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We have made an update to how the Windows Mobile soft keys work if you enable the soft keys (you can enable this option in Menu->Options->Toolbar Options). When you enable the soft keys, the main toolbar is replaced by a left and right soft key. You can customize what commands appear under the left soft key menu by changing the commands for the primary toolbar in the “Toolbar Options”.

This feature is nice for one-handed navigation because now you can access all of the commands on the toolbar through the soft key menu system.

You can download a beta version of the BibleReader with this updated feature from http://www.olivetree.com/download/beta/palmppc/.

- Stephen

Many of you may remember my post about one handed navigation on Palm from the start of the summer. I am pleased to say that we have added more one handed navigation features to both Palm and Pocket PC I have three main ways that I use the BibleReader. I use the BibleReader for reading, following along in church/Bible studies, and studying the Bible. When I am reading or following along in church I typically don’t have my stylus out. Having to pull it out is distracting and too cumbersome for performing a simple task. This is where one handed navigation is a life saver. You can now use most features of the BibleReader without using a stylus

The new one handed navigation features are in version 3.69.228 and above of the BibleReader. You can download this version from the beta web site http://www.olivetree.com/download/beta/palmppc/.

The big new feature that we added for one handed navigation is “5-way navigation of hyperlinks”. This feature lets you select hyperlinks (including publisher notes) using the 5-way arrow pad. There are two options that you can enable with this feature. You can have the left/right arrows navigate hyperlinks and/or you can have the up/down arrows navigate the hyperlinks. Palm users can find these options the Menu->Options->Preferences and then select “Scrolling” from the drop down in the upper right corner. Windows Mobile (Pocket PC) users can find these preference in the “Scrolling Preferences”.

If you choose to have the up/down arrows navigate the hyperlinks then when you click on the down arrow it will put a dotted box around the next hyperlink on the screen. If there are no more hyperlinks on the screen then it will do the scrolling behavior for the down arrow. You can click on the center button to follow a hyperlink. For books like CWSB and Gramcord that have lots of hyperlinks it can be helpful to enable both the up/down and left/right arrows to navigate hyperlinks. When you have both options selected clicking on the down arrow will go to the hyperlink below the hyperlink with the box around it.

When you are just reading having the arrow keys constantly highlighting hyperlinks can be annoying. You don’t want to have to go to the options every time to turn this feature on/off since that would defeat the purpose of being able to quickly select a hyperlink without pulling out your stylus. We added a shortcut called “Toggle 5Way Hyperlink”. You can assign this shortcut to a hardware key on your device. You can use this shortcut to turn the 5-way navigation of hyperlinks on and off.

On Windows Mobile 5 Phone Edition and Windows Mobile 6 Professional (Windows Mobile devices with soft keys) we have added another toolbar that makes one-handed navigation much easier. In the toolbar options you can enable the option to “Use Windows Mobile 5 & 6 Soft Keys”. This will make the main toolbar be two buttons that work with the left and right soft keys. With this toolbar you can easily access all of the BibleReader features without having to use the stylus to access the toolbar.

As if that wasn’t enough we have also fixed up the 5-way navigation on many of the Windows Mobile BibleReader dialog boxes. Now you can use your 5-way keys to navigate dialog boxes like the search screen.

There are other one handed navigation features in the Palm and Windows Mobile BibleReader. You can read about some of them in the blog one handed navigation on Palm. Many of the features talked about in that blog article also apply to the Windows Mobile BibleReader.
-Stephen

I have been doing most of my reading electronically on a PDA or smartphone for the past 2 years. When I first started reading books electronically I did not like how much I had to scroll. When reading a paper book you can usually read for a few minutes before turning a page. On a PDA or smartphone it usually takes less than a minute before you have read all the text on the screen and have to scroll. This makes for a lot of scrolling to read through a book. The second problem with scrolling is that the text “jumps” by a line or screen when you scroll. Your eye has to do a quick adjustment to find out where to begin reading again after you finish scrolling. This becomes tiring when reading electronically for a long time.

So you may be wondering why I didn’t give up on reading electronic books. Auto scrolling was the reason. Auto scrolling solves both of these problems with reading electronically. On the Pocket PC BibleReader you can turn on auto scrolling by going to Menu->Display->Toggle Auto Scroll. On the Palm BibleReader you can turn on auto scrolling from Menu->Options->Toggle Auto Scroll. When you turn on auto scrolling the text will begin automatically scrolling. The text will do a smooth scroll. This means that the text doesn’t “jump” up the screen which makes it easy for your eye to follow. You can control how fast the text scroll by using the up and down arrows. You can make it go faster with the down arrow and slower with the up arrow.

If it weren’t for auto scrolling I don’t think I would be doing most of my reading electronically. For me, once I start reading a book with auto scrolling I forget that it is electronic. I start enjoying the book and forget about the medium that is being use to present the book. I have even found that reading electronically while riding a stationary bike is much easier than reading a paper book since I can do it completely hands free when I prop up my smartphone.

Happy Electronic Reading!

Stephen

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

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

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.

Every serious student of the Bible appreciates the value of a concordance, not only for finding a verse one can’t seem to locate, but also for searching out the various places in the Scriptures where certain terms and topics are addressed.

Many users of Bible software for PDA’s and smartphones ask us to include concordances among our product offerings, not realizing that their BibleReader software already contains, in essence, copies of the great concordances by Strong, Young, and Cruden as well as the Englishman’s Hebrew and Greek Concordances. “I don’t remember buying them,” you say? That’s because you didn’t need to. Olive Tree’s search engine does everything any kind of printed concordance can do—actually, far more—and it does it much faster.

