This is not an announcement of the first ever Accordance Users’ Conference held September 24-25, 2010, but rather a summary of what went on. If you want to know, here is an official comment from David Lang, as well as good summaries and observations by Rick Mansfield, Mary Hinkle-Shore and Kerry Magruder.

A new Bible software website has been launched. BibSoft is a promising project run by Sean Reed, a student at the Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary at Andrews University. The first review to be published is on Accordance 9 (PDF file – 7MB  - LINK UNAVAILABLE). I wish him the best of luck in his endeavors.

LaRosa Johnson, lead book developer for WORDSearch Bible Software, is posting a series of videos on Advanced Bible Study with WORDSearch 9. The first two installments are already available.

James M. Tucker, of Biblical Exegesis & Interpretation is producing some videos on Syntax searches in Accordance and Logos. You may want to check out his YouTube channel, or watch his Syntax comparison on vimeo.

Have you ever wondered how a BibleWorks training seminar looked like? Watch this presentation by Jim Barr.

This popular freeware Bible software has been updated to version 9.7.2. According to the official Update Changes list, the main enhancements are as follows:

The editors have been broken out into their own view and are no longer located in the Commentary view. Also, a new Journal Notes editor has been added to the Editor view to join the Study Notes and Topic Notes!

You can now Search the Bibles and other modules using Regular Expressions (REGEX). While a bit complicated for typical use, this functionality adds powerful searching capabilities when that might be needed.

Inline notes and cross-references are now possible in Bible modules.

This is a widely used application, but in my opinion it is lagging behind other freeware Bible programs.

A new version of this excellent piece of Bible software has been recently released. theWord 3.2 includes a number of new features (see change-log), but the most exciting one, from the point of view of the UI, is the Welcome Screen that allows users to build their own layout and tweak some basic preferences by following a few very simple steps.

Anyone looking for a good free Bible app for Windows should consider getting this program. I am sold to it!