Interesting presentation: "How the Rabbis Invented Web2.0 Before Their Time"

I came across this interesting presentation done by Ellen Frankel, the CEO and Editor-in-Chief of The Jewish Publication Society (I've heard now that she's recently left JPS) which she gave at the BibleTech:2009 conference:

How the Rabbis Invented Web2.0 Before Their Time

View more documents from YAVNET.

The audio for the presentation is here (open in a separate tab to follow along with the presentation).

HebrewBible Release 2.2 submitted to Apple for approval

I've made a number of usability enhancements to the HebrewBible iPhone app. The changes have been submitted to Apple for approval. Usually, changes take about 2 weeks to be approved for release on the Apple App Store and I'll post here again when they're available (it's a free upgrade for existing users of the app). These are all enhancements that a number of users have requested that I add to the application. The changes:

1. Enhancement: When in the Bible text screen, swipe-left will hide the tab bar and swipe-right with display it. This makes more room available for reading the text when you're reading the Bible.
2. Enhancement: When playing the audio in the Bible text screen, the Play button now changes to a Pause button when pressed (instead of the Stop button previously displayed). This lets the user pause and resume audio playback.
3. Enhancement: The Translate functionality (in the Words tab) now has an additional button for "Swap Languages" to allow the source and destination languages to be reversed. For example, if the user had selected French as the "from" language and English as the "to" language, pressing the Translate button converts French to English. Pressing the "Swap Languages"button reverses the two languages so that the translation will be from English to French.
4. Enhancement: The languages that are used for the Translate functionality (in the Words tab) are now "sticky" (e.g. - once a translation has been done between 2 languages, the selected languages are the defaults the next time the application is started).
5. Fix: Moved the "i" button on the Bible screen further from the tab bar (to prevent accidental touches).
6. Fix: Corrected positioning of popup box in the Hebrew Torah with Commentary version (in certain cases, the popup would not appear on the visible screen).

Hebrew Learning Resources

The following links are useful resources for learning Hebrew:

• The Boulders 2 Bits blog has a nice summary of vocabulary resources for people learning Hebrew (including a few that I suggested). The summary is in 2 separate posts (Part 1, and Part 2). The blog also has a Hebrew Resources page with some more useful material for people learning Hebrew.
• The Codex Biblical Hebrew Resources page has a lot of links to resources for learning Hebrew. It's broken now into:
  • Learning Biblical Hebrew
  • Mastering Biblical Hebrew
  • Hebrew Fonts
  • General Hebrew Resources
  • Hebrew Terminology
  • Kittel Resources
• Ehud Ben Zvi's Resources for the Study of Biblical Hebrew page ha s a large number of links to useful resources.
• Rahel Halabe has another large collection of Hebrew Links that are primarily focused on learning Hebrew.
• The Biblical Hebrew HTML Keyboard is useful for entering small amounts of text for copy/paste to a word processor.
• Learning new Hebrew words via Hebrew Songs is a nice way to pick up new vocabulary.