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Few Christian writers, from the present or the past, have affected my life and the lives of other Christians I know as much as Andrew Murray (1828-1917). His books are the kind you come back to again and again, savoring every line, reading slowly and prayerfully, drawing near to the Christ he knew and loved and expressed so well. It’s hard to read very far without stopping to pray, for the Spirit of prayer seems to be the very atmosphere of Andrew Murray’s books; moreover, the author speaks so directly to you, the reader, that it’s sometimes hard to believe you don’t know him; of course, in the Spirit, as a fellow member of Christ’s body, you do.

Andrew Murray grew up in South Africa nearly two centuries ago, both his father and grandfather being Scottish missionaries to that vast, untamed land. After attending school in Aberdeen, Scotland, and receiving theological training in the Netherlands, Andrew returned to South Africa as an ordained minister of the Dutch Reformed Church. This author almost never refers to himself in his books, so it’s surprising to read a biography of Murray and to find out about the trials he endured and the burdens he bore. Once, as a young pastor, serving remote farmers in the wide-open landscape, he was surrounded by wolves. After his horse threw him and ran away, Murray walked by faith the rest of the way to his parishioners’ farmhouse, many miles it was, wolves snapping at him all the while but never touching him. Though a man of much practical experience, it seems that Murray focuses every book on one thing only: the indwelling Christ.

Olive Tree Bible Software is privileged to be able to publish in electronic format several of this beloved writer’s books (which number some 240), a few of which I’ll describe briefly. In The New Life: Words of God for Young Disciples of Christ Murray addresses new believers concerning the wonderful life they have received, his clear intention being to establish firmly their faith in Christ and to encourage them on the path of life and fruitfulness in Him. In With Christ in the School of Prayer, the author presents thirty-one lessons on prayer, one for every day of the month, echoing the disciples’ plea, “Lord, teach us to pray.” Reading this book, one is infused with faith that God wants to answer our prayers even more than we want them answered; in fact, He put the desire within us to begin with. In The Deeper Christian Life, Murray relates that the first and chief need of our Christian life is fellowship with God. Indeed, this theme, and the blessedness of abiding moment by moment in Christ, in absolute surrender, trusting Him to accomplish all that He has promised to do in us and through us, is the essential message of Andrew Murray’s fervent ministry to the body of Christ.

“I have learnt,” he says, “to place myself before God every day, as a vessel to be filled with His Holy Sprit. He has filled me with the blessed assurance that He, as the everlasting God, has guaranteed His work in me. If there is one lesson that I am learning day by day, it is this; that it is God who worketh all in all. Oh, that I could help any brother or sister to realize this!”

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

This January Olive Tree will be giving two talks at BibleTech 2008. According to the BibleTech website, BibleTech is a conference that explores the intersection of Bible study and technology. This two-day conference is designed for publishers, programmers, webmasters, educators, bloggers and anyone interested in using technology to improve Bible study. BibleTech 2008 is an opportunity to meet others who share your interests and hear from industry leaders.

Drew Haninger (President, CEO, of Olive Tree) will be talking about “Electronic Publishing and Bible Software in a Fast-Moving Mobile Landscape.” I will be talking about “The Challenges and Future of Bible Software in a Mobile World”.

There will be a number of other very interesting talks given at BibleTech 2008. If you are passionate about the intersection of Bible study and technology I would recommend attechend BibleTech 2008 in Seattle, WA on January 25th and 26th.

Stephen

Recently Olive Tree Bible Software surpassed a significant milestone. We now offer over 100 Bible translations! Olive Tree strives to provide you with resources for you to grow in your Christian walk, and we know Bible translations are a fundamental part of that effort. We will continue to provide you with Bible translations in English and other languages. When we have fully supported Unicode format (currently in beta), we will be able to offer Bible translations in many of the world’s languages, in addition to the non-English translations we already offer.

