Daily Archives: August 29, 2008

Accordance 8

Well, I just shelled out the money for an upgrade to version 8 of Accordance. I may discover more later, but I already know of three compelling features.

First, when you have two panes open, it will highlight the words in one that correspond with the ones your mouse cruises over in the other (assuming both texts are tagged).

Second, it will let you adjust the leading.

Third, fuzzy searching. I don’t know how good this will be, but I know I need it. My problem is that I remember there’s a verse I want to find but I don’t know what translation it’s in. For example, I search for “Jesus wept” and get the “no matches” dialog, because I normally use the NRSV, where John 11:35 reads “Jesus began to weep.” (Inexplicably. That verb must be the “aorist of but-it-ought-to-be-imperfect.”) Then I say, “[curses] it” and ask Mr. Google to find the verse for me.

Google Calendar

It’s been a couple of 2-3 years since the last time I played with Google Calendar. At the time, I thought it was interesting, but not compelling enough to migrate away from iCal. (Or even go to the trouble to integrate it with iCal.)

Today I played with it some more, and I liked it. Not least because it enabled me to publish a calendar that I could then subscribe to in iCal. This might have been one of the reasons I didn’t like it back then: I didn’t have any truly public calendars. Today I do, both at the church and with some of the other organizations I’m part of. The only thing I used to want to share was my personal calendar, but I didn’t want to make that public, and my wife refused to get a gmail account. Anyway, that’s history, and now I see how wonderful Google Calendar is. My bad.

Anyway, now that I’m a late adopter, I want to point out something else I like about Google Calendar. Take a look at these two events. First, iCal:

Calendar Detail (iCal)

Now compare that with Google Calendar:

Calendar Detail (Google)

You see the difference? In the month view, Google shows what time the event is. If iCal could do that it would be a huge win.

Another thing I like about Google Calendar is the extra views: 4-day and Agenda.

And, frankly, it isn’t any harder to edit an existing event in Google Calendar than it is in iCal. In fact, iCal has gotten harder to work with in Leopard. Brilliant decision that was.