Best Web Browser for your Online Work

I have been using Safari for quite awhile. I have Firefox installed for those web pages that seem to require it. I am interested in the little cottage industry of web browsers still out there, some of them very powerful. I'm not sure any are a clear choice for pastors/scholars... Firefox has so many plug-in options, there is great potential there. Macworld just released a very good survey of the Mac browser landscape called "The Browser Bunch". It includes sections on: Comparison charts

Interface summaries

Rendering Engines

Web standards compliance

Plug-ins

Forms/passwords

Privacy/security

and suggestions on finding the right browser for you (pay or free)

It's a very well done article. It does conclude that for most folks, Safari is the best choice, with Firefox also with merits. (It seems I had gotten it right even before reading the article.)

Update: Or you can go old school.

B-Greek Search Bookmarklet

I previously made available a Dashboard Widget to facilitate searching the rich archives of the Biblical Greek Email Listserv. For the sake of my PC-using fellow Hellenes, here is what I think could be an even better way of searching the archives--a bookmarklet.

By dragging the bookmarklet into the bookmark bar of your browser, you can click on it to quickly jump to a custom B-Greek search page. However, it includes the additional features:

• If you first highlight a search string in the current browser window, it will search for that string in the B-Greek archives.
• It returns results from the newer and older archives (pre- and post-1998)

To use the bookmarklet, just drag this link into the bookmark bar on your browser:

B-Greek Search

Have a look at a results page: You can see the "B-Greek Search" item on the bookmark bar. See how, for instance, I could be viewing the results of my previous search shown in the image above, and becoming interested in TON KOSMON--well, I can then highlight the term and click the bookmarklet to search once more.

As for Bookmarklets: This little project has got me thinking what other web resources we use in scholarly/biblical work would be handy to be able to search by highlighting text in a web browser window followed by a single click. Perhaps someone may have suggestions.

Οὐκ ἔστιν ὧδε

ἀποκριθεὶς δὲ ὁ ἄγγελος εἶπεν ταῖς γυναιξίν· μὴ φοβεῖσθε ὑμεῖς, οἶδα γὰρ ὅτι Ἰησοῦν τὸν ἐσταυρωμένον ζητεῖτε· 6 οὐκ ἔστιν ὧδε, ἠγέρθη γὰρ καθὼς εἶπεν.

Happy Easter!

German Dictionary Plugins

Here are some German Dictionary Plugins to add German words to Dictionary.app in OS X 10.5 or later.

See this blog post for more.

Welcome to the Church of Mac!

Mac genius Tony Edwards has taken his speaking enterprise and general Mac evangelism to a Stephen Colbertish place by creating the persona of a charismatic leader of the Church of Mac. I'm left trying to decide whether this is cute, funny, clever and/or sacrilegious.

I think I'm leaning towards sacrilegious. :)

Mac Apps for Getting Your Work Done

I am still an agnostic with reference to my office productivity methods. I switch back and forth, at times meandering lost in the wilderness. I move from post-its to notebooks to on screen solutions including iGTD, iCal and/or plain text files (though a constant there is that Quicksilver always plays some role). One could waste alot of time figuring out how they'd like to manage their time.

I did find helpful this article on 5 Amazing Mac Apps for Getting Things Done (from Zen Habits).

"The ideal for anyone interested in Getting Things Done (more on GTD, and more)– or just being productive and organized, for that matter — is to be able to quickly add things to your to-do lists without interrupting your work; to be able to see what you need to do right now, without worrying about everything else; to be able to organize stuff without too much work."

Do share in the comments any tips, methods, utilities you use. The choices really are legion.

B-Greek Search Widget

Carl Conrad mentioned to me the ongoing woes of searching the B-Greek archives. For those who don't know, the Biblical Greek email listserv has been active for years. It has been a place to discuss matters regarding learning, teaching and exploring Biblical Greek. The archives contain a treasure in and of themselves, but the listserv doesn't provide easy searching capability. So, I wrote this little Dashboard Widget for Mac users (10.4 and up) to have easy access to searching the web archives. You may download the B-Greek Search Widget here.

Additional info: Carl Conrad has offered this helpful tip on searching the archives:

I simply put the BG transliteration ARKETON into the search box and immediately my browser went to the relevant posts in the current archives...
I would note that, although you can search for scripture citations (e.g. Matthew 6:34), there's such variety of citation modes (Mt 6:34, Mt. 6:34, Mt 6.34, Mt. 6.34, Matt. 6:34, ..., Matthew 6:34 ...) that no particular mode chosen is likely to hit on every item in the archives that deals with the text in question. I have found that a search that uses the standard B-Greek transliteration of a key word or phrase in the passage you're looking for makes a more serviceable search term for getting most of what's useful in the archives.

See another search option in this later post.