October 01, 2012 - David Lang — I'm pleased to announce that the Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament (BECNT) is now available as an Accordance module. BECNT has long been one of our most requested commentary series, and it's no wonder. Bestcommentaries.com ranks more than half the volumes in this series among the top three commentaries on their respective books of the Bible, and most of the other volumes rank in the top ten. For more about the series and its individual volumes, see this detailed article. The BECNT is available now for $699.99.

September 28, 2012 - David Lang — Accordance has always offered two distinct ways to access any resource. You can simply open it, in which case you'll get a new window showing the beginning of that resource; or you can amplify to it. Before you can amplify to a resource, you must first select a word or verse reference you want to look up in that resource. For example, if I select a word like "Heaven" in a Bible text, and then amplify to an English Bible dictionary, that dictionary will automatically open to the first article which mentions heaven. As I said, Accordance has ...

September 19, 2012 - Darin Allen — At long last, Accordance 10 is now available on the Mac App Store! Thank you for your patience, as we know many of you have been waiting for this release. For those interested in the differences between the Mac App Store version and the version you can buy directly from our website, here they are. Mac App Store Requires Intel Macs running OSX 10.7.3 or later Updates are released through the Mac App Store Updates may be delayed due to Apple’s approval process Possibility of future iCloud support No special discounts are available ...

September 19, 2012 - David Lang — Avast, ye lubbers! Know ye what today be? Aye, today be International Talk Like a Pirate Day! In honor of this day, I challenge ye to embark on a quest fer buried treasure aboard the good ship Accordance. Tell us, if ye dare, which is the only English Bible clever enough to mention pirates by name? Judge ye it to be a true rendering? Or like most things to do with pirates, is it a bit of a stretch? If ye successfully navigated that first challenge, here's another'n for ye. Can ye find a story of pirate lore that could serve as a good ...

September 17, 2012 - Helen Brown — In all the excitement over the release of version 10, the release of some new modules went unannounced and mostly unnoticed. Included in most levels of our new Collections: Bible Themes Dictionary -- the basis of several publications, this powerful topical work explores themes of the Bible with links to the verses and to related themes. Many Thoughts of Many Minds -- a treasury of quotations from the literature of every land and every age English Revised Version -- the forerunner of many modern revisions of the Authorized Version ...

September 14, 2012 - David Lang — Yesterday I told you about the Sunday School class I'm teaching on Bible Study methods using the book of Colossians. I told you about the I See! So What? Hmm… method, and showed how I used a User Notes file as a convenient way to record the class's observations, applications, and questions about Colossians 1:3-8. The next week we went over Paul's prayer for the Colossians in 1:9-14, and this gave me a great opportunity to talk about one particular kind of observation they should make when studying a passage. You see, when we read these ...

September 13, 2012 - David Lang — For the past few weeks, I've been teaching a Sunday School class on Bible study methods using the book of Colossians. Rather than just giving a series of lectures about the Bible, I want to get people reading the Bible for themselves and learning some basic methods of interpretation. I started by laying out a bare-bones inductive method: what I call the I See! So What? Hmm… method. The I See! step refers to making simple observations about the text being studied. The So What? refers to deriving simple life applications from the text. The ...

September 10, 2012 - David Lang — I upgraded to Apple's Mountain Lion Operating System this weekend, and by far the coolest thing about it is Airplay Mirroring. I can now wirelessly mirror my laptop screen on the family TV through our Apple TV. This came in handy the other night when we had an impromptu family discussion about teenagers who think Biblical righteousness means no longer being able to have any fun. I pulled up Matthew 6:16, which talks about how hypocrites "disfigure their faces" to show the world that they're fasting, went into reading mode, mirrored it to the ...

September 07, 2012 - David Lang — In January of this year, I heard a conference speaker make an oft-repeated observation about the book of Ephesians: namely, that it is clearly divided into two parts. The speaker asserted that in the first three chapters, Paul uses verbs in the indicative mood—that is, verbs that make a statement or convey information. In the last three chapters, Paul switches to imperative verbs. Thus, he moves from theology to application, from instruction to exhortation. This inspired me to blog about how you could use Accordance's Analytics tools to see ...

September 06, 2012 - David Lang — When we first released the IVP Dictionary of the OT: Pentateuch and IVP Dictionary of the OT: Historical Books in May of this year, I blogged about how useful they are and how excited we were to be able to offer them. Since then, I've found myself turning to these dictionaries more and more in my own research, and I just wanted to offer a quick personal recommendation. As I've been writing about various aspects of Old Testament narratives—worship practices, pagan religion, daily life, etc.—I've been looking up subjects that are not ...

