The weblog of Olive Tree Bible Software
BibleReader Tips
Here’s how to get the most out of the BibleReader software by learning about its powerful features and how they can work for you.
Watch Olive Tree on YouTube, learn BibleReader’s newest features
Dec 8th
We’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!
Bible Software Shootout Presentation
Nov 24th
Olive 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
Nov 19th
New 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!
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).
Update to Windows Mobile Soft Keys
Oct 26th
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
New Features for One Handed Navigation
Oct 4th
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
Reading Electronic Books Made Easier
Jul 5th
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
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
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
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.
