Greek and Hebrew for BlackBerry BibleReader
February 3rd, 2010BlackBerry users, Greek and Hebrew fonts for BlackBerry BibleReader are finally here! Now, you’ll find Olive Tree’s entire Greek and Hebrew library available to you.
To activate Greek and Hebrew on your BlackBerry, follow these steps:
- Download the newest version of BibleReader for BlackBerry by pointing your mobile browser to olivetree.com/m.
- Find your previously purchased compatible Greek and Hebrew resources in your Personal Library. You’ll see them listed in as available to download!
- You can also browse the library of Greek and Hebrew resources at OliveTree.com.
Olive Tree offers a variety of Greek and Hebrew resources, ranging from commentaries that reference original Greek and Hebrew words or phrases in their biblical exegesis all the way to the latest academic translations of ancient Greek and Hebrew Bible texts, complete with parsing and morphology information, and hyperlinked lexica.
You’ll have access to resources like these:
- Lenski’s Commentary on the New Testament, where R.C.H. Lenski, a lifelong student of biblical Greek, provides an original, literal translation of each portion of text, and augments his linguistic and textual analysis with frequent references to the Greek Bible text.
- NASB with Strong’s Numbers or NET Bible, First Edition with Notes, where textual notes to the English Bible text offer insight into Greek and Hebrew roots and clues to translation.
- Greek New Testament (Nestle-Aland 27) or Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (HMT), the Hebrew Old Testament, to read the Bible in the languages in which it was originally written.
- three parsed texts with dictionaries included: BHS (Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia) With Westminster Morphology and BDB Lexicon, Greek New Testament (NA27) with Mounce-Koivisto Morphology and UBS Dictionary, and LXX (Septuaginta) With Parsing and LEH Lexicon.
There are 3 ways to get Greek and Hebrew fonts for BibleReader on your BlackBerry device. If you open a resource that needs fonts your device doesn’t have, you’ll see a message that tells you to download the fonts from OliveTree.com. You only need to install the fonts once.
- Included with Greek & Hebrew resources. Our most popular Greek and Hebrew resources come with Greek and Hebrew fonts included. When you download the Bible to your BlackBerry, the necessary fonts will be downloaded and installed automatically.
- Download over the air. If you get a message that additional fonts are needed for a resource containing Greek and Hebrew, you can download the font pack for free, over the air. From inside the BibleReader program, select Library and then Browse Online Bookstore. In the Online Bookstore, browse the free books and find BlackBerry Fonts – Greek and Hebrew. Click on the Download for Free link and OK when asked to download and install the files. Close and reopen any Greek or Hebrew book you were reading.
- Manual installation. If you prefer to install files manually, visit OliveTree.com on your desktop browser and find the BlackBerry Fonts – Greek and Hebrew font pack. Download the files to your computer. When you move the files to your BlackBerry device, put them in the /olivetree directory on your media card—the same place your Bible and book files (.pdb files) go.
BibleReader for iPad – Coming Soon!
January 29th, 2010Along with technology blogs and Twitter feeds everywhere, Olive Tree’s office has been buzzing with excitement since Wednesday’s announcement of the new Apple iPad. The iPad is the latest device in the iPhone OS family, a tablet with iPhone’s familiar multi-touch interface, a larger screen, and massive possibilities for expanding what Bible study looks like for mobile devices.
iPad is built on the iPhone OS (operating system), which means that iPhone BibleReader runs on iPad today. Here at Olive Tree, we downloaded the iPad emulator on Wednesday afternoon and got our first glimpse of BibleReader on the iPad’s new larger screen. BibleReader is one of the many apps that will transfer directly to iPad when it ships in March, so you can expect to see BibleReader for iPad available from day one.
But, of course, we’re looking to do more. We’re committed to bringing the best Bible Study experience to iPhone OS, which now includes the iPad. And iPad’s new features give us the room to dream big.
Olive Tree has always specialized in mobile technology, and we’re excited about the iPad because it signals the direction all mobile technology is headed—becoming powerful, flexible, and useful enough to fit more than one category, transcending the current boundaries between mobile computing devices and other computers.
