Time with Jesus
Jun 22nd
Yesterday morning I went to the back porch early and read Spurgeon’s June 21 AM entry in the Morning and Evening devotional. Here’s what it said:
Thou are fairer than the children of men. Psalm 45:2
“The entire person of Jesus is but as one gem, and His life is all along but one impression of the seal. He is altogether complete; not only in His several parts but as a gracious all-glorious whole. His character is not a mass of fair colors mixed confusedly, nor a heap of precious stones laid carelessly one upon another; He is a picture of beauty and a breastplate of glory. In Him, all the “things of good repute” are in their proper places, and assist in adorning each other. Not one feature in His glorious person attracts attention at the expense of others; but He is perfectly and altogether lovely.
“Oh, Jesus! Thy power, Thy grace, Thy justice, Thy tenderness, Thy truth, Thy majesty, and Thine immutability make up such a man, or rather such a God-man, as neither heaven nor earth hath seen elsewhere. Thy infancy, Thy eternity, Thy sufferings, Thy triumphs, Thy death, and Thine immortality, are all woven in one gorgeous tapestry, without seam or rent. Thou are music without discord; Thou art many, and yet not divided; Thou art all things, and yet not diverse. As all the colours blend into one resplendent rainbow, so all the glories of heaven and earth meet in Thee, and unite so wondrously, that there is none like Thee in all things; nay, if all the virtues of the most excellent were bound in one bundle, they could not rival Thee, Thou mirror of all perfection. Thou hast been anointed with the holy oil of myrrh and cassia, which Thy God hath reserved for Thee alone; and as for Thy fragrance, it is as the holy perfume, the like of which none other can ever mingle…each spice is fragrant, but the compound is divine.”
May the Lord give us grace to take control of our busy lives and to spend uninterrupted time with His incomparable Christ, who is the meaning of everything.
Olive Tree at BookExpo America
Jun 12th
For those of you who don’t know what BookExpo America (BEA) is, let me give you a quick summary. BEA is the third largest book fair in the world, and combines the largest selection of English language titles on the planet with special industry and author events and unparalleled educational content to create a dynamic environment for networking, sourcing and relationship building. It’s main purpose? To fuel the passion for books and spark new ideas for publishers, booksellers, librarians and rights professionals from around the world.
Just shy of two weeks ago, Olive Tree was one of the many companies present at this book fair. You might wonder what Olive Tree Bible Software was doing at a book fair? The answer is simple – we were working on licensing more products that we can make available for you to install to your PDA or Smartphone device! As an electronic publisher, Olive Tree works with other publishing companies to acheive permissions for Bibles, study tools, devotionals, and Christian eBooks. We then get eText for those books, convert them to the Olive Tree format, and post them on our website for you to download! So that’s how things work in the realm of electronic publishing…
While we were there we met with many publishers and made great progress in moving forward with more resources for handheld platforms. More new products are always around the corner!
~ K
One Handed Navigation on Palm
Jun 5th
You may have noticed that we have not posted anything to the Olive Tree blog for nearly two weeks. A number of Olive Tree employees were out of town last week. I went for a 7 day backpacking trip down the Olympic coast. Now that my “batteries are recharged” I am ready to take on the summer programming projects 
Below is a picture of me by the camp fire.
If you are like me you prefer to not use your stylus when using the BibleReader. This is especially true when I am in church. I find that using the stylus is distracting. Did you know that you can easily navigate the Palm BibleReader without a stylus. There are a number of settings in the Palm BibleReader that you can customize to make one handed navigation easy.
1. You can assign your most commonly used features to shortcut buttons. Go to menu->Options->Preferences. Then choose “Shortcuts” from the drop down in the upper left corner. On this screen you can assign the features that you use the most to the hardware buttons. For example, I always assign the select button (center button of the 4-way arrows) to be the verse chooser since that it is the feature I use the most. If you have a Treo you can add shortcuts to any of the letters on the keyboard by using the “Shortcuts – Alpha” preferences.
2. You can customize how the up, down, left, and right arrows scroll. Go to menu->Options->Preferences and then choose “Scrolling”. From here you can select if you want the up/down and left/right arrows to scroll by line, verse, screen, history, chapter, or book.
3. When you are in the verse chooser you can use the up, down, left, and right arrow keys to move the selection box around on the screen. You can then use the button in the center of the up, down, left, and right arrows to choose the book, chapter, or verse that you have selected.
4. In the Palm BibleReader you can make the up, down, left, right, and center buttons toggle between navigating the main screen and scrolling. This feature is a bit hidden in the BibleReader. This is not intentional, we didn’t want to make this navigation be the default since we wanted the arrow keys to scroll by default. To make this feature work you need to assign one of the shortcut buttons or alpha shortcuts to be “Toggle 5-Way Nav.”. Then when you are on the main screen you hit the button that you assigned to “Toggle 5-Way Nav.” to change between one handed navigation and scrolling. When you turn on the one handed navigation you will see a blue box around the current item on the screen. You can move the blue box around with the up, down, left, and right arrows. You can select the button or window by clicking on the center button.
