I wish a Happy and Fruitful New Year to all readers of Bible Software Review and to all the fellow bibliobloggers that make my life more enjoyable.

Peace to all!

I wish all readers of Bible Software Review a truly blessed Christmas. I will probably be “off-duty” — as far as blogging is concerned - for a few days, but hope to be back with new reviews, comments, and some nice surprises real soon.

Please let me indulge in some personal reflections for a moment.

I have many reasons to feel proud of my family. My wife and I have been blessed with three wonderful children. Each one of them is truly special, and all of them make life worth living. They make us feel a deep sense of purpose and fulfilment. So, I am definitely very enthusiastic about being a father. Being a dad is one of the most difficult, yet rewarding, jobs one can have. I highly recommend it.

Right now, I feel particularly proud because my older son (Andrés) and a friend of his (Carlos) will be releasing their first Christian album next Thursday, December 29. It is called “Abre la puerta” (Open the door). They are called 2Latidos (literally, two heartbeats), and their songs sound really great (I’m trying real hard to be objective here…) I highly recommend their CD
Feel free to check out their website and listen to a short sample. And here’s a Trivial Pursuit question for you: which one of the two do you think is my son…?

Laridian has partnered with BEIKS to offer the New International Version of the Bible to users of BlackBerry devices running Noah Bible Study Viewer, which already includes the KJV and other public domain Bibles. More info on this product, its features and system requirements can be found here.

David Instone-Brewer’s latest Tyndale Tech email (not still available online as I write this), includes a link to John Glynn’s comparative review of Bible software (Exegetical and Bible Study Computer Program). It’s an interesting review of five software packages (Accordance, BibleWorks, Gramcord, Libronix (Logos), and Pradis (Zondervan). I recommend it.

I have updated the links to Christopher V. Kimball’s electronic text of the Westminster Leningrad Codex in various blog entries. And while we are at it, I want to leave with you another interesting link to the TanakhML Project, maintained by Alain Verboomen. This includes not only the Hebrew text, but also a number of useful tools (such as a “form concordancer” and the ability to read the Hebrew and English text in parallel columns). There’s also some other pretty cool stuff that you can discover on your own.

Holger Szesnat has kindly updated his review of Bible+, which now covers version 3.20. Thanks, Holger!

Jan Van Der Watt is the author of the review of BibleWorks 6 posted on the Review of Biblical Literature website. You can download the PDF right here.

If you want to know what 2005 has been like as far as Mac Bible Software is concerned, you’d do well reading what David Lang has written over at CMUG.

I keep track of all the blogs I subscribe to via Bloglines, which I have found to be a very useful tool. My Feeds section currently runs at just over 35 blogs or so. I must say I do manage to keep up with most of the posts and threads than interest me (well, sort of), but there is one thing I can’t seem to get under control: the number of saved clippings keeps growing and growing. I originally saved them in the hopes of getting back to them and writing a follow-up post here, but I now realize that most of them are “old hat” by the time I get round to reading them again. So, what do I do with those clippings? Am I the only one in biblioblogdom who’s got this problem? I guess I’ll have to reset the counter to zero by the end of 2005…