Here’s one of those times where I wish that I was invited to take part inside of an event that would have been able to have a significant impact into the way that we use biblical software.
Specifically, I’m talking about the Bible Software Shootout that took place this weekend at the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) Conference. The website This Lamp has provided theonly> report of the event that I have seen – this despite the many tweets on the event which were very incoherent and disjointed. Here’s a snippet about a surprising entry into the field:
…Although Olive Tree could not perform every aspect of the last two challenges, what they could do was very impressive, indeed. The representatives from Olive Tree showed that their “pocket” software can be used for very serious work if someone is so inclined to do so…
Now, without getting into the details too much, each participant was to use their software to complete 5 tasks, and then document the steps they went through. It seems (from This Lamp’s reporting) that only Accordance was able to do this successfully, the others (Logos Systems, Stuttgart Electronic Study Bible, Bible Works, and Olive Tree) missed on one or several points.
It would also seem that not just the tasks, but also process documentation was a difficult piece to address. We’ve talked about it some here in terms of designing a Bible UI around the user, not so much around the features. And it would seem that some of the applications got caught up into the latter.
Another few things I noticed from this report were in those that were not present: Laridian, Word Search, Sword, and a few others. I would have thought that this would have been more about getting as many platforms here as possible for evaluation, not just those with certain name or reputation recognition. Nevertheless, there now seems to be some metric for some of these software platforms to be measured against in respect to academic (I refuse to use the word serious) biblical study on computing devices.
Check out the rest of the post at This Lamp, and be sure to give some feedback to your Bible software platform of choice if you would see these features better developed for what you’ve paid for. This will only make the field better for all, and hopefully, better students of the Word.
Other Posts on the Software Bible Shootout:
Post Edit Note: If you’ve got a report from the Software Bible Shootout, post a link to it in this comment and I’ll link it to this main post.