Thursday 10 January 2008

Apple Newton and Bible Study


I use the Message (a bible study program) on the Newton. The Message is a relatively rudimentary Bible Software program written for the Newton OS. It has only been partially completed. Presumably development halted when Apple announced that it was withdrawing the Newton as a product.

The Message does allow some gestures for navigating around the book. A broad downward stroke over the touchscreen executes a "page down" and an upward stroke provides a "page up". A left-to-right stroke navigates to the next chapter and the opposite stroke presents the previous chapter.

The Newton's pen-based copy and paste functionality is also supported with highlighted text that has been dragged to the clipboard being tagged with the bible reference.

It supports simple biblical text searches, shows a lengthy list of recently reviewed passages but doesn't allow one to attach a note to a verse or passage. It is evident that Saved Searches Bookmarks were intended because they can be seen as menu choices but they have not been implemented. More sophisticated Boolean searches are not possible.

I have the NIV, RSV and KJV bibles; but no other resources such as commentaries, dictionaries.

Consequently in order to fill in the blanks, I augment the Message with commentaries from material that I have purchased through Logos by creating Newton Books. These books can then be easily searched with Assist.

This works well but sometimes the books can get quite big.

So to keep the file sizes down I might take only a selected portion of the Commentary. For example, in order to use the Nelson NKJV Study Bible Commentary I might just take the Introductions to each book of the bible. This is very useful for reviewing the historical context of the text and the Commentators' summary of what they consider to be the key themes of each biblical book.

Theoretically I should be able to get a mountain of material into a format that can be accessed on a Newton.

No comments: