Techy
Visit from YouVersion
Mar 4th
Yesterday, Olive Tree hosted two of YouVersion’s representatives for a great time of fellowship and sharing ideas. Bobby Gruenewald and Terry Storch, both pastors of LifeChurch.tv, spent the day with us. It is great to spend time with coworkers in the Gospel who have a similar passion to get the Word out. Olive Tree is very appreciative of their ministry. Below is a picture of Drew Haninger with Terry (left) and Bobby (right) standing in the Olive Tree office.
Olive Tree’s first official Android tablet!
Feb 24th
With today’s release of the Motorola Xoom by Verizon, one of Olive Tree’s Android developers, Scott Currie, braved the foot of snow that fell last night here in Spokane to be one of the first to get his hands on one. Upon entering the Olive Tree office, the new Xoom found itself immediately surrounded by not only the Android development team but also our iOS and other department teams excited by the new addition to our expanding tablet family.
Within minutes of arriving Scott installed BibleReader for Android. This tablet is sleek! Actually having a “live” Android tablet in the office is only fueling our developer’s drive to bring Android BibleReader’s potential to fruition.
One of Olive Tree’s employees has installed BibleReader on his personal Notion Ink Adam, also an Android Tablet. The picture is a little out of focus, but you can still see the text.
Bible on Xoom
Zondervan Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Bible on Xoom
Greek New Testament on Xoom
slightly fuzzy picture of TDNT on the Notion Ink Adam
BibleTech 2011 – Intersection of Bible Study and Technology
Feb 17th
What better place to see the unchangeable Word of God meet the fast and fleeting world of technology…
Does the Bible change how we look at technology or does technology give us new light into the changeless truths found in God’s Word?
This year at BibleTech 2011, the Intersection of Bible study and Technology, Olive Tree will present two talks. Drew Haninger will be “Laughing at Radical Changes in Electronic Publishing Especially as it Relates to Bible Software,” and Steven Cummings, our Chief Content Engineer, will talk about Olive Tree’s latest development, “BibleReader 5: Reinventing BibleStudy for Mobile.”
If your passion is the Bible and technology, this conference is for you! It will feature both a high- and low-level technology track, offering something for the interested layperson, hobby technologist, and technical programmer. This two-day conference is designed for publishers, programmers, webmasters, educators, bloggers and anyone interested in using technology to improve Bible study.
Olive Tree makes iTunes Rewind 2010 list!
Dec 15th
Lots of excitement around Olive Tree this week…through your customer support we have made it into 8 category lists on the iTunes’ Rewind 2010! One of our iPhone apps made the top five ebook list!
Other significant categories Olive Tree made were:
Bible Reader 5.0 Videos
Nov 29th
There are some minor changes since these videos were made, but here is an idea as to what BibleReader 5.0 will look like. We had these on a loop at the recent Evangelical Theological Society and Society for Biblical Literature Conferences in Atlanta, GA.
Software Development at Olive Tree – An Inside View
Sep 8th
Personal blogs are a place to share your own unique musings and insights. David T, an Olive Tree developer, occasionally posts his thoughts about developing for Olive Tree’s BibleReader on his blog Digital Pericope.
What’s Going On At Olive Tree?
. . . I believe we are still at the defining moments of [Bible technology for mobile devices] and Olive Tree plans to lead the way on what that technology will look like. Read the full post.
To keep up on David T’s thoughts on BibleReader, iPhone development, and more, check out his blog Digital Pericope. You can also find David on Twitter.
Bible Study Tips: Using Strong’s Numbers
Aug 9th
Olive Tree Bible Software’s BibleReader is probably the most sophisticated Bible study tool you can get for your mobile device, though I admit I’m a little biased. I would like to start a small series of posts on how using the rich feature set of BibleReader can enhance your Bible study. In this first installment, we will take a look at the importance of doing word studies for your Bible study, and how a Strong’s-tagged Bible from Olive Tree makes doing a word study easy, intuitive and enjoyable.
What is a word study? It is a study on a particular word in a passage you are reading, usually going back to the original language to find a richer, fuller meaning. The primary reason this is important for Bible study is that the Bible wasn’t written in English or any other language used today. Even modern Hebrew and Greek are different than the languages used to pen the Bible. Some of the difficulties that a word study can address are: being able to track and sort out one Greek, Hebrew or Aramaic word that is translated in multiple ways, multiple Greek, Hebrew or Aramaic words that are translated into the same word in English (or another modern language), and being able to find all the places a certain Greek, Hebrew or Aramaic word is used. The translators of the versions we all use to read the Bible in our own language have done an excellent job conveying the what the original languages say and mean. However, it is inevitable that some things get lost in the translation.
An example of this can be easily seen in the exchange between Jesus and Peter after the resurrection in John 21:15-17. Without a word study, it just appears that Jesus asks Peter three times if he loves him and Peter responds three times that he does, though he is cut to the heart after the third time, likely a parallel to the thrice denial by Peter before the crucifixion. However, a word study on the word “love,” used seven times in the passage, reveals that two different Greek words are being used. Both “agapao” and “phileo” are translated with the word “love” in the passage, yet we lose the sense of what kind of love is being mentioned. Without this word study, we would never know to ask why Peter is using a different word than Jesus, why Jesus changes the word he uses in the third instance of the question, and if Jesus’ word change is why Peter is “cut to the heart” as the passage describes.
