Let’s start by exploring what can be done with the free Olive Tree software without installing anything else that costs money. How much of a power user can you become without spending any money at all?
As you’ll see, I highly recommend spending money judiciously in Olive Tree, but how far can we get before we spend a penny?
I cleared off one of my devices, an iPad Mini 2, and I reinstalled from scratch. Today’s iOS version is 7.3.0, the first version with audio support. The download size is 125.4 MB.
When we kick off to start with, we are asked to Select Free Translations:
Let’s just pick them all:
I’m going to log in with my longtime account, but for this blog post, I’m only going to install free resources. So to start with, I already have an NIV, ESV, NKJV, and KJV. If you’ve been using Bible apps since the 90’s like I have, you’ll know that this is a significant improvement over the past. The first three items are copyrighted, and it used to be that “free” apps only had “free” translations which meant public domain.
I wake up in the Gospel of John in the NIV:
So what else is free? From inside the app, I can shop for free items by navigating to the store. I scroll down to the bottom and I see “Free Resources” with a “See All” link:
Unfortunately, the See All link is misleading, since it throws me back into a page that’s full of non-free resources. The olivetree.com website is better; it has a clearly marked “Free” drop-down where I can get a list of lots of resources:
I see here that I can download HCSB Free and the NET Bible with limited notes. If I switch over to Free Study Tools (different page than Free Bibles), I see that I have some good choices from Christian history:
- Matthew Henry’s Concise Commentary
- Jamieson, Fausset, and Brown Commentary
- Easton’s Bible Dictionary
I’m skipping over “map samples” and Bible fragments like the NAB Gospel of Luke. Let’s install these three free resources, along with the HCSB Free and the NET Bible Limited Notes, giving us five Bibles and three study tools.
In the next post we’ll delve into actual usage. What can we do with only free tools?