5. On newer Palm units that support the one-handed APIs all of the preference, search, bookmark, and note screens can be navigated by using the up, down, left, right, and center buttons.
I had to include one more picture
New Resources for Palm OS, Pocket PC, Windows Mobile Smartphone, Symbian
May 23rd
It’s already a busy summer here at Olive Tree! This last week we posted more new products, and I thought you might be interested to know what a couple of them were. Also, in case you haven’t noticed, many of the new commentaries that we have been releasing are now supported on Windows Mobile Smartphone and Symbian devices – the study tools available on these platforms are increasing!
Here’s a couple of the new products we’ve recently posted:
C.A. Coates Commentary and Articles
Available for Palm OS, Pocket PC, Windows Mobile Smartphone, and Symbian phones!
This collection of C.A. Coates’ ministry contains 37 volumes of his commentary and articles. We made this excellent resource simple and easy to use by adding in the Table of Contents Chooser, which makes navigation to a particular location in these 37 volumes easy and quick.
NET Bible® First Edition, free version
Available with limited notes for Palm OS and Pocket PC.
Available with no notes for Windows Mobile Smartphone and Symbian phones.
The NET Bible® is a modern translation of the Bible based entirely on the original languages. The full version, available for Palm OS and Pocket PC, includes almost 60,000 translator notes from the original Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek texts, as well as more than 700 references to scholarly works.
How Biblical Languages Work
Available for Palm OS and Pocket PC.
This eBook is an excellent resource for study of Greek and Hebrew. It serves as an engaging introduction to these languages, and makes learning Greek and Hebrew much easier.
I hope you check out these and our other new releases soon – enjoy!
~ K
User Feedback – New Palm toolbar and more
May 16th
With the release of a new beta version of our software, we at Olive Tree are always curious to see what kind of user feedback we will have. The latest beta version of the Palm BibleReader was no exception. And with this reader, we were even more expectant, because there are some really neat features that we added this time, as you probably read about in an earlier blog post. Sure enough, the user comments have been coming in, and we wanted to share a couple with you. Here’s what one avid Olive Tree user wrote in to tell us:
Thanks for not leaving out Palm users on all of the wonderful new features that you have just released. The new beta is incredible. The new search options are second-to-none and the secondary toolbar is just AMAZING! I have never seen a company so dedicated to constant improvement of their products. I am so glad that I am a customer of Olivetree. Thank you for being so attentive to the requests of your customers.
Today we also came across an article recently posted on PalmAddicts that gives a good discussion of Bible software for Palm devices, and talks in particular about OliveTree’s BibleReader software, our frequent updates, and some of the new features we’ve just recently added. Here’s a quick look at what this article discusses:
Recently (in about the last 2 years), Olive Tree improved their BibleReader by leaps and bounds! So much so that it is now the most used Bible reading program on my Palm device … I carry 12 different translations of the Bible with me, including a French Bible. It has commentaries, cross reference links, life application notes and a dictionary … Navigation through the Bible and searches are very easy to do. There are a variety of choices for programming your hard keys for certain tasks while using BibleReader. They put a high importance on you being able to customize the program to do whatever you want … The best part about Olive Tree is that their basic reader and a few of the most basic Bibles come absolutely free!
You can read this full article at:
http://palmaddict.typepad.com/palmaddicts/2007/05/bible_software_.html
So if you’re a Palm user, why don’t you download our new beta reader and checkout these new features for yourself!
~ K
New Customizable Toolbar on Palm
May 9th
We have added a secondary customizable toolbar to the Palm OS beta BibleReader. You can choose what buttons you want on this toolbar and where this toolbar should be placed. When you don’t want the toolbar visible you can even hide it using the blue arrow button on the top of the toolbar. We have had many requests for a popup highlighting palette so that you would not have to always go to the highlighting preference screen each time you want to change your highlighting color. You can now do this with the secondary toolbar. First, go to the secondary toolbar preferences (Menu->Preferences->Secondary Toolbar). Second, remove the buttons from the secondary toolbar that you do not want. Finally, select the highlight colors from the drop down list that you want and click on Add. Now you can use the secondary toolbar to easily highlight with the colors that you want and you can hide the toolbar when you just want to read text.
Help us test a new look for our website!
May 7th
We are in the process of testing some new features on our website, and are looking for some outside testing. The basic changes we’ve made:
- You can customize the website to be “device dependent” so that you can browse olivetree.com just based on your device and the features and products that will work for you.
