podBible makes the Word of God just a thumbclick away

A few weeks ago while visiting a church this crazy idea struck: put the Bible on an iPod! I'm not talking about MP3s of spoken passages from the scriptures. You can find those all over the place. What I wanted to know is: was there any software that puts the text of the Bible itself on an iPod, that can be taken with you and read anywhere?

It took awhile but last night I found podBible, a neat (and free!) application created by a fellow named Brendan Ross. Using the Notes feature of the iPod, podBible puts the entire New Testament of the English Standard Version along with Psalms and Proverbs from the Old Testament on the iPod with an easy-to-navigate interface. Here you see podBible running on my own 80-gig iPod classic, displaying 1st Corinthians chapter 1 starting with verse 26 (however that is not Corinthian leather on my snazzy new iPod case...).

The one thing that I wish could have been better with podBible is if the complete Bible were possible. Apart from Psalms and Proverbs the rest of the Old Testament is not included, but that's only because of a firmware limitation within the iPod itself: the iPod allows for about a thousand notes and podBible takes up 450 of them according to the software's website. Brendan suggests that future iPods will overcome that obstacle.

In the meantime, if you're a casual to serious student of the Bible and want to have at least one testament for on the go, give podBible a looksee. I for one am glad to have it on my iPod: it's a rather good counter-balance to all those Elvis songs, Lost episodes, Beastie Boys music videos, Warner Brothers cartoons and Star Wars movies that hog up the rest of the thing :-P

Categories: bible, christianity, computers, ipod, reviews, technology