Glo is more than just a mere Bible software. You know, a program that basically displays a specific Bible translation in electronic format. Glo is a complete package if you are really serious about your Christianity. More than just a Bible reader, Glo shows how Bible studies have evolved over the last century. With 2,382 high resolution photos, 7,500 Encyclopaedia articles, 463 Virtual reality tours, 3 hours+ of HD videos, 689 works of art, and 147 maps, Glo will satisfy not just Christians who are serious about the Word of God, but also historians who are interested in the history of Christianity.
Glo introduction video:
Glo comes with 3 DVDs and a nice packaging. You are meant to install all 3 DVDs which take around 18 GB of your disk space, thanks to the HD resolution photos and videos. As such, Glo might not be perfect for you if you own a 10 year old computer as you might have to buy an extra hard drive just to install Glo (even that, I don’t think Glo can run smoothly in the computer). The installation process also takes a while but once finished, you can fully experience Glo in all its glory without having to insert any of the discs.
Glo’s interface is beautiful and fully animated (such as the flipping animation when reading through the Bible pages. At any time while you are using Glo, you can always have access to its 6 main modules, called lenses. Glo also supports multi-sessions, so you can always go back to what you were doing in Glo after opening a different lens. For example, while reading through a Bible passage, you might wonder where this event is occurring in the world map. The multi-sessions make it easy to quickly switch between these chores. Although the interface is great and animation is smooth, sometimes I wish the animations can be turned off though because it takes a few seconds to switch between sessions or to do things that you do a lot in Glo.
The Glo 6 lenses/main modules are: Bible, Timeline, Atlas, Topical, Media, and MyGlo.
Glo Review – Bible
Glo comes with 2 Bible translations: NIV (New International Version) and King James Version (KJV). Unfortunately there is no way for you to download a different Bible translation and import it to Glo. The team does promise on the FAQ page that more Bible translations will be added in the future but of course it’s unclear as to what translations are going to be added and when. I’d love to have an ESV, NET Bible, and also a translation for my original language, for example. For now, I have to be happy with NIV and KJV. If they can add some Hebrew/Greek reference for serious Christians, that’d be great too.
Glo also comes with NIV Study Notes at the bottom of the Bible lens and these references give deeper knowledge about a verse or a passage.
Glo Review – Atlas
The Atlas lens is more like Google Earth for Christians. It displays the actual world map of where events in the Bible were occurring. You can zoom in and zoom out of the map and on some Bible passages/events, you can actually see the timeline of the event occurring on the map.
This is useful to understand the struggles of a character in the Bible, for example when Abraham was asked by God to go to the Promised Land from where he lived. Using the Atlas, you can clearly see the route that he was taking on the real map (and how far has he gone). This creates a deeper understanding of Abraham’s struggle which can be related to the struggles of our lives.
Glo Review – Timeline
In the Timeline lens, you can see the Bible in chronological order (time based). From here, you can pick a particular timeline and all the scripture references, artwork, maps, and articles will be presented that relate to that timeline.
Glo Review – Media
The Media lens contains the photos, artwork, videos, and even virtual realities of places written in the Bible. There’s also a video documentary titled “In His shoes” included in Glo and I really enjoyed watching it. It has certainly opened my eyes to certain things that I haven’t really put much thought before. For example on the first episode, Troy Schmidt shows how Jesus was born, in animals’ shelter and takes us to the real place. This allows us to imagine how it was like for Jesus to be born there visually, and so on.
The virtual tours are amazing as well. You can see the City of Jerusalem from your own home, among other places in the Bible such as Sodom, the mountain where Jesus was tempted, the mount of beatitudes (where Jesus taught the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5), and many more (546 virtual tours available when I wrote this review). Of course, these photos and tours are of amazing high quality.
Glo Review – Topical
Sometimes, you might be teaching other Christians about certain topics, have your own struggles on certain things/sins, or want to know the Bible’s point of view on certain world issues. The Topical lens is clearly created for this. The topics are massive and you can easily get lost in this lens. Each topic normally has the scripture references about the topic and links to Christianity Today’s articles or other sites. The topic selections are huge and cover from your own spiritual life to others such as relationships, marriages, parenting, even to studying about angels or Satan.
There is also the handy search to find just the topic you need. Sometimes you might be asked a certain difficult question and would love to find some Bible references or articles to answer that question. This is a good way to find out. Or a good friend of yours is grieving about someone’s death – then you can search more about death and how to comfort your friend more effectively if it’s something new to you.
Glo Review – My Glo
In here, you can setup your Bible reading plans and also a journal where you make notes.
The Bible Reading Plans application is pretty handy as you can set your goal and track your progress easily here. It will even let you know if you are left behind the schedule! You can set the speed of the reading, along with the target of how many days you want to complete your goal.
I was trying to play around with it by planning to read the whole bible in one day :D The application smartly displayed:
Hah! Even if you can read the whole Bible in a month, what good does it do? It’s nothing different than reading a comic book or a fiction.
Glo Review Conclusion
Glo is not just a Bible reader software. It’s fully interactive and loaded with tons of artwork for illustrations, photos, real world maps, virtual tours, and basically all things to enhance your Bible study experience and life as a Christian. Everything in Glo is fully connected to each other so when you are reading on a passage or a certain topic, you can normally view the corresponding illustrations, maps, photos, or relevant verses on other books.
Everything is searchable and results from different lenses will be displayed, allowing to you quickly finds occurrences of certain events, person, or basically any keywords that you are looking for in the Bible. This way, studying someone’s biography can’t be much easier as you can simply type in his/her name on the Search field and all references to that person will come up on the search results, including verses on the Bible.
Glo is not meant to replace your Bible, but it certainly enhances the way you experience the Bible itself and gives you the tools to study the Word of God better. It also get updates every now and then with new media, features, and bug fixes so make sure you keep your Glo up to date if you decide to purchase it.
It crashed on me once a while, 18 GB space is needed, and can be overwhelming at first, but these drawbacks are nothing compared to what you’ve got with Glo. Highly recommended if you are serious about learning the Word of God deeper. If they can put in extra commentaries and Bible translations on future updates, it’ll be perfect! But even at the current stage, I’ve never seen a Bible software better than Glo!
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