The weblog of Olive Tree Bible Software
What’s hot? Love Dare, powered by Olive Tree.
Sep 23rd
If you were following @OliveTreeBible, or any of our engineers like @StephenLJohnson, on Twitter, you heard when we noticed yesterday’s big spike in sales on The Love Dare: 40 Dares, a “daily dare” App for iPhone that’s an adaptation of the best-selling B&H book The Love Dare. For a while, we were confused—Was someone running a promotion we didn’t know about? What caused this big jump?
Today we finally figured it out—The Love Dare: 40 Dares got listed on the App Store front page, in the “What’s Hot” category. So every person visiting the iTunes App Store got a chance to notice this little $0.99 app focused on strengthening your marriage, right up there beside T-Pain, Kelly Clarkson, and Chipotle Ordering.
We still don’t know exactly how Apple decides what’s hot and what’s not. But we’re pleased to be up there!
All Over iTunes
Sep 9th
We were browsing iTunes today to check on how our Apps are doing. We were surprised to see how high they showed up in iTunes search lists!
We have seven applications in the top search screen when you search on Bible. The Love Dare: 40 Dares (the brown icon at #7) is an application from Broadman & Holman Publishers that Olive Tree designed, based on the best-selling book The Love Dare. If you haven’t heard about this best seller or the Olive Tree-powered iPhone application, you can read more here.
Olive Tree shows up very first when you do a general search on “Bible”.
And our New King James Bible Application just turned up on the Top 20 list of paid applications!
Customer input, including purchases, reviews, and ratings, plays an extremely important role in what Apps shows up in which lists on iTunes. So if you’ve ever purchased an Olive Tree iPhone App, and if you’ve left us a review or a rating on any of our products, you’ve helped us achieve the visibility we’re enjoying today. When Olive Tree Apps turn up in people’s search lists, we hope this spreads the word about our products and introduces new users to our mobile Bible software.
Thanks, all of you, for checking us out on iTunes!
The Dominant Animal in Mobile Bible Publishing
Aug 12th
Olive Tree’s Spokane employees were pleased to find our company profiled in our local paper, The Spokesman Review, today.
You can read the online version of the article here: Spokane digital Bible publisher aims to stay in lead
It gives a great history of our company and a good description of what we do, including our cross-platform development strategies for the mobile marketplace and our partnership with print publishers who supply the content for our digital Bible and book downloads.
We were also happy to see Dr. Keith Reeves, professor of Biblical Studies at Azusa Pacific University, describe us as “the dominant animal in the mobile device platform for Bible texts.” We’re glad to know that users—particularly Bible students—are finding our software useful.
One clarification we want to offer is the number of Olive Tree downloads for iPhone. The article says, “To date the company has seen more than 400,000 downloads of its products from Apple’s iTunes”—but that’s not precisely accurate. The 400,000+ downloads also includes users who have downloaded books or Bibles (mostly free resources) from OliveTree.com, not just iTunes.
The article also includes some great photos: one of our CEO Drew Haninger (@DrewHaninger) in his office, complete with white board in the background (don’t laugh—our company runs on white board lists and diagrams!) and one of a demo product on Drew’s iPhone.
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.
Running Olive Tree Software on the Palm Pre
Jul 20th
With the latest update to MotionApps Classic application, Olive Tree’s Palm 5.x software can now be installed and run from it.
You can follow the installation instructions that you’ll find at www.olivetree.com/palm/palm_pre to get your product up and working. But right away, given the size of the screen, and the inability to use a stylus, you may experience some problems with accessing certain features with a screen tap.
I’d like to share with you a number of suggestions to make the process of operating our software on the Pre as painless as possible, minimizing the number of screen taps that are necessary to operate the program.
The Keyboard
One of the advantages of the Palm Pre is its built-in keyboard, which can become the simplest means to access certain features of the BibleReader program. By simply pressing a key you can access a number of features, listed below:
| L | Library |
| V | Verse Chooser |
| B | Bookmarks |
| M | Notes |
| F | Search |
| N | Search Next |
| W | Split Screen |
| T | Toggle Full Screen |
| S | Toggle Strong’s |
| H | Verse History |
| A | Toggle Tabs iLumina |
| E | History Back |
| D | Line Forward |
| Space | Chapter Forward |
| Backspace | Chapter Back |
If you don’t care for this particular list of choices, you can go into Tree>Options>Preferences and select Shortcuts – Alpha from the drop down list.
Select the shortcut and select modify, or hit the add button, and set up the shortcut that you really want and makes sense to you. If you get a little too ambitious creating and changing your shortcuts and get confused, you can rest easy knowing that the developers thoughtfully left a default button for you to make it all right again.
