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!
Rick
In your poking around, did you come across Accordance? It has been developed for Mac since its inception in the early 90’s. While it isn’t free, packages start out at a very reasonable $59. You can download a working demo here, and check out a video demo here.
The Great Java
Looks cool, but would be $100 with one modern version a bit steep for me. I’ll try the trial.