What’s New?
Read company news as well information about new products and new BibleReader releases.
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.
Olive Tree Welcomes Dr. Bill Mounce
Sep 14th
Olive Tree Bible Software is happy to announce that renowned Greek scholar, Dr. Bill Mounce, will be joining our ranks as the Vice President of Content and Learning.
Bill obtained his bachelor’s degree in Biblical Studies (with a minor in Greek) at Bethel College in St. Paul, Minnesota. He went on to earn an MA in Biblical Studies from Fuller Theological Seminary, and a PhD in New Testament from Aberdeen University in Scotland.
Bill has previously served as a professor of New Testament and Greek at Azusa Pacific University, and as a professor of New Testament and the director of the Greek language program at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary.
Bill has also served as the New Testament chair of the English Standard Version translation committee, and is currently serving on the NIV translation committee for the 2011 revision.
Most recently, Bill was the VP of Educational Development at BibleGateway, the world’s largest online Christian website. His primary responsibilities were content acquisition and developing a strategy for online education.
Bill is very excited to be a part of Olive Tree. With his vision for using technology for ministry and education, it became apparent to Drew and others here at Olive Tree that he would fit in wonderfully with the goals and direction of our company.
So again, Bill, WELCOME!
BibleReader tops iTunes List
Aug 25th
We’ve all heard that the Bible is the best-selling book of all time. Apparently, this holds true even in the new world of eBooks!
Olive Tree’s app NIV Bible for BibleReader recently topped the list of Top Grossing Apps in the category “Books” (pictured at right). As Bible publishers, we’re happy to see that God’s Word hasn’t lost any of its edge, despite the massive changes that are rocking the world of print books and traditional publishing.
Even though our NIV app is a leader among book apps on iTunes, Olive Tree also offers many options for Bible reading and study that are completely free. BibleReader Free is a free app for iPhone and iPad that you can find on iTunes. BibleReader for other mobile platforms like Android, BlackBerry, and more can be installed immediately by pointing your mobile browser to olivetree.com/m.
And along with our perennially popular premium Bible translations like the NIV and others, Olive Tree offers a host of free Bibles, free Bible Study Tools, and more free products of all kinds.
Olive Tree is proud to be a leading electronic Bible publisher and we’re excited about the innovation we bring to Bible study in the new world of mobile devices and digital publishing. In the weeks and months ahead, we’ll be sharing details about our exciting plans for the future BibleReader. Stay tuned!
Watch Olive Tree on YouTube, learn BibleReader’s newest features
Dec 8th
We’d like to welcome you to Olive Tree’s YouTube Channel, the home for BibleReader demo videos.
Have you ever wished someone could sit down and walk you through how to use BibleReader’s more advanced features, like morphological searches? Our demo videos are designed to do just that. These demonstrations are created by our engineers and book formatters—the people who know BibleReader best—and they contain explanations and walk-throughs of BibleReader’s features, from basic to advanced. There are already 14 demo videos posted, and more will be added periodically.
You’ll find demos on advanced topics . . .
. . . and learn how to adjust the little things to make your bible-reading experience just right.
You can watch general demos for a BibleReader overview . . .
. . . and new users can get started with the basics.
We recently introduced Olive Tree University on BibleReader for iPhone, a collection of tips and information to help familiarize users with BibleReader’s newest features. Many of the same demonstration videos are available through Olive Tree University, directly on your iPhone.
Visit us on YouTube at www.youtube.com/OliveTreeBible, and learn more!
iPhone BibleReader In-App Purchases and Price Change
Oct 2nd
We are adding In-Application purchases to iPhone BibleReader. This will let you purchase books directly from within BibleReader using your iTunes account. In-Application Purchases will make the process of purchasing books much easier. Apple requires that all applications with In-Application Purchase be for sale. To meet this requirement we are going to start changing $.99 for BibleReader. We have submitted a new app called BibleReader Free that has all of the features of BibleReader without In-Application Purchases and will remain free. We choose to make BibleReader $.99 instead of adding a new app for this since this will give everyone who has already downloaded BibleReader the update for free.
Currently Amplified Bible for BibleReader has the In-Application Purchase. The rest of the iPhone BibleReader apps will have this functionality with version 4.09. The In-Application Purchasing requires each book to be approved by Apple for each reader. Most of the books are still in the Apple review process.
Stephen
Edited to Add: Since this post, Apple has changed some of their requirements, and no longer requires apps with in-app purchasing to be for sale. At this time, BibleReader and BibleReader – Free both allow in-app purchasing. BibleReader – Free comes with the ASV and KJV Bibles. BibleReader comes with the ASV and KJV Bibles, plus Matthew Henry’s Concise Commentary on the Whole Bible and the Jamieson, Fausset, and Brown Commentary. Features and functionality for BibleReader and BibleReader – Free are the same, unless their version numbers are different. (Different version numbers occur when Olive Tree has submitted a software update that has been approved for one app but not the other. Usually, the second app is simply waiting for update approval and will be updated shortly to the newest software version.) Updated 8/30/2010.
