Bibleworks 8 Announced
The folks over at BibleWorks have announced the release of the eighth iteration of their software product. The announcement includes an extensive list of upgrades and new features. Read the whole announcement. Here are some highlights:
New Features
The biggest advances appear to be in the area of searching and analysis (rather than text handling or diagramming, though there are a few additions here as well). They have added a new phrase matching tool, as well as some other search improvements:
Over lunch in mid-2007, we asked ourselves, “How could we find all verses which are similar to each other?” Out of this discussion came the Phrase Matching Tool and Related Verses Tool. The new Phrase Matching Tool takes your current verse and finds all verses containing similar phrases. The new Related Verses Tool finds all verses using some of the same words from the current verse.
They are also adding in an “External Resource Manager” that lats you organize and collect your massive storehouse of documents, PDFs, and images into Bibleworks’s main interface. Personally I use Zotero for this, but some might like this feature.
New Databases
Two additional modern grammars are now available in the suite: Waltke/O’Connor for Hebrew and Wallace for Greek. The complete Early Church Fathers is also available (only the Apostolic Fathers are available in BW 7).More importantly, Bibleworks will finally include the Greek Text of the OT Pseudepigrapha (BW 7 included the Apocrypha, but not the Pseudepigrapha), which is a much needed addition. The Targum of the Psalms will also be added, though only in English.
Thoughts
There are a couple of features that would motivate me to upgrade from BibleWorks 7, and only one of them appears to be included: the OT Pseudopigrapha. I would really like to see Bibleworks include a robust semantic diagramming module (Logos has one). And I wish BDAG was bundled with the rest of the suite (though that is Chicago’s fault). BibleWorks also needs to seriously improve it’s map functionality (the map module is excessively sluggish on my computer, and my computer is rarely excessively sluggish). The most serious need in my opinion is full-fledged Unicode support. They claimed this would be available in Bibleworks 7, and while oen can certainly export text in Unicode, it is not native built it. ASCII is dead as a doornail. There should be no ASCII text visible in BibleWorks, especially since it attempts to handle so many languages.
I am optimistic, but need a couple of more features explained before I am ready to purchase. Stay tuned for updates!
Purchase
Bibleworks 8 can be purchased by visiting the Bibleworks site. Special upgrade prices are available for those with Bibleworks 6 or Bibleworks 7. Bibleworks will not ship out until mid-December, however, so you still have some time.
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