so don’t following the link below without doing that first. Once you do you can get the Alpha Preview from the Oive Tree website.
As you can see from the above screen shot, it looks a lot like the Mac version (see below). The biggest difference is the Tools & Notes window that slides out when you click the button on the far right end of the toolbar. Instead of have tabs for the various tools, it has a list with icons.
Right now it’s a little slow, but still usable. I’m downloading my content and haven’t given it a workout yet. I will over the next few days and share if I see anything new or exciting.
WORDsearch dropped a bomb on the Bible Software world and announced new version 10 just in time for you to download before Christmas, either as a gift for yourself or for a friend/family member or colleague. I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet, but will very soon and most likely will offer a review of the program for my January or February Christian Computing Magazine column. I’ll also post here.
Until then, you can check out the page relating all the new goodness. I’ve heard from a friend at WORDsearch that some cool tools will be included and I can’t wait to try it out.
New features in WORDsearch 10 include:
Program Options Assistant – helps you get the new software running the way you want at setup time
Desktop Template – save your study interface for quick return that way you can set up new templates depending on whether you’re doing Greek study, Hebrew, or just reading
Audible Pronunciation – speaks 20,000 words with a right click
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Sermon & Illustration Organizer
Verse Explorer – the most exciting new feature finds all your reference material on a given passage
Morph Explorer – quickly find morphology info
Most Recently Used Book List
User Font Override – change fonts of books
Keep Your WORDsearch Up-To-Date – updates books for you
Of these above features, the Sermon & Illustration Organizer looks great. I hope it lives put to my expectations. The Verse Explorer will make using WORDsearch to study a passage so much easier.
Can’t wait to get my hands on it. I’ll let you know what I think. For only $29.95 you should be able to check it out yourself now. That’s a great price. I’m waiting till I can see some of the more advanced features.
Here’s a movie I’ve been waiting for since I saw the last Lord of the Rings movie. The Hobbit predates the LOTR trilogy of books both in published date and in story chronology. I loved this story even more than the LOTR.
Here is the trailer:
May have to make a Movie Bible Study about the LOTR movies if it hasn’t been done already!
The movie comes from Peter Jackson, who also made his name directing the LOTR movies. I thought that the same actor who played Frodo would be playing the younger Bilbo in this one, but no. Instead Martin Freeman play him. I’m not familiar with him, but that may not be a bad thing.
The film looks beautiful. I’ve heard that they filmed it in 3D which isn’t a good sign. I’m not a fan of the gimmick and hope it is just that. Will have to rewash LOTR on Blu Ray this holiday season to ge myself all excited again!