We have just added several Bible translations that pushed us past the 100 milestone, including William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament and parts of the Old Testament, a Tagalog (Phillipines) translation, and a Swahili New Testament. Of course, we have had for many years the New American Standard Bible (NASB), the New International Version (NIV), the King James Version (KJV), the English Standard Version (ESV) and other English Bible translations. We also offer numerous non-English translations of the Bible as well as an extensive set of Greek and Hebrew language Bible materials.

The 100 milestone also applies to our free resources. We have over 100 free resources, and roughly a third of those are free Bibles. And we have more on the way! We often post New Releases every week and you can look for more free resources and free Bibles in the future.

Olive Tree is a growing company with a great future. We seek to provide you with the best resources and the most useful BibleReader possible. No small part of that is the free resources and free BibleReader we provide to our customers. May they be a blessing to you in your walk with the Lord.

We are currently looking for a Java Programmer that could help us develop the BibleReader for Java platforms. The number of BlackBerrys and J2ME enabled phones is rapidly growing. Olive Tree strives to support as many popular mobile platforms as possible. To provide customers with the best experience on BlackBerrys and J2ME enabled phones we need another programmer who can take charge of the Java BibleReader.

The job posting follows.

Software Developer – I (Java/J2ME/C++ Programmer)

• Olive Tree Bible Software is looking for a part/full time engineer in Java J2ME.
• We have several Java BibleReader platforms and need to do more development.

Ideal Requirements: 3-5 years professional experience with Java, J2ME, and C++.

• Experience as part of a multi-person software development team.
• Experience in developing applications for the BlackBerry or J2ME cell phones.
• Locations: Greater Northwest (states of Washington, Idaho, Oregon)
• Most work will be done from home.
• Self motivated and productive when not constantly supervised.

Additional Useful Experience: (not required)

• Linux C++ programming, PHP, and MySql database.
• Experience in Biblical material or Bible Software.
• Experience in Biblical Greek and Hebrew.
• Experience in the field of information retrieval.

To apply for this position, please email your resume to drew@olivetree.com with the subject line: Resume

Many of you may have seen the post a few weeks ago about Hebrew and Aramaic developments on the Pocket PC. I am happy to let you know that we have been working on these features on Palm as well Unfortunately, the Palm OS is still in the dark ages when it comes to font support. To make Hebrew look the best we needed to support Unicode and take advantage of technologies that have been developed for rendering complex scripts. Since Palm does not support this we had to create our own Unicode solution for Palm.

You may be wondering just what is Unicode and why is it important. Unicode is a character encoding that is used to represent characters in most of the world’s scripts. So by supporting Unicode on Palm we now have a way to render text from most languages! See the screen shot below for an example (we have not applied any cursive joining rules on this screen shot).

The first book we are working on with Unicode support is the HMT. Here is a screen shot of the beta version of HMT with Unicode support. The display and rendering of the Hebrew is much improved with this new Unicode HMT.

On Tuesday, us O.T. engineers left for Mount Spokane for an “Engineering Meeting.”  We spent hours (well, at least 2 hours) working our way toward the top of Day-Mount Spokane!  Of course, on the way up we talked about Olive Tree (for at least part of the time ).  Finally, we reached the peak….

Top Picture from left to right:

Stephen Johnson (my bro): Senior software engineer : always making the Bible reader the best it can be
Chris Early: Intern programmer 1 : Doing LOTS of programming with conversion projects!!!
Paul Johnson (me): Intern programmer 2 : Created material for the iPod, and tutorial videos
Tim Rosinbum: Regular expression guru (a.k.a. conversion project master): Converted almost 100 items!
Drew Haninger: owner and CEO : Does everything!

Engineers that couldn’t make it due to different geographic locations:

Kathy Stevens: AMAZING conversion programmer : Oxford material and other great resources
Drayton Benner: Programmer/Hebrew scholar : Did unicode Hebrew HMT and font support

This is only the list of engineers.  There are many others who do LOTS for O.T.!!!

