Since late 2004, when my wife first bought me a copy of the English Standard Version, the ESV has been my Bible translation of choice for most applications. I pre-ordered the ESV Study Bible when it was announced, and was very pleased when it was released last fall. It’s an incredible resource, and I highly recommend it to any of my church members interested in seriously studying scripture.

Crossway has released the ESV Study Bible materials for a variety of platforms, including Accordance for Mac. (Incidentally, it’s not available for the cross-platform Libronix Library System, which I love… but I digress. [Edited 7/29/09: As Kent pointed out below, Logos is now offering the ESV Study Bible Notes on Pre-Order, with or without the ESV text.]) However, I don’t have Accordance, and didn’t want to buy a different application to use it on my Mac.

That said, one of the neatest aspects of the ESV Study Bible is that the publisher, Crossway, has an awesome online version containing all of text, notes, charts, pictures, and articles in the print editions. You can add notes, listen to passages being read, and more. All that,and it’s FREE if you’ve bought any of the print editions.

I tend to lose track of the tabs in my browser while I work on projects, so I wanted to have the ESV Study Bible as a unique application with a dock icon, not just a website in a Safari or Firefox tab.

Enter Fluid. Fluid is a Site-Specific Browser. It allows you to pick a site and create a custom “application” that launches the site in it’s own dedicated web browser. You can customize the appearance and dock icon, or leave it with the defaults.

Here are the steps I followed to create an ESV Study Bible application:

1. Download Fluid and run the program.
2. In the URL field enter: http://www.esvstudybible.org/search
3. In the Name field enter whatever you want. I used “ESV Online Study Bible”.
4. The Location drop-down should be your Applications folder.
5. The Icon can either be the Webside Favicon, or something different. I used the following image from the ESV Study Bible site: esvsb-feature.png:
6. Once you’ve done that, click create. It will place the new app in your Applications folder. Run the application.
7. The first time the site loads, you’ll need to enter your ESV Study Bible login and password information.
8. While this is optional, I prefer the “HUD” Theme, which you can select in the Preferences menu under the Appearance tab. Quit and restart the program if you change the theme.
9. In order to enable access to Articles and Maps & Charts, open the Preferences menu, go to the Advanced tab, and add this string to the list: *esvstudybible.org/*

That’s it. Pretty simple stuff. There are a number of other options in Fluid, and it can be used to make SSB’s for any number of websites. I also have one made for Stafftool (where I first learned of Fluid last year), the church management software we use at NCF. This is what the program looks like running on my desktop:

If you give this a shot, and encounter any problems, or have any questions, let me know.

NOTE: Chris Giammona pointed out on Twitter (and in the comments section here) that this setup doesn’t allow you to access the Articles and Maps & Charts sections of the ESV Online Study Bible. The fix for this has been added as step 9 above. Thanks Chris!