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

My app

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.

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.

There are four parts to setting this up, all of them relatively easy.

1. Script file and other associated bits

Download the script .zip archive, and we’ll start getting this sorted.

The folder that you’ve just extracted can go anywhere you like. On my system I’ve got a folder for ‘Bible Stuff’, and it sits there. In the examples below I’ll assume it’s on your Desktop.

There are 3 important files in this folder:

• DailyReading – this is the application that does the work – it’s actually an AppleScript saved as an application.
• DailyReadingPassages.txt – the ‘database’ of days of the year and the corresponding readings for that day.
• DailyReadingWorkspace – a workspace from Accordance, set up for reading just how you like it (see step 2).

2. Accordance

Obviously you’re going to need Accordance. I have version 8, and most things should work fine in earlier versions, although I haven’t tested it. I’m sure it would be possible to modify this to work with other Bible apps (such as MacSword), and you’re free to do so, but I don’t use them and so haven’t worked out how.

What you need to do is to set up a workspace that you’re comfortable with for your daily reading. If you’re using the same plan as me, that’s about 4 chapters a day, give or take.

This is what my setup is like (included in the .zip file):

I’ve got the Hebrew Old Testament (BHS-W4) text, the Holman Christian Standard Bible, and the Greek New Testament (GNT-T) in parallel columns. This works for me, your mileage may vary.

Save this workspace. It’s easiest if you save this with the other files (see step 1), but that’s not mandatory. The script file assumes it will be called DailyReadingWorkspace in the same directory, but you can change that in the next step.

3. Edit the Script File

Open the script file in Script Editor (you’ll find it in Applications–>AppleScript).

There are two changes you need to make here to ensure things work on your system.

1. Change the path to the DailyReadingPassages.txt file. Locate the line that looks like this:
set textFileRef to "~/Desktop/DailyReading/DailyReadingPassages.txt"


   and change the path in quotes to what corresponds to where you put the folder in step 1.

   (Note that the ~ sign means your home directory).

2. Make a corresponding change to the DailyReadingWorkspace path on the line that looks like this:
set accFileRef to "~/Desktop/DailyReading/DailyReadingWorkspace"


Save the script file, and exit Script Editor.

4. Set up a recurring event in iCal

Final step. Hope you’re still with me.

In iCal, set up a recurring event at a time of your choosing. I’ll choose 6am.

The trick with this bit is to set the alarm to “Open file”, and choose the DailyReading application.

Clicking “Read” will continue the script, and open up Accordance for you. “Cancel”, surprisingly enough, will cancel.

Any problems, ask away in the comments. It’s fine for my system, but there may be quirks for yours.

Enjoy.

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!).

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.

When you press ‘OK’ this modal window pops straight back up again, often needing a Force-Quit to get out of the Preferences.^[1]

There is a way to change this (thanks to Mike Allen). Go to the Security panel, and select the ‘Require password to unlock secure system preference’ checkbox:

Voila.

Problem solved.

I’m getting more frustrated with Accordance by the day. Not with maps – with the core stuff.

Perhaps some competition will help things along.

Sort of like watching Titanic.

Two articles from the Herald grabbed my attention for this reason over the weekend. One was a tech article, on the opening of the new Apple store in Sydney. The straw men, in this case, are the ‘mac faithful’:

For the cult who worship the Mac, the company co-founder and chief executive Steve Jobs has become the high priest and the Apple Store his temple. It is a place to go to worship and give thanks for having an alternative to Microsoft, PCs and Windows.

Hmm. That’s right. Mac users are zealots, sort of, you know… different… to normal people.

The other was an astounding juxtaposition of ideas, in a short piece on the Anglican church:

Archbishop Jensen is one of the leaders of 1000 conservative churchmen from 17 Anglican provinces who will gather at the Jerusalem Global Anglican Futures Conference this month. Mainly from Africa, the Middle East and Asia, they are united on one principal issue: hostility to homosexuality.

But Archbishop Jensen argues: “This dispute is not really about homosexuality. It’s really about authority and who runs the church. And fairly clearly, to most of the rest of us, God runs the church through the Bible.”

(h/t David Ould)

Not a great example of listening skills, it seems.

Fascinating.

To be frank, I’m not that impressed with the feature list. The big one is that it’s now a universal binary, which means that on newer Intel-based macs (read: any mac that has been available in the last 2 years or so) it should run with fewer system resources. That’s good, but I’ve never really noticed it being particularly power-hungry anyway, so it’s one of those features that I probably won’t notice much.

More advanced search features sound cool, but I’m yet to be convinced of their utility. Horizontal panes of bible texts – meh.

And the final thing they’re trumpeting is Unicode import. This means you can type/paste unicode characters into the search field and it will actually work, as opposed to now where it simply doesn’t recognise the characters. Presumably you can still export to unicode, but there is no mention of upgraded fonts, so my frustrations continue. The beautiful fonts used to render Greek and Hebrew within Accordance remain accessible only to those who own Accordance. In order to share work effectively, you need to use a sub-standard font, which is really annoying.

I’m amazed that unicode is still not used internally. I’ve done some coding on mac, and it’s really not that difficult to support as far as the programming tools go. Font creation and modification is not impossible either. There must be an awful lot of legacy code that they’re unwilling to change, and very few programmers, over at Accordance HQ. At some point they’re going to have to strip it back and rework it properly, and the longer they wait, the bigger the job will be.

My conclusion? I’m nowhere near impressed enough to shell out for an upgrade. Feel free to convince me otherwise.