A Different Kind of Summer Vacation
Jul 21st
Instead of a vacation to Mediterranean beaches this summer, Olive Tree developers are taking an intellectual vacation to the Eastern Mediterranean, the ancient home of Hebrew and Greek, the original languages of the Bible. Academics, lay people, and clergy alike have benefited from the convenience and affordability of Olive Tree’s original Greek and Hebrew products for Palm and Windows Mobile, which brought parsing, morphology, and dictionary products to the mobile platform. Now our developers are hard at work extending those same ground-breaking original language features to the iPhone BibleReader.
The recent release of the BHS/GNT BibleReader for iPhone was just the beginning, and we have great plans to update the platform in the upcoming months. What can you expect to see in upcoming product releases?
- One touch parsing and morphology
- Fast and powerful searching capabilities extending beyond the biblical text to the parsing information itself
- New and improved dictionary functionality, including a nearly-unabridged version of BDB
- Improved quality of dictionary links to support entries even when sources disagree on lexical forms
- Aesthetically pleasing UNICODE fonts
Behind great projects are great people, and Drayton Benner and Steven Cummings will be working on these projects for Olive Tree. Drayton studied math and computer science as an undergrad at the University of Virginia, and he worked full-time doing research and development work in mathematical software for a number of years. But Drayton was drawn to biblical studies and had a desire to edify the church through academic teaching and research, so he shifted directions and obtained a Master’s degree from Regent College (Vancouver, BC, Canada) in Old Testament. He is now studying for a PhD in Northwest Semitic Philology in the University of Chicago’s Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations Department (Hebrew and Aramaic are Northwest Semitic languages). He is three years into these studies, and he hopes someday to be an Old Testament professor and to research, among other things, the use of computers in aiding biblical studies. This is Drayton’s third summer working for Olive Tree, and he is “delighted to be working to provide tools to advance the work of two institutions about which I care: the church and the academy.”
Assisting him on manuscript formatting will be new Olive Tree employee Steven Cummings, who is well-versed in Koine Greek and has a Master’s of Theology in New Testament Biblical Studies from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. Steven says, “I am excited to tackle the formatting for Olive Tree’s original language projects, and look forward to helping make original language study more accessible to those on the go!” You can read more about Steven in his own blog entry: http://www.olivetreeblog.com/2009/07/08/new-book-formatter/
While there are no swimsuits or beach towels for our developers on their Mediterranean vacation, their hard work means that Olive Tree Original Language tools will be as handy to take with you to the beach as the sunscreen.
Help Direct Olive Tree’s BlackBerry BibleReader
Feb 19th
See this blog post for how Olive Tree decides where to spend engineering time.
We would like your help to direct where we should spend our time in the BlackBerry BibleReader.
Click here to take the survey.
Stephen
Help Direct Olive Tree’s iPhone BibleReader
Feb 12th
We are so excited about the level of enthusiasm and interested in Olive Tree’s iPhone BibleReader! We gets lots of excited users asking us when will feature XYZ be in the iPhone BibleReader. I want to explain a little about how our engineering process works and then give you a chance to help us decide what features to include.
Most engineering teams follow an established work process that was established for a 6-36 month time period with milestone deliverables throughout that process. Most of the time the schedulers underestimated the amount of time the project would take and so the engineering team is almost always behind schedule. (As a side note I usually way underestimate the amount of time something would take. Most projects look “easy” until I am faced with the reality of making something that barely works into production level quality.)
At Olive Tree we take a different approach to scheduling. We know what we are currently working on, we know what we will work on next, and we have a list of things to work on after that. The list is only partially prioritized. When it is time to pick the next item to work on we look a number of factors like what people have been requesting, what we feel is important, what we need to publish certain books, etc to decide what to do next. This allows us to be flexible and quickly change our engineering to meet demands, market shifts, and capture opportunities with vendors or publishers.
This does mean that it will difficult for us to say when we will have feature XYZ done since we don’t actually know ourselves. We do know if that feature appears higher on the to do list that means it will get done sooner, but we haven’t actually scheduled that feature for engineering yet.
We had one of these meetings today for picking the next features. There are so many important features to work on we wanted to get more of your feedback to help us decide. We created a survey you can fill out to help us decide what you would like to see us work on next.
Click here to fill out the survey.
Thank you for your support, help, and enthusiasm!
Stephen Johnson
Senior Software Engineer
Newest Display Technology for Biblical Languages
Jun 30th
On June 16-18, I attended the conference “The Bible and Computers: Present and Future of a Discipline” in the suburbs of Madrid, Spain. At this conference, a group of people from many different nations interested in the intersection between Biblical studies and computer technology gathered together to hear presentations on current research. Most of those present were university professors.