Shortcuts Via the Buttons
If you are not much for memorizing a bunch of keyboard commands, another option is to assign many of these same functions to buttons. What button goes with which number? Here is a list so you can keep it straight:
| Button | Number |
| Contacts | 1 |
| Calendar | 2 |
| 3 | |
| Home | 4 |
The opportunities are somewhat limited, in that there are only so many buttons to assign, but it can be helpful if you, like me, tend to hit the home key by accident on occasion and move the app out of view. Reassigning this key alone to something fairly unobtrusive might save you some anguish as you attempt to aim for the 5-way navigator button. The down side of this reassignment is that you have removed the button assignment that is the means to get back to the main Classic screen.
You can also control the behavior of the navigator button while in BibleReader by setting the options at Tree>Options>Preferences, and select Scrolling. Designate the navigator to move your text by line, verse, or screen among other choices. I set the right and left taps of the navigator for screen scrolling, but you will probably have your own preference on this. In this same screen, you can also designate the location and size of the scroll bar, and setting it for large does help however it is still pretty useless if you have your screen split. Down at the bottom were some check boxes I never investigated before, but now think will be quite useful: I set the Up/Down action of the 5-way navigator for next hyperlink/scroll, and so when I use this feature I can jump from note icon to note icon, hit the center select button and the note opens up.
Shortcuts Via the Toolbar
If you go into Tree>Options>Preferences, and select Secondary Toolbar, you get a number of helpful options. I moved the toolbar to left and changed it to large buttons, which is a necessity if you are really going to use it. Of course, as soon as you go to large icons so much less will fit on the screen, so you can use the options available under this preference choice to set your most used choices to the top (visible) part of the toolbar. My choices were split screen, daily reading, notes, maximize screen, and some highlighting choices.
Final Notes
You’ll definitely want to make sure you’ve listened to and dealt with your voicemails, as the voicemail strip will cover up the bottom of the screen and interfere with the 5-way navigation button.
Because of the small screen size, I would recommend setting your BibleReader program for a maximum of two windows (Tree>Options>Preferences, select Split Screen).
New Book Formatter
Jul 8th
Hi everyone! I am the newest of the newbies (at least for a little while) here at Olive Tree. My name is Steven. My duties here at Olive Tree are primarily going to be in book formatting. I’m still learning the ropes, but I am excited about the opportunities here.
My education is in the Biblical Studies field. I have a Master’s of Theology in New Testament Biblical Studies from the University of Edinburgh in good ‘ol Scotland. Though I grew up the Southeast (no I don’t really have a cool accent – sorry to disappoint), I made my way out to Spokane shortly after returning from Scotland. I had been working for a marketing firm doing systems administration before finding Olive Tree’s posting.
One of the biggest “draws” for me was Olive Tree’s work with original languages. I really enjoyed learning Greek in school and even teach a Greek class now. So the opportunity to jump in and help in the original language projects here seem like they will be right up my alley. I look forward to working with this great team to produce quality original language tools.
-Steven
BibleReader and iPhone 3.0
Jun 16th
Many iPhone users have already heard that Apple plans to release the iPhone OS 3.0 software update tomorrow, June 17. And those who haven’t will learn about it when they connect their iPhone to their computer tomorrow, and iTunes pops up the window that asks “A new version is available . . . would you like to download it now?”
Many Olive Tree customers will be able to use BibleReader on iPhone OS 3.0 without any problems, but depending on which BibleReader features you use regularly, you may encounter some technical difficulties. We’ve discovered two BibleReader bugs that users may experience in iPhone OS 3.0:
Split screen. If you activate the split screen function, BibleReader may begin to run extremely slowly.
How to avoid this bug:
- Don’t slide the split screen slider up. Read using full screen only.
- Turn split screen off, using the following commands: Information > Settings > Split Window Settings > Split Window Slider Position > Turn off the split screen slider.
Table of Contents. If you try to go to a new chapter or section using the “Table of Contents” menu, BibleReader may crash.
How to avoid this bug:
- Navigate using the Verse Chooser.
- Navigate manually by scrolling down or up.
We have already submitted an updated version of BibleReader to Apple, but as of today, Apple has not yet approved it for sale. Look for the corrected version, BibleReader 4.07 (or 4.08 Amplified Bible for BibleReader), which fixes both bugs above. As soon as Apple approves it, you can download it to resume a fully-functional Bible reading experience.
New Features for Olive Tree Books
Jun 11th
Two exciting resources are now available at Olive Tree: John Piper’s Sermons (1200+ of them!) and the New Living Translation Study Bible. Having had the pleasure of working these from start to finish, I just wanted to share the best parts with all of you. Beyond the content and quality inherent in each product, we’ve done some different things in the creation of the electronic form that we simply must highlight.
The NLT Study Bible has several firsts for Olive Tree.
a. First Bible with a Table of Contents! The entries follow the outline in the paper book, complete with book-sections and story headings.
b. First Study Bible with links to its Study Notes! This is due to the fact we’ve always used the standard Bible bundled with the notes.
c. First link with an icon! The icon doesn’t distract the eye from reading, while still enabling easy navigation to the notes.
d. First resource with a Verse Chooser, Table of Contents, and a Dictionary.
