On Friday, I promised that Accordance 8 would be released very soon. I wasn't kidding. I'm pleased to announce that Accordance 8 is now available for purchase and download, so you can start playing with all the new features today.
So what's new? More than I can list in a single blog post, but I'll try to highlight the major changes:
Universal Binary: Many of you have said, "I don't care about new features, just make Accordance available as a Universal Binary." Well, the wait is over. If you're running Accordance on an Intel Mac, you can now enjoy a significant speed boost without the overhead of running Rosetta.
Library Window: With Accordance 7, we introduced the Arrange Modules window, which was designed to let you organize all your Accordance modules. That window has now been expanded into an all-purpose launcher and renamed the Library window. A streamlined design makes it easy to keep this window very narrow and leave it open on the screen all the time. A Find box lets you type a few letters and find all the modules which begin with those letters. Use the arrow buttons to skip to the module you want, and hit return to open the module. You open and close the Library window from the Window menu.
Powerful New Search Capabilities: The new FUZZY and INFER commands make possible some incredibly powerful new searches. The INFER command is so powerful, in fact, that I really can't do it justice in a mere listing of new features. You can get a glimpse of these new search commands in action in the video demo of the new features in 8, and I'll be blogging about them at length later this week. In a nutshell, the FUZZY command lets you search for approximate matches to phrases, and the INFER command lets you find places where one text quotes from or alludes to another.
ANY Tag: Until now, Accordance has always required you to pick a part of speech when searching a grammatically tagged text. Thus, if you wanted to search for all nominatives, you would have to search for all nominative nouns, pronouns, adjectives, participles, etc. The new ANY tag (keyboard shortcut shift-command-Y) lets you search for any tag meeting particular grammatical criteria. Entering "nominative" in the ANY tag will find all nominatives regardless of part of speech.
Key Number Highlighting: When you display a tagged Greek or Hebrew text in parallel with an English Bible with Key Numbers, you can now drag over a word in either text and Accordance will highlight the corresponding word in the other pane. For example, drag over agapas in John 21:15 and the first occurrence of the English word "love" in the NAS95S will be highlighted. Drag across the second "love" in the NAS95S and philo will be highlighted in the Greek text. This feature makes it easy to see the relationship between the original text and the English translation.
Favorite Workspaces: Amplifying to a module lets you instantly search that module for any word you select. Favorite workspaces let you set up predefined sets of modules you can amplify to. For example, you might set up a Hebrew Studies workspace with (1) a tab containing the tagged Hebrew Bible in parallel with several English translations, (2) a tab containing the tagged Qumran in parallel with the Qumran English, (3) tabs containing HALOT, BDB, and TWOT, (4) a tab containing the Old Testament volumes of Word Biblical Commentary. Once you've saved this workspace as a Workspace favorite, you can select any Hebrew word and amplify to this workspace. Doing so will look up that Hebrew word in every one of the resources included in that workspace!
Custom colors and color backgrounds: Tired of black text on a white background? Accordance 8 lets you set up your own custom colors in addition to the standard Accordance color palette, and use those colors for text or the window background. Try coffee-brown text on a parchment yellow background, olive text on a mint background, or even white text on a black background. The possibilities are endless.
Custom leading: Accordance 8 now lets you control the leading (pronounced ledding), or space between lines of text, to improve readability (and keep the graphic designers happy!).
Horizontal Panes: Accordance has always displayed Bibles side-by-side in vertically-oriented panes. With Accordance 8, you can choose horizontal panes and stack parallel Bibles one above the other. This is great when you want to compare a single verse in a wide variety of texts.
Draggable Panes: Let's say you open the KJV, NAS95S, GNT-T (Nestle-Aland), and the GNT-TR (textus receptus) in parallel panes of the same window. You then decide you want them in a different order: say, KJV, GNT-TR, NAS95S, and GNT-T. Until now, you would have had to change the text which is displayed in each pane. In Accordance 8, you can just click and hold on the gray area above each pane and drag that pane to another position in the window.
Support for Arabic: Accordance 8 now supports Arabic Bibles and Arabic text within tools. Arabic modules will be coming soon.
Unicode Import: Accordance 8 now seamlessly imports Unicode Greek, Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic, and transliterated text. Copy some Greek text out of a web page and paste it into an Accordance search field. Import html documents with Unicode Greek and Hebrew into your own Accordance user tools! Accordance will convert the text to the appropriate Accordance fonts and place it into the appropriate fields of your user tool.
All that's just the big stuff! I haven't even begun to mention all the little enhancements which will make your lives easier. I'll have to talk about those in an upcoming post!
Until then, check out the new features in 8 page of the newly redesigned Accordance web-site.
# posted by David Lang @ 10:26 AM