There were three types of talks presented. The first group involved research that academics are doing that produce databases that will eventually be—if they have not already been—incorporated into Bible software packages. It was exciting for me to hear some of what is on the horizon. For example, I am interested in Hebrew syntax, so I enjoyed listening to presentations by representatives of two different groups that have been working on syntactically tagging the entire Old Testament. The second group of talks revolved around the progress and state of existing Bible software packages. I got to hear about the latest bells and whistles on a variety of Bible software programs. Finally, the third group focused on the results of using Bible software packages, from successful strategies for teaching Hebrew and Greek more effectively with the use of Bible software to the results of research enabled by Bible software. It was gratifying to hear how Bible software is helping professors in their teaching and research of the Bible.
I presented a talk at the conference entitled “Displaying Hebrew and Aramaic on Handheld Devices That Lack Proper Complex Script Support.” In my talk, I set the stage by discussing the way in which complex script technology has improved on personal computers in recent years, but these improvements have not yet been extended to mobile devices. I then discussed some possible strategies for overcoming these limitations on mobile devices, giving the positives and negatives of each approach. Finally, I discussed the approach we at Olive Tree took in successfully overcoming these obstacles—to my knowledge producing the first aesthetically pleasing Hebrew and Aramaic texts with all the desired vowels, cantillation marks, and symbols on mobile devices. My talk was warmly received by the audience of scholars. I supplemented my presentation’s screenshots by showing off BibleReader’s Hebrew and Aramaic display to many of the conference’s participants on an actual Windows Mobile device.
Here is a list of our products that use this innovative display technology: BHS, BHS Add-On – Groves-Wheeler Westminster Hebrew Morphology, and Qumran (non-biblical texts). You can see my previous blog posts about it here, here, and here.
~Drayton B.
Advanced Rendering of Hebrew and Aramaic Texts on Palm and Pocket PC
Jan 22nd
We at Olive Tree are excited about new developments in our handling of Hebrew and Aramaic texts. Over the past several months, we have moved to UNICODE!
In recent years, there have been impressive technological advances made for displaying languages like Hebrew and Aramaic with complex scripts, from the establishment and expansion of the UNICODE standard to the development of “smart fonts,” which position the glyphs in a context-sensitive manner. These developments have paved the way for some strikingly beautiful Hebrew and Aramaic fonts, most notably EzraSIL and SBL Hebrew. Handheld devices, however, have sought to meet their tight constraints on speed and storage by excising anything in the operating system that might be extraneous. As such, handheld devices generally do not include complex script support, with some not even supporting UNICODE at all. Thus, in general, Hebrew and Aramaic texts have not been able to be displayed in a manner that takes advantage of these recent breakthroughs in typography.
We are delighted to announce that we have overcome the limitations of the Palm and Windows Mobile operating systems with regard to complex script support! On these platforms, we are able to display Hebrew and Aramaic texts with all the beauty that recent UNICODE-based smart fonts have allowed. This includes our BHS (HMT) module with all of the vowels, cantillation marks, and symbols to which you are accustomed in the print edition of BHS. (Of course, this does not include the critical apparatus, the massora magnum, or the massora parva.) It also includes our BHS Add-On—Groves-Wheeler Westminster Hebrew Morphology module, which allows you to click on a Hebrew or Aramaic word, see the lexeme, morphological information, a gloss, and a link to the appropriate entry in an abridged version of the BDB dictionary, one of the finest dictionaries available for Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic. We also give independent access to BDB, so you can see the entry for any particular lexeme you would like, or you can browse through entries in BDB.
This new way of representing and displaying Hebrew and Aramaic also applies to our new Qumran (non-biblical texts) module, complete with editorial symbols, lexical and morphological information, a gloss, and a link to the appropriate entry in BDB (provided that you have the BHS Add-On—Groves-Wheeler Westminster Hebrew Morphology module). If you missed my blog article on the Qumran texts, you can find it here.
On Palm and Windows Mobile, you can view these Hebrew and Aramaic texts using the EzraSIL font, which looks virtually identical to the printed edition of BHS except that EzraSIL is easier to read when there are multiple marks around one consonant than the print edition is. On Windows Mobile, you have the additional option of downloading the freely available and aesthetically-pleasing SBL Hebrew font and using it as well.
I think that the results of this new way of displaying the texts are really quite stunning, but you do not have to take my word for it. Here are two screenshots for you. The first is a screenshot of our our BHS (HMT) module at Psalm 23, and the second is a screenshot of our Qumran (non-biblical texts) module at column 1, line 11 of 1QS (The Community Rule).
~Drayton B.
