Wednesday, February 1, 2017

New Bible Mapper WebViewer!

Web page view showing results of a search for sites in John 2
David P. Barrett, creator of the Bible Mapper program and co-author of the Crossway ESV Bible Atlas, has just released an initial version of the Bible Mapper WebViewer. According to Barrett,
It is intended to be a quick reference tool for Bible geography information, not a way to make maps (there is not a way to save, export, or print a map other than the default tools of your browser). I envision people using it to look up Bible geographical information on the fly, such as on their mobile device at church or Bible study, or on their computer while studying a passage. You can also input a reference like "Joshua 10-12," or pass in a page URL, and it will automatically fetch the text and map all the locations it can discern on it (though it's definitely not 100%).
There are still some glitches in my intial testing. It works well in Chrome on my Android phone and on my desktop computer, but it got hung up in Firefox on my desktop. The interface is very nice and works well on my phone, but zooming in/out requires repeated taps of the + and - icons. Searching for a specific site works very well. Searching for sites mentioned in a specific passage or sites mentioned on a web page works but is not entirely reliable. Including the option to display hi-res tiles did not particularly slow things down, and it's nice to be toggle on/off OT and NT roads. (If you're looking for something more in-depth, check out the Bible geocoding at OpenBible.info.)

Especially for its purpose as an quick reference, particularly for mobile devices, this is a very nice tool, and it's even better that Barrett is providing it for free. Thanks, David Barrett!

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