Bible Software for the Mac

If you are looking for Bible study software for the Mac you aren’t alone. On Windows there are quite a few options – even great free ones like Online Bible and e-Sword. I did a lot of “poking around” for low cost and free solutions. The only real solution I found, that was native to the Mac, was MacSword.  MacSword is a port of the open source “SWORD Project”. It didn’t do much for me, though it had great integration with the large Sword project library.

On Windows I used e-Sword, and I had bought a couple of modules for it (like NASB translation). I decided to look at running e-Sword on Mac using virtualization or emulation. Since I only have 1G of RAM on my MacBook I immediately tossed the idea of a tool like VMWare Fusion (which would have been easy and effective). I looked at using the Windows emulation software called “wine”. I already own a copy of Crossover, a paid supported version of the “wine” project.

I was able to use e-Sword on the Mac, and it works pretty well. The verse navigator box causes it to crash, but everything else works so far. Here are two options I found for installing it.

1) Get Mac e-Sword Package. This package bundles the free version of Wine with an e-sword distribution. You can click, install, and run. I found the tool worked fine but was a bit slow.  This was totally free and simple!

2) CrossOver with e-Sword. Since I own CrossOver which has the latest Wine code, etc. I decided to try it out. First I installed IE6 with CrossOver to create a Windows 98 “bottle” as my default. I then ran the installer for e-Sword using the CrossOver control panel. This worked fine and product started normally and works much faster than the one using the Darwine wine package (above).  CrossOver costs $30 but it’s a great product.  You can easily install Quicken, IE, Office, and many other windows programs easily onto the Mac.

Regardless of how you install it, I would recommend following these instructions for turning on font smoothing. Enjoy!