September 05, 2012 - David Lang — Last week, I blogged about how Accordance 10 tries to strike a balance between hiding lesser-used features that might add to a new user's learning curve, while still keeping them easy to find and easily within reach. Today I want to show how some of our efforts to simplify the interface have actually made many features more easily discoverable. One example of this is the new gear icon in the top right corner of every text pane. Click this icon, and the first item you'll see is Move Up or Move Down. This option replaces the pane orientation ...

September 02, 2012 - Helen Brown — If it ain't broke... don't fix it. But sometimes it is broke. Despite the widespread acclaim the initial release of version 10 received, we recognize that some things were broken. Most seriously, and fixed within 24 hours as 10.0.1, was the last minute bug that broke amplifying, triple-clicking, and copying of images. We took the opportunity to add searching of the Library by the new Library module names. This version was only posted as an update therefore many new users encountered the same bugs at first, our apologies. Version 10.0.2 ...

August 30, 2012 - Helen Brown — Accordance was already proud of our very own Lighting the Lamp podcast series. Most such productions involve a team of experts. However, ours is written, designed, filmed, narrated, edited, and produced by one person: Dr. Timothy Jenney! Dr. J and Lighting the Lamp are featured today on the ScreenFlow blog. ScreenFlow is the screen and voice capture software that Dr. J has used from the start. Now they are recognizing the incredible professional results that he has achieved, and giving Accordance 10 some welcome publicity at the same time....

August 28, 2012 - David Lang — Interface design requires finding the right balance between two often conflicting objectives. An interface is intuitive if it is easy for a new user to understand. This typically requires hiding advanced features and options which they are not likely to need. On the other hand, a program's usability typically depends on having those features and options right at one's fingertips. The more the advanced user has to go digging to find those options, the more difficult the program is for him or her to use. It is relatively easy to create an ...

August 24, 2012 - David Lang — Accordance has always been extremely customizable, but Accordance 10 offers new ways to adjust its look and functionality to your own personal tastes. Here are a few of the new options you should be aware of. Customize your Toolbar: The new toolbar now places a number of features and resources at your fingertips, but you can customize it by control- or right-clicking it. The contextual menu which appears lets you choose how you want the toolbar items displayed. I prefer to use the small icon size and to display both icons and text ...

August 23, 2012 - David Lang — The Accordance Construct window has been around from the very beginning. In fact, when I first saw an early prototype of Accordance way back in 1992, our lead programmer was showing how you could drag grammatical tags onto the Construct window to perform incredibly powerful searches. Accordance was the first Bible study program to offer such a graphical search interface, and it enabled students and scholars to search the original texts of the Bible without having to become experts in computer science. Back when I first saw it, the Construct ...

August 22, 2012 - David Lang — When it came time to redesign the Accordance 10 interface, we were determined that there would be no "sacred cows" we would be unwilling to sacrifice. On the other hand, we were equally determined that we would not engage in unnecessary slaughter: that is, we saw no point in change merely for the sake of change. In every design decision, we tried to simplify, declutter, and beautify, while being careful not to fix what wasn't broken or to lose Accordance's distinct advantages. One example of this can be found in the redesign of the Search ...

August 21, 2012 - David Lang — One of the new features of Accordance 10 is the ability to choose from a variety of text formatting "themes". Accordance has always offered an unparalleled level of control over the appearance of Bibles and books, but you had to tweak each option yourself and there was no way to preview the results in the Set Text Display dialog. With Accordance 10, not only can you preview the changes you make right in the dialog, but you can choose from more than a dozen predesigned "themes." So what are your favorite themes? Are you using different ...

August 20, 2012 - David Lang — All last week, I wrote a series of posts asking, "Wouldn't it be nice?" Each post looked at a specific way Accordance could be improved, and offered a carefully cropped screenshot of a version of Accordance still in development. It didn't take long for you to realize that Accordance 10 must be on its way. Neither did it take long for you to start asking, "When?" I'm delighted to inform you that Accordance 10 is available now! And yes, it sure is nice! For Accordance 10, we took a hard look at every aspect of the Accordance interface, asking ...

August 17, 2012 - David Lang — Many Accordance tools contain images of some kind, which are displayed in the tool as a clickable thumbnail. In Accordance 8, when you clicked this thumbnail you would get a new tab displaying the image at the full size of the workspace. That was nice, but if you wanted to look at a series of pictures you would have to switch back and forth between the tab containing the tool and the tab containing the picture. Sure, you could have detached the picture tab so that it appeared in a separate window, but how many of us thought to do that...?