Lee Eclov writes a short side-by-side review of five Windows Bible software programs (i.e, PC Study Bible Version 5: Professional Reference Library, BibleWorks 7, Logos Bible Software 3: Scholar’s Library: Gold, Quickverse 2008: Platinum Edition and The Teacher’s and Pastor’s Library 6.0 for Windows — Pradis). Take a look!

Mark Vitalis Hoffman has posted the first installment of a Review of Accordance 8 on a PC. He has not covered Accordance as such yet (except for some preliminary installation issues), but he makes some comments on the installation and setup of the emulator Basilisk II.

There is one very important point I feel I should make up front. I have always thought that running Accordance under emulation is always better than not running it at all, but if is unfair to Accordance for the simple reason that the emulator is far from perfect.

Mac users can choose between different commercial and freeware emulators that allow them to run the latest versions of Windows or Linux at basically native speed. The user experience is the same, and applications can be used just as they would on a PC box. Unfortunately, this is not the case with Mac emulators on the Windows side. Basilisk II is probably the best emulator available, but it pales in comparison with running a real Mac computer. To put things into perspective, running Accordance 8 under emulation would be roughly equivalent to trying to run Logos or BibleWorks under Windows 3.1. In other words, you can run Logos or BibleWorks on a Mac as your production machine and you won’t be missing anything. But when you run Accordance on a PC you are missing out. It is not Accordance’s fault, it’s the emulator’s, and that’s why I said at the beginning that is wasn’t really fair.

By all means, do try Accordance on a PC under emulation if you want to, but keep in mind that Basilisk II has a number of limitations, and it does not run Mac OS X. The documentation provided by OakTree software is very clear and thorough, but it is often the case (as Mark tells us) that you need to reinstall the emulator in order to get it just about right. This requires some effort and patience, and by the time you reach that point you may feel a bit frustrated (again, nothing to do with Accordance). That’s why I always recommend running the program on a real Mac.

I look forward to what Mark has to say about Accordance, but sadly (for PC-only users, that is) what he has already experienced with the emulator shows that Windows and Linux virtualization on a MacIntel is light-years away from Mac virtualization on a PC. So please keep that in mind.

Though still in beta, Bible.Logos.com is a promising Web 2.0 type of application that has now been opened to the public. You may think of this new online Bible site as a quick way to search the Bible instead of having to run your desktop application, or as a helpful resource when you’re away from your computer. It is expected that WBSA (“What the Bible Says About”), RefTagger and Bible.logos.com will integrate seamlessly in the near future. Check it out!

Andy Naselli blogs about a very recent book entitled The New Media Frontier: Blogging, Vlogging, and Podcasting for Christ. After a short summary, he reproduces some quotations from the book which I have found rather interesting. There are some thought-provoking issues that are worthy of further consideration.

1. Is the new media creating a new kind of reader/listener? Will people eventually never get beyond the headlines, a couple of paragraphs and a few catchy phrases?

2. Are we becoming chronological snobs? Will we end up considering that anything written one month or one week ago is old and irrelevant?

3. Do we have so much information at our disposal that we are unable to process it or to discern the good from the bad?

4. Since publishing content, in the broad sense of the term, has become so easy, is peer-review no longer possible? Are the democratization of knowledge and academic excellence two mutually exclusive things?

5. Will printed books eventually die, as some say? Is the digital media going to replace the printed media anytime soon?

I know these are all questions I have asked myself lately, and I wonder what others think about them. I must say I haven’t read the book Andy reviews, but some of these questions (and their answers!) have a direct bearing on the role of bloggers and of Bible software. I suppose the key question is whether these tools are actually allowing us to see both the forest and the trees rather than making us misplace our focus and lose sight of the heart of the matter.

I know I need to think a lot more about it, but this is just a brainstorming exercise to jumpstart some discussion along these lines. I have to admit that the new media has changed to a certain extend my own reading and study habits. It remains to be seen if all of those changes are for the better…

Olive Tree‘s BibleReader for the iPhone and iPod Touch has been reviewed at the Touch Rundown blog (via OliveTreeBible). It’s great to have Olive Tree on Twitter, BTW!