Searching for a particular verse? Just select a Bible, any Bible. (You can’t do that with the printed concordances because they are translation-specific.) Type in a word or phrase from the verse you are trying to find. Keep it short and simple because, unless you have the exact wording, you may not find what you’re looking for. I would like to use the New King James Version, NKJV, to look for the verse that says, “The Spirit is life because of righteousness.” I set the search engine to look for an exact match, limit the range to the New Testament, type the words “Spirit is life,” and away we go. In a second, literally, I’ve discovered that the verse I’m looking for is Romans 8:10. By selecting that verse and tapping “Go to,” I’m there in an instant, ready to read. Try doing this with a printed concordance. You’ll probably find that it takes much longer.

Or maybe you would just like to look up the word “faith” in the entire New Testament. Suppose you want to use The New Testament in Modern English by J. B. Phillips. I doubt you’ll find an exhaustive concordance in print for this translation. With your PDA or smartphone, select the translation, go to the search window, type in the word “faith,” choose the “Exact” option again, and search. A split second later you have 304 results. You can read through all of these in sequence, scan the list and find the results that pertain to the aspect of faith you are looking for, or try another search that is more limited. Suppose you want to study the relationship between faith and Christ. Type in both words and select as your search option “All Words Any Order.” You now have 51 results, all pertinent to what you are studying. It might take hours to do this with a printed concordance, and you’d be limited to the King James Version and a very few others.

Can you do this with Greek or Hebrew words? Yes, but you can also search using Strong’s numbers, which is often the best way to search in Hebrew and Greek since these languages are highly inflected. In other words, a single word may appear in many different forms. Assuming you want to see every instance of a Greek or Hebrew word, regardless of its form, just use KJV Strongs or NASB Strongs; find the Strong’s number of the word you want to search for by going to a verse that contains it and toggling the numbers on (if they are not already on); type that number into the search window; and immediately you have the results you’re looking for.

Although printed concordances are wonderful tools in their own right, none of them enables you to do everything that I’ve just mentioned, and I’ve only pointed out a few of the options possible. Moreover, your electronic Bibles, which automatically come with all these search capabilities and more, enable you to do in seconds what may take hours with printed Bibles and a printed concordance. One more very important advantage to the electronic medium is this: all these Bibles and concordances fit in the palm of your hand or, when you’re not using them, in your pocket. Wow!

For additional suggestions on Bible searches, see “The Why and How of Bible Searches” in Olive Tree’s article series Explore the Bible on Your PDA or Smartphone.

Anyone who has used both our Pocket PC and Palm BibleReader has noticed that searching on the Pocket PC is much faster than it is on Palm.  This is true even when the Palm unit has a faster processor.  What you will probably be surprised to find out is that the searching code is 98% identical in the Palm and Pocket PC readers.  The reason that the Palm BibleReader searches slower is because it has to go through an emulation layer in the Palm OS.  We are pleased to announce a beta version of the Palm BibleReader that bypasses this emulation layer.  This version of the Palm BibleReader runs natively on the ARM processor.  This reader has faster searching, scrolling, and text rendering. Click here to download the beta reader.

You may have noticed that Olive Tree’s BibleReader now has a new verse chooser. Perhaps you’re wondering why we spent the time to completely recreate this function? In this blog, I’d like to tell you why and let you know about the newer, friendlier verse chooser functions.

As Olive Tree developers, we realize that the verse chooser is one of the most accessed screens in the BibleReader, second in importance only to the main screen that displays the text. So we wanted to make the experience of using the verse chooser the best we could make it. To accomplish this goal we added a number of features to the verse chooser and designed it to work across platforms. Those that have used earlier versions of BibleReader on more than one platform (BlackBerry excluded) have probably noticed that the same pdb files work on the different platforms we support and that the display appears exactly the same. The main screen of the BibleReader is identicle on Palm, Pocket PC, Smartphone, and Symbian; therefore, when we add a feature to the main screen on one platform, it works on all of the other platforms. We wanted to do the same thing with the verse chooser.

One feature we have added is the ability to use the 5-way navigation button to select a verse. This is great for those who don’t like using their stylus and especially good for those whose devices don’t have a stylus. I personally find using the stylus to be distracting when I am in church, but now I can simply use the 5-way navigation button to change verses.

Another objective was to make the verse chooser give a better representation of what verses are actually referenced in a book. Although this feature is presently supported with new databases only, the verse chooser will now show you just the verses that are in the book and nothing else. The verse chooser also now shows introductions, prefaces, outlines, and the like. Formerly, verse 1 of chapter 1 would take you to the introduction for a Bible book, assuming an introduction was present. Now you can see in the verse chooser whether an introduction is present, and you can choose either to read it or to go directly to the verses.

Yet another feature we added was table of contents navigation. This feature works by letting you “browse” through a book’s table of contents to find where you want to go. This is great for non-versified works like Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology. We have even used this feature on a number of versified works. The Bible Knowledge Commentary has a very rich outline structure too. So we put this structure into the table of contents navigation. On versified material you can switch back and forth between verse mode and table of contents mode (or TOC). Having both modes gives you more flexibility for locating a passage of interest to you. (Once again these new features are only supported on newer databases.)

Finally one of the biggest advantages of the new verse chooser is that it is cross platform (except BlackBerry). This lets us add new features to all of our platforms much more easily. Right now this verse chooser is in the Palm and Pocket PC release BibleReaders and the Smartphone beta reader. We are currently working on “hooking it up” in the Symbian BibleReaders. This means that Smartphone users can now use works like Grudem’s Systematic Theology, the New Scofield Bible Study Notes, the Ryrie Study Bible Notes, and the Bible Knowledge Commentary. With minimal work we were able to get this rich verse chooser working on Smartphone. I hope you will enjoy the many benefits of this new verse chooser as you use it for reading and studying your Bibles and other tools.