“But you, beloved, building yourselves up on your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in the love of God, looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life.” –Jude 20-21

How vulnerable we may find ourselves in the matter of trusting God’s love toward us! Some small thing happens that threatens our security, and a host of anxious, gloomy, fearful, and even blaming thoughts rush in like air into a vacuum. If we are this way in small things, how much greater is the tendency to lose our grip on God when big things happen (although, praise the Lord, He never loses His grip on us)!

To keep ourselves in the love of God, to simply believe what God has said concerning His intention toward us, sounds easy enough, but we may discover that it is the fight of our life, what Paul calls “the good fight of the faith” (1 Timothy 6:12). As Jude indicates in the verse above, we keep ourselves in God’s love by praying in the Holy Spirit and building ourselves (and one another) up in our faith, something which he calls “most holy.” How do we “build ourselves up in such a faith”? Romans 10:17 says, “Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ.” Concerning our Lord’s absolute faithfulness, the Bible has much to say: “I will never leave you nor forsake you (Heb. 13:5)” and “He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not also with Him freely give us all things?” (Romans 8:32). As we stay calm in adversity and saturate ourselves with facts like these, then “faith comes,” and when faith comes, all is well, whether or not our circumstances change.

Sometimes dark thoughts and morose feelings want to occupy our mind and fill our emotions. “You’ll never make it. You’ve failed too many times. There’s no hope for you.” Then come the temptations to try to solve a problem on our own. “You’d better do something about this right away. Change yourself, or else!” But while reading, as currently I am, a devotional by C. H. Spurgeon and a little book by Martin Luther, I keep hearing about the fundamental need of faith in God’s unconditional love, no matter what happens in us, to us, or around us.

When our insides are raw and our mind is reeling, the confidence in God exuded by those who have gone before us is of great value, and very needful, like ointment to an open wound. Consider Amy Carmichael’s entry for August 12 in her devotional The Edges of His Ways. Like so many who learned the secret of trusting God for everything, she derives comfort from the most unlikely places and sees God’s grace everywhere. (Surely, this is what God desires for each of us.) Her text is Romans 10:21 in the Rotherham translation, which says, “All day long have I stretched forth My hands unto a people unyielding and contradicting.” Reading this, one may think, “How can I find any solace in a verse like this?”

Notice, however, that Amy’s focus is not on the unyielding ones, but on the God who stretches forth His hands. She writes, “Today this verse which has often helped me came in my reading. When I have been near the end of my patience with some unyielding child, or some ‘contradicting’ disposition, these words have come to me. He who gave us our work to do knows all about it, and has been through the sense of baffled love. He is with us now, and all the day long His hands are stretched forth. His love never faileth. Lord, evermore give us this love.”

How comforting such words are, written by someone who kept herself in the love of God! Thank You, Lord, for all day long stretching forth Your hands to unyielding and contradicting people. By Your grace may we always, in every situation, believe in and yield to this unconditional love.

We recently put up a new beta Smartphone BibleReader. This is one of the most exciting betas we have ever posted for any platform! The list of cool new features added to the Smartphone BibleReader is simply amazing.

For starters we added support for selecting hyperlinks on Smartphone using the 5-way arrow button. This opens a lot of new resources on Smartphone that were not usable before. With hyperlink support you can use the KJV and NASB strongs Bibles and see the Strong’s definition for each word in the Bible. You can also use the Complete Word Study Bible, Treasury of Scripture Knowledge, and many other Bibles and Bible study tools from Olive Tree.

We also added support for Greek and Hebrew. You can now use Gramcord, HMT, and any other resource that has Greek and Hebrew in it on your Smartphone.

As if that wasn’t enough, we also added support for dictionaries. So now you can use Easton’s Bible Dictionary, Unger’s Bible Dictionary, EDNT, TWOT, and all the other Olive Tree dictionaries on Smartphone.

We didn’t stop there. We then went on to change the shortcut options to support more keys, reorganize the menu, add more options, add support for displaying images in Olive Tree resources, and add support for MacArthur New Testament Commentary.