A Strong’s-tagged Bible from Olive Tree can greatly aid this type of study. I use it quite a bit in my own personal study and greatly enjoy the ease which the BibleReader brings to this method of study. Olive Tree offers a Strong’s-tagged version of the following Bible versions: KJV, NASB, ESV, HCSB, and Almeida Revista e Atualizada (Portuguese), with hopefully more to come! BibleReader offers you the ability to view Strong’s numbers in the text or to hide them. 
Hiding them makes each word with a Strong’s number a hyperlink to bring up the dictionary entry for the word in a pop-up with a simple tap. I prefer to hide mine to maintain an visually-pleasing reading experience. You can choose to show or hide the numbers in your settings under “Other Settings -> Show Strong’s Numbers.”
Whether you have chosen to show or hide your Strong’s numbers, a tap is all it takes to bring up the dictionary entry for that word. If you come to a longer dictionary entry, or would like to leave it up while you scroll, you can tap the window icon in the top right corner of the pop-up to open the dictionary, at the current entry, in either the split window (for those platforms that have this feature) or the main window.
As you begin to use the dictionary, you will become accustomed to seeing the code for each word at the beginning of the entry. One of the great features of doing a word study in an Olive Tree Strong’s-tagged Bible is the ability to create an Englishman’s Concordance on the fly. Using our example from above, if you were studying the word “love” and wanted to see all the places in the New Testament where “phileo” is used, no matter how it was translated, BibleReader lets you do it easily. Just take the Strong’s number for the word “phileo,” which is g5368 if you were wondering, and search your Strong’s-tagged Bible for “g5368.” The search result will be a list of every instance of that Strong’s number, no matter how it was translated. Pretty handy!
I hope this brief tutorial of how to enhance your Bible study with a Strong’s-tagged Bible from Olive Tree has been helpful. I hope to do more of these in the future.
-Steven C; Resource Conversion and Formatting
The oFone and Cross Platform Development
Jul 13th
Working with mobile devices is a lot of fun and very challenging. New devices and mobile platforms are springing up all time. For example, see the new ofone from Microsoft. This phone does things most developers would not have thought about when writing applications for mobile devices. (In case you didn’t catch it during this video, the ofone is not a real phone. It was used by Microsoft to humorously point out the challenges of developing for mobile devices.) Olive Tree currently supports a staggering 12 platforms! Each of these platforms requires product support, maintenance, web site changes, and development. Looking at the future, more platforms are on the way. Palm is planning on releasing a version of their operating system based on Linux. Motorola is developing more and more Linux based cell phones. The iPhone, which runs a version of Mac OS X, was just released (right now there is no way for developers to create local applications for the iPhone). ACCESS is working on their ACCESS Linux Platform for mobile devices. I am pretty sure that Nokia is working on the next version of Symbian series 60. Who knows, maybe someone is even working on the ofone 
For a software company to stay current in today’s mobile landscape they have to be able to move and adapt as new devices and platforms are released.
So how does a small company like Olive Tree manage to do this? Even more importantly, why is this important to BibleReader users? I can’t give too many technology secrets away, but I can share a few things that we do to make managing multiple platforms easier. Firstly, we have a common set of database files that run on 10 of the 12 platforms we support (The common database files do not run on the iPod and the BlackBerry, due to limitations on those platforms.) This makes the task of creating databases much easier since we only need to create one database. Secondly, we have a cross platform text rendering engine. The bulk of the complexity of the BibleReader is in figuring out how to display the text on the screen. This part of the BibleReader is written in such a way that it can run on almost any platform (BlackBerry and iPod are the exceptions). For example, I am currently working on being able to select hyperlinks using the 5-way arrow keys. I got this working on Windows Mobile Pocket PC. Now with very little effort I will be able to get this feature working on Palm OS, Symbian, and Smartphone. If we did not have a cross platform engine, I would have to spend days coding this feature for each platform. Finally, we have a cross platform database layer. This means that there is only one set of code for reading and searching the databases. Having code that can run on multiple platforms makes the task of moving to new platforms and supporting new platforms easier.
We have also changed our website to help users manage the complexity of the different platforms. Not all of our products work on all platforms. As new platforms come out we initially get Bibles working on that platform. Then, if there is enough interest in that platform, we start enabling more and more products for that platform. Our new website makes it easy for user to find out exactly what will run on their smartphone or PDA.
So why does this matter to BibleReader users? You may be thinking that this really doesn’t matter to you since the BibleReader works on your current smartphone or PDA. If you never get a new device, then this doesn’t matter. However, consider what will happen when you decide to renew your 2-year contract with carrier XYZ and decide to get a new smartphone. Will you continue to use the same mobile operating system that you are using today? With the numerous mobile device platforms out there it is common to switch. Maybe you will decide to try the iPhone, a Palm Treo, or a device we don’t even know about yet (ie the oFone). Will the BibleReader run on the the new device that you buy in two years? Will you be able to continue using the Olive Tree library you have built on your new smartphone? Hopefully, the answer to this question is yes. Since we have positioned our technology to more easily transfer from platform to platform we will hopefully support all major mobile device platforms. I can’t make any promises about what platforms we will support, since we do not know what the future holds. But I can tell you this, we are well positioned to move to new platforms as they arise.