Palm Bible Plus is an

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

document viewing program for

Palm OS Palm OS (also known as Garnet OS) was a mobile operating system initially developed by Palm, Inc., for personal digital assistants (PDAs) in 1996. Palm OS was designed for ease of use with a touchscreen-based graphical user interface. It is provi ...

-based PDAs, focused on displaying the

Bible The Bible (from Koine Greek , , 'the books') is a collection of religious texts or scriptures that are held to be sacred in Christianity, Judaism, Samaritanism, and many other religions. The Bible is an anthologya compilation of texts of a ...

and commentaries about the Bible. It allows the user to read Bibles stored in

RAM Ram, ram, or RAM may refer to: Animals * A male sheep * Ram cichlid, a freshwater tropical fish People * Ram (given name) * Ram (surname) * Ram (director) (Ramsubramaniam), an Indian Tamil film director * RAM (musician) (born 1974), Dutch * Ra ...

or on a

memory card A memory card is an electronic data storage device used for storing digital information, typically using flash memory. These are commonly used in digital portable electronic devices. They allow adding memory to such devices using a card in a so ...

via VFS. It is licensed under the

GNU GPL The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general us ...

. This program is a fork of Bible Reader for Palm, a project started in August 2001 by Poetry Poon as an open source project licensed under the GNU GPL. After Poon decided to go closed source to ease support for copyrighted Bible versions, Yih-Chun Hu started work on earlier open source version. Besides reading the Bible and being able to navigate to specific locations, Bible Reader can search the Bible using three different search systems (phrase, set of terms, or boolean search query) and immediately jump to related verses using its cross-reference system (by tapping on the verse number). It includes a bookmark system; bookmarks can be assigned to categories, and each category can highlight verses with different colors. Text notes can be added and associated with verses or bookmarks. Two different documents can be displayed simultaneously in parallel windows, which are then kept in sync (these documents can be different translations or commentaries). It can also perform dictionary lookup on double tap of a word, using the

Plucker Plugin Interface Plucker is an offline Web and free e-book reader for Palm OS based handheld devices, Windows Mobile (Pocket PC) devices, and other PDAs. Plucker contains POSIX tools, scripts, and "conduits" which work on Linux, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, ...

(PPI) to other programs. Other features include built-in support for Hebrew and Greek fonts, "snapshots" to store search and navigation settings, auto-scrolling, support for display "skins" and plug-ins and text rotation. A vast number of Bible translations and commentaries are available for Palm Bible Plus. English translations available include the traditional

King James Version The King James Version (KJV), also the King James Bible (KJB) and the Authorized Version, is an Bible translations into English, English translation of the Christian Bible for the Church of England, which was commissioned in 1604 and publis ...

(KJV) and the modern well-respected translation the

English Standard Version The English Standard Version (ESV) is an English translation of the Bible. Published in 2001 by Crossway, the ESV was "created by a team of more than 100 leading evangelical scholars and pastors." The ESV relies on recently published critic ...

(ESV). Many other versions in many other languages, including the original

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...

Hebrew Hebrew (; ; ) is a Northwest Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Historically, it is one of the spoken languages of the Israelites and their longest-surviving descendants, the Jews and Samaritans. It was largely preserved ...

, and

Aramaic The Aramaic languages, short Aramaic ( syc, ܐܪܡܝܐ, Arāmāyā; oar, 𐤀𐤓𐤌𐤉𐤀; arc, 𐡀𐡓𐡌𐡉𐡀; tmr, אֲרָמִית), are a language family containing many varieties (languages and dialects) that originated in ...

text, are available. The program allows two views to be seen at once, allowing someone to view two different translations, a translation and the original, or some text and a commentary at the same time. Although regarded as great Bible reader comparable to the best desktop competitors, reviewers noted some weak points: slow searching, no support for copyrighted Bible versions, lack of advanced export/import functions or limited colour customization of text and background. Ability to run on broad range of Palm devices also leads to more complex installation process. Palm Bible Plus Bible files in PDB format can be read in Symbian OS platform using Symbianbible application (free software/open source). The PDB file reader engine for Symbianbible was ported from Palm Bible Plus.

References

{{Reflist Electronic Bibles Electronic publishing King James Version editions