And that’s where BibleReader is headed too. We plan to make the BibleReader experience far more than just reading a book. And we’re glad the new Apple iPad will give us the opportunity to create a deeper experience of the Bible.
So you got a new phone for Christmas . . .
December 23rd, 2009. . . and you’re looking for the best smartphone apps to add to it. If carrying one—or several—of your favorite Bible translations, along a wide variety of Bible study tools, on your phone sounds good, we encourage you to explore BibleReader.
BibleReader offers powerful features that make Bible reading and study easy. Intuitive verse look-up with Verse Chooser, notes and bookmarks to record your personal thoughts, versified commentaries that open to the right verse every time—features like these transform your iPhone, BlackBerry, or Android device into a portable study library. Learn more about BibleReader’s features.
BibleReader isn’t just another eBook reader. It offers Bible-centric navigation and features, because the way you read the Bible isn’t the same way you read a John Grisham novel. Olive Tree engineers specialize in bringing the Bible to smartphones, so BibleReader is tailored to all the ways that eBibleReading is different than eBook reading.
BibleReader works on most mobile platforms. You have an iPhone this year, but what about next year? You had a BlackBerry in 2009, but you just got a Motorola Droid for Christmas. Because the world of smartphones changes so quickly, it’s hard to invest in a resource that might only work on this year’s phone. But BibleReader operates on most major mobile platforms and we’ve got 98% of the world’s phones covered. When you switch to a new device, your Olive Tree library comes with you. You can download copies for whatever device you currently own.
Get to know BibleReader. Watch a demo of BibleReader’s features on Olive Tree’s YouTube Channel. Or, if you’re just starting out with a new phone, try a collection like this that let you sample Bible translations, commentaries, devotionals, and cross references—a little bit of everything that Olive Tree has to offer:
including 4 Bible translations (NIV, NLT, KJV, and Amplified), Spurgeon’s Morning and Evening daily devotional, Matthew Henry’s Concise Commentary, and Nave’s Topical Bible Index.
Happy reading!
Olive Tree is the first Bible App on Ovi, the Nokia App Store
December 15th, 2009We’re one of only a few Bible software companies that develop exclusively for mobile, but we didn’t expect to be literally the first Bible App available on Ovi, the Nokia App Store. You can see it here: BibleReader 4 at Ovi.com. Two readers are available today: BibleReader (Free) and BibleReader KJV Strong’s ($14.99).
BibleReader runs on a wide variety of Nokia devices. Many of the latest Nokia devices run the Symbian 60-5 operating system, which supports BibleReader 4, our latest and greatest version of BibleReader. But BibleReader runs on many other Symbian operating systems as well. If you have a Nokia phone, check your phone’s operating system to find out what Olive Tree resources might be available for it.
Symbian, the operating system used by many Nokia phones, covers a substantial section of the world market. Look at the graph below to see why we’re excited to have another way to reach Symbian users.
BibleReader: available on 98% of smartphones worldwide.
Edited to add: Check out this review of BibleReader 4 on Ovi, from Nokia Experts. One small correction is that BibleReader 4 on Ovi does not include in-application installation of titles at this time. We plan to add that feature to our future submissions to Ovi.
Watch Olive Tree on YouTube, learn BibleReader’s newest features
December 8th, 2009We’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!
Prize Winners from ETS and SBL
December 2nd, 2009
If you met the Olive Tree crew at the ETS or SBL meetings, you saw that signing up for the Olive Tree Newsletter at those meetings gave you a chance to win a free iPod Touch, preloaded with Olive Tree resources. Well, the winners have now been chosen.
Congratulations to our winners!
- From the ETS drawing: Doug Powell of Tennessee
- From the SBL drawing: Kathy Barett Dawson of North Carolina
We hope each of you enjoy your iPod Touch, and the Olive Tree resources we provide with it.
And we video-recorded both drawings using an iPhone, in case you were wondering how we spend our time at the office.
Drew and Sarah draw the ETS winner
Drew and Stephen J draw the SBL winner
Blog Comments
December 1st, 2009We have enabled comments on the Olive Tree blog! We are going to enable comments for a trial period on our blog. We currently interact with users through technical support, the forums, and twitter. If the spam load gets too high or we are not able to provide adequate responses we will have to turn off comments.
