OliveTreeBlog.com

Olive Tree is now releasing material in a format for the iPod! We started by posting 8 FREE Bibles and are working on eBooks and devotionals. The format for the Bible is very basic but easy to use. It is organized by book, chapter, and verse. By clicking on a book of the Bible you will be brought to a screen with chapter selection. After clicking on the chapter you wish to view, you will be brought to a verse menu for this chapter. Finally, by clicking on the verse you want to view, you will be brought right to this verse. One thing to note is that the iPod only allows 1000 4 kb notes. Therefore, the whole Bible will not fit on the iPod. Once you have downloaded the Bible you want, you can delete any books of the Bible to have just the ones you want on your iPod. We are hoping the iPhone has the same notes feature with the same formatting. If this is the case, we will release all this material for the iPhone as well! If you bring your iPod with you to work, school, or anywhere else like I do, this material could be a very valuable resource for you. You can read Scripture wherever you are! Anywyay, I think this could be a really cool thing.

You can download the Bibles for you iPod from Olive Tree’s iPod beta web page.

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.

  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

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