- You can now build your own software bundle, and get discounts accordingly. This new discount system is already in place, and the discounts will apply to any purchases you make, once you turn on the testing mode for the site.
If you are interested in helping us test these exciting new changes, go to the link below and read the instructions there to get started. Please send all comments, suggestions, and feedback to beta02@olivetree.com.
http://www.olivetree.com/store/dd_beta.php
Looking forward to hearing from you soon!
~ K
If I get a new device, can I switch my Olive Tree files over?
May 4th
Yes! Our licensing agreement requires that you install each purchased product on only one device, but you can switch which device the product is installed on. For Palm OS, Windows-Mobile Pocket PC, Windows-Mobile Smartphone, and all Symbian platforms, you can just login to your Personal Library, click on the Download link for the product, and select the download that matches the OS for your phone. If you aren’t sure what OS your device is using, just email us at support@olivetree.com and we’ll help you sort it out. BlackBerry downloads will be incorporated into the download page for the products soon, but until then, if you let us know you’re switching to BlackBerry as your PDA platform, we will transfer your license to the BlackBerry files, which will then show up in your Personal Library. Once you’ve purchased a product from Olive Tree, it’s yours – you can access file updates, switch devices, whatever you need.
~ K
A New Way to View Search Results
Apr 30th
We have added a new way to view search results on the new beta Pocket PC BibleReader which you can download here. You can now view your search results as a book on the main screen. Viewing search results as a book in the main screen has a number of advantages.
- Greek and Hebrew search results display in Greek and Hebrew fonts (see screen shot).
- You can more easily look at verses for the search results since you can work your way down the list clicking on the verse hyperlinks. You no longer have to reopen the search results list to find the next result you are interested in look at.
- There are options for how to display the search results. For example, you can choose to display the entire verse instead of just the context around the search result.
- There are no limits on the number of search results.
- You can open the search results as an eBook in your library and the search results will open to where you where last reading.
You can turn on search results in the main screen by selecting the “Display Options” button in the lower left corner of the search screen and then checking the “Display Search Results In Main Screen” checkbox. This screen also has the options for how the search results are formated.
In case you Palm users thought we were ignoring you with this new feature, don’t worry we are currently implementing this feature on Palm OS! See the screen shot (also notice the customizable secondary toolbar). These features will be in the next beta version for Palm OS This screen shot gives an example of some of the other formating options for the search results.
Using Original Language Dictionaries without Understanding Greek or Hebrew
Apr 19th
Many times when reading a passage I want to find out the meaning behind a word that I am reading. I would particularly like to find out the meaning of the Greek or Hebrew word behind the English translation using a scholarly original language dictionary like EDNT (Exegetical Dictionary of the New Testament), Little Kittel (Theological Dictionary of the New Testament), or TWOT (Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament). The problem is that I do not know Greek or Hebrew. With the right tools from Olive Tree Bible Software this is possible for those that do not know Greek or Hebrew.
First, you need CWSB (Complete Word Study Bible). With the CWSB you can click on any English word in the KJV and get the Greek or Hebrew word behind that English word. For example, lets say you are reading Psalms 12:2, come across the phrase “Kiss the Son”, and you want to find out more about the word kiss from the Hebrew. With CWSB you can click on the word “Kiss” and it will display the Hebrew word and definition in the bottom window.
Second, you need an original language dictionary like EDNT, Little Kittle, TWOT, etc. For the rest of this example I am going to use TWOT.
Finally, you need iLumina Mobile. iLumina Mobile lets you assign a default dictionary and look up words in that dictionary.
To look up the Hebrew word for kiss in TWOT you need to set your default dictionary to TWOT. There are two ways to do this. You can set your default dictionary to TWOT by going to iLumina Preferences,
then clicking on “Default Files”, and selecting TWOT as the default dictionary. Alternately, if you have “Use Last Opened” as the default dictionary then you just need to open TWOT and it will be your default dictionary since it was the last opened dictionary.
Now tap and hold your stylus on the Hebrew word for kiss in the CWSB definition window. This will pull up the context menu. Select “Look up qvn in dictionary”. The Greek and Hebrew words are not displayed in Greek or Hebrew in the context menu. See the side picture for an example of how this is done.
This will pull up the dictionary input window for TWOT with the Hebrew word for kiss filled into the lookup field. You will need to look at the possible matches for the Hebrew word for kiss and pick the one that is the closest match. This will usually be the first match.
Now click on “Go” to lookup the word in TWOT. This will bring up the definition for the Hebrew word behind Kiss in Psalms 12:2. This allows you to look up scholarly definitions for words from the KJV without knowing Greek or Hebrew.
This procedure works exactly the same with the Palm BibleReader as it does on Windows Mobile (Pocket PC) BibleReader.