Since this version of the Smartphone BibleReader is still in beta not all of the products that work on it will be visible on Olive Tree’s web site when you have selected Smartphone as your device. If you want to see the complete list of products that work with this new Smartphone beta BibleReader change your device to Windows Mobile Pocket PC on the Olive Tree web site. All of the products, with the exception of Bible Atlas, multimedia in iLumina, Chinese, Arabic, and The Message audio will work with this Smartphone beta BibleReader.

You can download the Smartphone beta BibleReader here.

Enjoy!

Stephen

Exciting changes are happening here at Olive Tree Bible Software with regard to the handling and display of Hebrew and Aramaic text! A variety of new technologies related to the representation and rendering of complex scripts have been developed over the past few years, and we are looking to take advantage of them as much as possible. These changes will allow us to give a clearer presentation of Hebrew and Aramaic characters. We are moving to Unicode, beginning with the mobile devices that support it, namely Pocket PCs. We are making this switch first for our Hebrew Masoretic Text Old Testament, and we envision switching to Unicode soon for our Hebrew Masoretic Text with Parsing and BDB Dictionary as well. Unicode allows for a more consistent and font-independent representation of Hebrew and Aramaic texts than has been possible in the past, and its adoption is spreading across platforms and applications. Switching to Unicode now will allow us to take advantage of its implementation on the Pocket PC and position us well for the coming day in which more handheld devices will support Unicode. This switch to Unicode allows for better Hebrew and Aramaic font rendering. Now the consonants, vowels, dageshes, cantillation marks (accents), and other Masoretic symbols can all be shown. Moreover, recent developments in font technologies allow the vowels, cantillation marks, and other symbols to be placed appropriately around the consonants in order to promote maximum readability. The results can be quite stunning.

There are currently a variety of obstacles at the level of operating system support for the use of the most advanced Hebrew fonts on handheld devices, but we at Olive Tree are dreaming big. We have set our sights high, dreaming of a presentation that will provide you with an electronic version of the Masoretic text with all of the information in the main body of Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (BHS) as well as kethib/qere information. Not only will the standard consonants, vowels, dageshes, and cantillation marks be present, but so will be other symbols like maqqephs, soph pasuqs, paseqs, raphes (when BHS prints them), pethuhas, and sethumas. Moreover, we are seeking to make the display aesthetically pleasing and geared toward maximum readability. We are hoping that it can equal the quality we achieved with this screenshot, which begins at Genesis 1:1:

A beta version of the Hebrew Masoretic Text Old Testament for Pocket PC will soon be available from our website for trial. We will look forward to your feedback. If you know Hebrew and/or Aramaic and would like to be notified when the beta appears, let us know at beta02@olivetree.com.

For those of you who are biblical scholars or others educated in Hebrew and/or Aramaic, this is a major step forward in your being able to gain all the information you need about the Hebrew and Aramaic text on your mobile device wherever you are. For those of you who leave intense language study to others but still want to compare your Bible translations to the Hebrew or Aramaic original to gain a better understanding of a particular word or verse, this will make your decipherment of the original Hebrew or Aramaic an easier and more enjoyable experience.

Those of you who read this blog regularly may not recognize my name. I am a new addition to the Olive Tree team, specializing in those areas of Olive Tree’s software that deal with Hebrew and Aramaic. After studying computer science and mathematics at the University of Virginia and working in software development for a few years, I shifted my primary attention to the Old Testament. I picked up a Master’s degree in Old Testament at Regent College in Vancouver, BC, Canada, and I am currently working on a PhD at the University of Chicago in Northwest Semitic Philology in the Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations Department, the department to which the Oriental Institute is attached. (Hebrew and Aramaic are Northwest Semitic languages.) I am excited about improving the quality of the representation and rendering of the Hebrew and Aramaic text of the Old Testament as well as advancing searching capabilities. I am also excited about bringing additional ancient texts to your handheld device as well; look out for a release of a module containing non-biblical texts from Qumran later this summer or fall! Let us know (beta02@olivetree.com) if you would like to be notified when these texts, which are important both for the study of the Old Testament and the New Testament, become available.