Tuesday, September 30, 2008

The Ultimate Bible Tool

This past weekend I was down in Corbin, KY doing some house searching and had a conversation with a Dallas Theological Seminary (DTS) grad who noticed the Accordance Bible program on my computer.

He said that anecdotally that the majority of profs at DTS use Macs because of this advanced scholarly Bible tool. In describing it to someone else, he didn't say it was the Bible program for Macs, he said it was the Bible program period. 

And it's fast.

He then proceeded to show me a couple of the searches that you can do that I never would have imagined. I'm not an academic theologian and besides my 6 credits in classical Greek over 20 years ago, this was still all Greek to me. But it gave me a window into the power of the tool and how a serious student can use some of the language tools.

And did I say it was fast?

The introductory package along with a couple of purchased Bible versions will suit the average student and the additional tools will scale up to the most advanced theologian. With so many modules and packages, you get what you pay for and you only pay for what you need.

With version 8, it's now a Universal program which means it's optimized for new Macs that use the Intel processor as well as older Macs.

There are several other Bible programs for the Mac. I used to use Online Bible back in the old days running my black and white Mac Classic. There is a new version for the Mac and it's cost effective but I haven't tried it since the early beta. Logos is in beta for their Mac version but there isn't any support. There are even free tools and a whole bunch of online tools that work great too.

Check out these links below to some popular and some obscure Bible on Mac programs.

www.accordancebible.com
www.logos.com/mac
www.macsword.com
www.online-bible.com/maconlinebible.html
www.quickverse.com


Saturday, September 6, 2008

Allowing Mac Change

Having worked with several Bible camps over the years, I've noticed in years past that they are moving from being a PC based ministry to Mac based. One big reason for this is that more and more of the youth volunteers are Mac users themselves. This doesn't mean that PC's are kicked to the curb but it does mean that for many ministries, you will have to learn how to operate in a dual environment. 

Being draconian in only allowing one platform or sticking resolutely to the same software that you purchased five years ago that hasn't kept with the times will discourage rather than encourage younger volunteers. Or, if you have focused on the PC side, you will likely limit the artistically minded who can really add to your visual or aural dimension as they tend to be Mac users. Budget limitations and your ministry demographic notwithstanding.

One Bible camp purchased several PC based systems to develop DVD's for the campers several years ago. Fast forward this past summer and most of the editing were done on Macs that volunteers brought to camp while the PC's sat gathering dust. Now anytime you work with huge video files, you're going to have a program crash on you. With the PC's, the crashes would sometimes require a complete system rebuild as the hard drive became corrupt beyond repair. With the Macs, a simple restart of the the program usually was all that was required, although in a couple of cases, some re-editing had to be redone.

Now I understand that the director wants to move this part of the ministry to Macs next year as soon as donations or budget allows. The still useful PC's will be repurposed in a different role.

Instead of swimming upstream, you might want to ride the tide of growing Mac usage.