Stephen
Bible Software Shootout Presentation
November 24th, 2009Olive Tree was proud to perform in SBL’s Bible Software Shootout, a friendly competition that pitted Bible software contenders like Logos, Bible Works, Accordance, and SESB against each other, showcasing each software’s ability to perform detailed original language research.
To see Olive Tree’s presentation from SBL’s Bible Software Shootout, click here to read the presentation (.pdf), especially if you use BibleReader’s Greek and Hebrew tools.
Many thanks to everyone who stopped by the Olive Tree booth at ETS and SBL. Engineers Stephen J (@stephenljohnson) and David T (@dtrotzjr) and original language specialists Drayton B and Steven C (@steventcummings) enjoyed meeting you! Meeting our users makes a big difference for us. You can read David T’s blog post about his ETS experience to learn why.
Thanks also to those of you who signed up for the Olive Tree Newsletter and entered the ETS/SBL prize drawings. We’ll announce the winners of our drawing for a free iPod Touch, preloaded with Olive Tree resources, soon!
“Olive Tree University” is Live on iPhone BibleReader
November 19th, 2009New in BibleReader 4 for iPhone, we’ve released a library of instructional videos to teach you about BibleReader’s features. Learning your way around BibleReader has never been easier!
From the main reading screen, touch Menu (bottom right), then touch Olive Tree University in the pop-up menu. You’ll see a list of instructional features that begins with “What’s New in This Version”. It opens a short instructional video that demonstrates all the new additions to the latest BibleReader release for iPhone.
Watch this video to learn about
- new original languages support, including parsing, glosses, and lexical information for Greek and Hebrew texts. Take advantage of our highly advanced search function and learn how to search by morphological code.
- online backup for notes. By syncing notes with your EverNote account, you can keep a backup of notes in your Bible and access it on your device or on your desktop.
- new display and navigation customization to make pop-up reference windows even more useful.
Olive Tree University is new in version 4.10 of BibleReader for iPhone. Version 4.10 has been submitted to Apple, and Apple has approved the upgrade for some BibleReader Apps, but others are still in the approval process. If you haven’t yet been notified that an upgrade is available for your BibleReader App, be patient—you will soon!
Visit Olive Tree at ETS/SBL Conferences This Week
November 17th, 2009Are you planning to attend one or both of these meetings? If so, come visit Olive Tree at our display booth:
ETS – Evangelical Theological Society, New Orleans, November 18-20
Olive Tree Booth # 100
SBL – Society of Biblical Literature, New Orleans, November 21-24
Olive Tree Booth # 808
We’ll be happy to give you a demo of our latest BibleReader release on iPhone, which implements new features especially for original languages. We’ve also released an entire bookshelf’s worth of original language texts, tools, and resources for iPhone, including
- Greek New Testament (NA27) with Mounce’s Morphology and UBS Dictionary,
- LXX (Septuaginta) with Parsing and LEH Lexicon, and
- BHS (Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia) with Westminster Morphology and BDB Lexicon.
Engineers Stephen J (@stephenljohnson) and David T (@dtrotzjr) and original language specialists Drayton B and Steven C (@steventcummings) will be happy to show you around these new resources.
And if you’re interested in seeing the best of BibleReader software for Greek and Hebrew study, be sure to watch Olive Tree in SBL’s Bible Software Shootout. Side-by-side with Bible software peers like Logos, Bible Works, Accordance, and SESB, Olive Tree will demonstrate how our software answers real-world research questions, like:
I want to study a part of speech, e.g., demonstrative pronouns or interjections. How do I get all of the lemmas for that part of speech, get all the occurrences of those lemmas, and the results organized in such a way that I could write an article/monograph on that part of speech from the data?
If questions like these spark your interest—because of your academic work or your personal study—watch Olive Tree perform at the Shootout, and see how Olive Tree’s latest tools can help you in your own Greek and Hebrew study:
Bible Software Shootout
Saturday, November 21
4:00 – 6:30 p.m.
Rhythms Ballroom 3-SH, at SBL
We’ll also post this presentation on our website later, so everyone can take advantage of the information presented by Drayton and Stephen J.