The traditional Table of Contents has items in the order they appear in the book. We’re now able to build a Table of Contents that can also function much like an index.
a. For John Piper’s Sermons, we wanted to allow you to browse the sermons by date, by title, etc. In the past, we could have sorted the sermons in any order and then created the table of contents, but that would leave the other browsing methods jumbled. We enhanced our format to allow the table of contents to point to anywhere in the text.
b. For the NLT Study Bible, we wanted to give you an easy way to access the maps, charts, in-text articles, etc. Like the sermons, they are out of order, but the table of contents still works.
—Adam H., book formatter
Welcoming a New Programmer
May 20th
Keith, the newest addition to the development team at Olive Tree Bible Software, is onboard and working hard to bring you an updated Symbian reader. We know this is going to be great news for the many, many people who have written us about wanting to get a BibleReader program on their Nokia 5800s.
Keith is an experienced programmer, having begun back in 1986 as a Programmer/Systems Analyst for the Boeing Fabrication Divisions Tooling System, and later serving as a SME (Subject Matter Expert) for Boeing Computer Services in the C and C++ programming languages.
Keith’s passion for Bible study and programming came together in 1995 when he began work as a C++ programmer for the BibleSoft product, an early and groundbreaking PC software program that targeted the Biblical academic community. Keith worked with BibleSoft over a 10-year period, alternating his programming duties for BibleSoft with his service as a missionary to Papua New Guinea, where Keith and his wife pioneered a Bible School in addition to doing evangelism and medical outreach while serving in the field.
Keith and his wife returned from the mission field to live in the Spokane area. With BibleSoft winding down its business, Keith was ready for his next software project. His experience with programming made him a great hire for any company, and he spent some time working for a local game development company. But his passion for Bible software would eventually lead him to Olive Tree. What more perfect combination of events could there be than a mobile device Bible software company needing a programmer in Spokane, and a Bible software programmer just happening to move there?
“I’m excited about getting back into Bible software development for Olive Tree.” explains Keith. “We are rapidly moving ahead into new technologies in the mobile industry such as Symbian and Google Android. I will be working on the Symbian S60 platform which covers over 45 percent of the world market in mobile OS. Lord willing, the years I have spent in Bible study, Bible Software development, and missions work will help me better serve our customers by making the Word of God both come ‘Alive’ and be close to them.”
Please welcome Keith to Olive Tree, and look for more additions to the team in the weeks and months ahead as we continue to present quality tools for Bible reading and study. As a fitting close to this blog post, Keith quotes Deuteronomy 6:6-9:
6 “And these words which I command you today shall be in your heart.
7 You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up.
8 You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes.
9 You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.”
How eBibleReading is Different From eBook Reading
May 5th
Rumors abound about the new Kindle® devices that will be released soon. Some Olive Tree users have been wondering: What makes BibleReader different from Kindle, or from other eBook readers?
The main difference is that BibleReader is tailored to the experience of reading and studying the Bible. BibleReader is Bible-centric technology. In contrast, reviewers have pointed out that Kindle is “dominated by the book metaphor.” Kindle reads and handles almost exactly like a book (and not like a magazine, reference work, newspaper, or website). If all you read is fiction, or linear non-fiction—books where you start on page one and read, page by page, straight through to the end, the way you’d read a novel—then Kindle and other traditional eBook readers may work well for you.
But as anyone who has done any Bible reading or study can tell you, that’s not the way most people interact with their Bibles. Certainly, reading the Bible from cover to cover is a valuable practice, and if you’ve never done it, you should try it at least once. But for many people, daily Bible reading and study takes place in primarily non-linear ways.
And that’s where the specialized features and usability of BibleReader come into play.
- Say you want to open your Bible to a specific place—not just the third chapter of the book of John, but John 3:16 exactly. BibleReader’s Verse Chooser lets you navigate quickly to any verse in the Bible.
- Suppose you wonder how the word “spirit” is used throughout the Bible. BibleReader’s search function lets you look up every occurrence of the word “spirit” in both the Old and New Testaments. And when you scroll through the search results, it takes just one click to open the Bible of your choice to that verse.
- What if you’re reading Nehemiah, and you need more historical background on the Temple and its importance in Jewish culture to really understand what’s going on in the story? BibleReader’s versified commentaries let you switch to the commentary of your choice that opens right to Nehemiah, or wherever you were reading in your Bible.
- BibleReader’s split-screen reading makes commentary or other Bible reference works instantly available as you read—the two screens are linked so your commentary is always open to the right verse. Or you can use split screens to read two different Bible translations side-by-side.
- Many Bibles have additional information like textual notes, cross-references, or Strong’s numbers. BibleReader includes hyperlinked notes that are available with one touch.
- If you make a personal note on a specific verse in the Bible, you can access these notes in any Bible version, tied to the same verse.
While you might not need any of these functions while reading an eBook, reading the Bible is a different story. BibleReader was created with the unique experience of Bible reading in mind, and its features are designed to let you get the most out of your Bible reading and study.