We’re in business.

$1.19 at your local Apple app store. (Cheap at twice the price, etc., etc.)

My app is now waiting for review in the app store. Hopefully for not too long.

And I’m waiting for my GST registration so I’m allowed to sell it in Australia (interestingly, this is Apple’s rule, not the ATO’s).

The waiting game begins.

Especially after a system upgrade. A screen shot:

Just the other day Stan pointed out, quite rightly, that reading the Bible can easily take second place to reading other things, like blogs and news feeds.

One solution that may be a good one is to subscribe to the news feed of the Bible Gateway’s Daily Reading plans – that way, while you’re reading all the other stuff each morning, you’ve got a chapter or three of the Bible to read as well. There’s a few different plans to choose from (although for my money it looks like the Old/New Testament plan is the best option).

I tried this for a sum total of two days before my frustrations with it got the better of me.

First, my news reader isn’t a great place to read the Bible. The font isn’t quite right, and all my instincts born of skimming scores of news posts each morning militates against attentive reading. Second, the feed (I assume) is made with the US in mind, so it arrives here at 3pm. That means it’s not fresh each morning. Third, I have good bible software on my machine already.

These aren’t huge problems. But it’s not quite right, and I’m a stickler for getting things working nicely (just in case you hadn’t noticed).

So, I came up with another solution. I’ve got an alarm that goes off in iCal at 6am each morning (that is, before I open my machine, so it actually triggers as soon as I log in). This alarm runs a little app I wrote which works out the passage(s) for the day, and brings them up in Accordance, laid out with the Hebrew and Greek beside the English for good measure, so I can see what’s going on more deeply if I want to. So far, it’s working well.

If you’d like to grab this script and set it up for your machine, keep reading for details.

This post is in response to a couple of people asking me how to set up Unicode input on a Mac. If it’s more broadly useful, excellent.

If you’re someone who uses languages with character sets other than Roman (i.e. what this post is written with) with any frequency, then you need to do this. Stop stuffing around with fonts that pretend to show other languages, start writing properly with the right characters.

If you need more convincing, or if you want a brief overview of what the heck Unicode is and why it matters, Joe Weaks has an excellent overview aimed at those who work with the original Biblical languages.

Note: The following instructions are for the Mac. If you use Windows, then you’ll have to look further afield (actually, just in the Control Panel/Language settings).

Step 1:

Go get the Tyndale House Font Kit for Mac. It includes a couple of keyboard maps plus the Cardo Font, which is pretty good (not perfect, but useful nonetheless).

Step 2:

Unzip it.
Drag the Hebrew keyboard layout to Library/Keyboard Layouts.
You don’t need the Greek layout.

Step 3:

Open up System Preferences, select ‘International’, then ‘Input Menu’.

Find the Greek Polytonic Layout, and the HebrewTH layout you just installed. Select them.

Also check the ‘show input menu in menu bar’. This will put a flag up in the menu bar. You can click this flag to select your input source:

I prefer a keyboard shortcut to cycle through these. I’ve set it to be option-space (since I have cmd-space as spotlight, and ctrl-space for quicksilver). Repeatedly hitting this shortcut toggles back and forth between the previously selected keyboard and the current one. Hitting option-shift-space cycles through the list.

This is what my preference window looks like (it might only group the selected layouts together when you open it up next):

Note the Greek Polytonic and HebrewTH keyboard layouts selected along with the Australian one.

How do I use it?

When you’re typing, hit alt-space, ανδ υοθ γετ Γρεεκ ψηαραψτερς. Hit it again, and back to Latin characters. Hit alt-shift-space, and you get Hebrew: חוסת ליכע תהיס. It works pretty well.

Cardo is a nice font that covers the full set of Hebrew and Greek characters, along with the Latin characters. It’s Latin stuff is pretty awful though, so if you want a font that covers everything without needing to toggle between languages, stick to either Times or Helvetica.

Hebrew Vowel and Accent points

The HebrewTH layout, whilst being quite sensibly laid out and easy to use, fails to cover certain oft-used marks, such as composite vowels. To get to these, open up the Character Palette, which is one of the options in the menu when you click on that flag in the menu bar.

If you navigate to the Hebrew section, you’ll be able to insert all manner of accents, vowels, and cantillation marks. Below is an example, with the best approximation to the ‘accent’ marker used by many Hebrew grammars, the ‘ole’ cantillation point:

Voila (Olé!).

Not beer. Software.

Head on over to Code Weavers and take advantage of a free software offer. It’s due to some slightly cheaper petrol prices in the US – which doesn’t concern me at all, but that’s ok – and to celebrate, they’re giving away their CrossOver Pro software for free.

Crossover is a way of running Windows apps and games on the Mac (or Linux), without having to run the whole operating system. If you don’t want to run VMWare, Parallels or BootCamp, or if you want another solution kicking around give it a shot.

It’s for either Mac or Linux. 1 per customer, and is for today only.