MyBible Review

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You’ve heard the saying, “If I were stranded on a desert
island and could only have one book, I’d want it to be the Bible”. And what
about when you travel and have to carry it with you? Bibles are heavy! Well, not
any more. Thanks to Laridian Electronic
Publishing, you can carry your Bible on your PDA!

The MyBible*
software allows you to load your favorite Bible version on your Palm, or
Handspring PDA. (A WinCE version is also available, but it is completely
different. We may do a review of it in the near future). It is easy
to install and even easier to use. And there are many functions in the software
that allow you to easily navigate your favorite Bible. Currently, the only
versions available are King James Version(KJV), New American Standard Bible(NASB),
New International Version(NIV), and Revised Standard Version(RSV). More
versions are planned for the future, but these are the most widely used
translations.

When you purchase MyBible, you need to
purchase the MyBible Program in addition to
the Bible version you want. This is a good thing because if you wanted to buy
more than one version, you don’t have to pay for the program again. (The program
is $10, the Bibles range from $19.99 to $29.99). I’ll be reviewing the Palm OS
version of the KJV Bible installed on my Visor Deluxe.

The first thing that you may want to do is go to the
“Preferences” menu, so you can customize your Bible by changing the
way the verse indicators are displayed, or you can just hide them for easier
reading. You can also change the font size, put in chapter dividers, and
start every new verse with a new line.

To go to any verse in the Bible, you simply
tap the book name in the upper right corner, and a listing of all of the
books pops up. Then you tap the book that the verse is in, and use
graffiti to go directly to the chapter and verse. The graffiti part
is a little bit challenging for me because you only have 2 seconds between
numbers to get it right. For instance, for me to go to a chapter 25,
I kept telling it to go to chapter 2 then chapter 5 because I am
not too swift with graffiti. But after a while I got the hang of it
and it wasn’t too bad. Then while in the chapter, you use a period
or a colon followed by the verse number to jump to the verse. I was
never able to write the entire chapter and verse separated by a colon or
period correctly, but I could do it in stages. For instance, while in a
specific chapter, tap for a period followed by the verse number will take
you to the desired verse.

bible1

Some Bible versions are available with
footnotes. Unfortunately, there is no functionality to add your own
footnotes. It would also be nice to be able to at least underline
or bold text so that you could see it better while
scrolling through the chapters. (Next version perhaps?) But as a study
Bible, there are many advantages to using MyBible. If you
have more than one Bible translation loaded, you can easily jump between
translations to compare how verses are worded. Just use the menu pick for
the translation you want to see, and that translation will come up at the
same verse that you were previously viewing. (How cool is that?!)

bible6

One of the most useful features of MyBible
is it’s “FIND” functionality. Here’s an example…

Make an “f” in graffiti and you go to the
FIND screen. Here you have many search options. You can search
by a specific word or phrase, and you can specify the section of the
Bible you wish to search in. I was searching for the verse that says, “Jesus
said, I am the way, the truth, and the life…”
Write on the Find line, “the truth”, and
search in the entire Bible, and you get 87 hits. You can scroll
through them and find the verse that way. But you can restrict the
search to just the Gospels, and the same search gives you only 14
hits. Or enter on the Find line, “the way, the
truth” and you only get one hit.

Regardless of how many hits you get, it’s a lot
easier than flipping through the pages of a real Bible when you need
to find a specific verse. And all you have to do once you find it is
tap the screen on the verse in the Find listing and you
instantly jump to that verse in the Bible. To bookmark it, just tap
the bookmark icon at the top of the screen. Now all you have to do
when you want to go to your favorite verses is scroll through your
bookmarks.

Each Bible is approximately 1.5 MB. This may sound like a large
file, and it is, but on a 8 MB machine, I still have a lot of room left.
And if you are hard pressed for memory space, MyBible allows
you to selectively delete books from you PDA. In an example from their
web site they site that you can install just the New Testament, Psalms and
Proverbs easily on a 2 MB machine and not take up too much memory.(It’s
somewhere around 460K.)

Finally, what I like best about MyBible
is the fact that on the Palm OS it’s so fast and easy to navigate. I don’t think
that most folks will actively use MyBible
to do every day devotional readings, but MyBible
is excellent as a study Bible and will be a valued addition to anyone interested
in the Bible who needs to look things up in a hurry.

*Prices:*	MyBible Program for Palm OS	$10.00
	MyBible Bibles
	King James Version	$19.99
	New American Standard Bible	$29.99
	New International Version	$29.99
	Revised Standard Version	$19.99

Pros:
Ease of use.
“Find” functionallity.
Can delete book to save memory space.

Con:
Can’t add personal footnotes.
Can’t underline or bold text.

*(Please note that Laridian
Electronic Publishing states on their web site that MyBible is
actually the finished version of a product called Scripture for
which a beta version was released in the summer of 1999. Scripture
owners can “upgrade”
to MyBible at a discount.)