life in mordor :: mike frizzell’s blog

Cheap Mac will be an ongoing series of posts on free/cheap Mac software that I find useful.  These are not reviews, but just first and/or general impressions.

Overview
While there are hundreds of cheap/free Bible programs for Windows, there are very few for the Mac.  Sure, if you’re a serious student, you could get something like Accordance or the new Logos for Mac, but most of us don’t have a couple grand lying around to buy software.  Enter MacSword, a free program that does just enough to be useful while not enough to force you to pay a lot of money for it.

MacSword is a part of the Sword Project, described as “cross-platform open-source tools– covered by the GNU General Public License– that allow programmers and Bible societies to write new Bible software more quickly and easily.”  Once you download and install MacSword, you can go over to the Sword Projects webiste and find all sorts of study tools, from commentaries to dictionaries to classic books.  Since it’s all open source and free, the modules are limited, but there are a few good Bible texts (the ESV) and language tools.

Interface
MacSword is a native Cocoa app, and, if you care about this, is actually pretty nice looking.  (One thing I wonder is how long before someone ports this to the iPhone via the new SDK.)  From the main toolbar you can open any module (see right), which opens up a new window.

Once open, you can customize each module as much as you want, giving you the ability to perfect your workflow.  You can have as many modules open as you want and even scroll simultaneously, but I find that two to four works best for how I like to work.  Below is an example with the Matthew Henry commentary and ESV both open (click for the full size).

Searching
Search is arguably the most important part of a piece of software like this. Unfortunately, I can’t figure out how to actually perform a search.  The screenshots their website offers don’t look like what I see when I hit CMD+F, nor is the help of any particular use.  Any search I run ends with “No results found” (see below).

I’m certain the error is on my end, or perhaps it has somethng to do with Leopard (or, more precisely, 10.5.2) but my inability to search takes MacSword from great software to only good.  Bible Software Review has a more in depth take on MacSword’s search function (although they have the unfortunate url of BSReview.com).

Conclusion
For a free piece of software, MacSword is pretty good.  If nothing else, it gives me a way to compare a few translations and read commentaries on my computer instead of paper or internet form.  If I could figure search out, it would be much more valuable to me.