First Function: Design

When you first open the BibleWorks help file you see the immensity of the project at hand. Even the list of new things, things which were not in BW 7 is quite large. The content page shows 62 different things that are indexed and within each of those points there can be several things to which you can do. That being said it should also be noted that several of these 62, are not items or functions at all, at least one is a Bibliography, another a welcome and an overview. Actually you don't truly get to the functionality until you reach point 8 with the "main menu," however, even this truly goes with some of the previous ones that were overviews. With this in light I will here do a quick look at the functionality of overview and design of Bibleworks 8 (from here on it will be abbreviated as BW 8). The earliest form of BW that I have used is BW 3, and it had a certain structure to it with the text box on the top left side and your lexical aid on the bottom left side with this on the right was much of your search functions and summaries. They kept their general layout till BW 6, in BW 7 they introduced a new layout which is carried over to BW 8. The layout, in my own opinion, is genius in its simplicity. It splits the screen into three sections. On the Left side is where you would typically start with the search screen. There is a command line (from here on abbreviated CL), and underneath is where it displays your search results. in the Middle is your browse window which shows the particular verse and versions which you are looking at. In the right hand side of the screen is your analysis window it is here that (at least in BW 8) you have several options including a summary of your resources (commentaries, grammars), a browse feature(allows you to read the full text of a single version of text), User created notes and editor to write, word analysis (lexical aid), stats, x-refs (will discuss later), and version info. On the top running across the screen is a series of shortcut button to more quickly get to key functions of the program. I find this layout to be better than their previous one and have adjusted to it rather quickly. The layout seems to follow the natural pattern and direction that I move in the first place.I find the Analysis window to have the most functionality with its various tabs. However, I don't want to slight the search window, BW is, in its purest form a powerful search engine that is versatile in its searches. Many of these we will be getting into later.