PBB Update?

Bob gave some great insight on not only PBB but also a lot more, here's the link:

http://community.logos.com/forums/t/33263.aspx

No such email list, unless you count Logos Newswire.  

Michael Lyman said:

Thanks! It's so hard to figure out which thread the latest news you want to know about can be found. It would be great if there was a Bob e-mail list or something. If there already is please let me know how to sign up!

You can do a Google search for "Bob Pritchett Posted" site:community.logos.com

Todd White said:

Also, you will find a link to an RSS feed next to 'My Activity' (http://community.logos.com/members/2130/activities/rss.aspx). Websites like Google Reader help you keep track of what is new in any RSS feeds you are watching.

Cool! Thanks!

I, too, read Bob's statement, but it doesn't give much info other than "it isn't ready yet."  I upgraded to Logos 4 because the "coming soon" features included PBB.  The release date of which has been changed at least twice, and now it appears it may not be ready by the end of this quarter.  It's good to know that it hasn't been abandoned, but I'm a bit disappointed that every promised "coming the quarter of..." has come and gone. The forthcoming PBB was the major selling point for me to upgrade to 4.0.

Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice...

Not to sound overly harsh, but I'm learning to do the same.  And learning I may want to start looking into other options that will suit my study needs.

tom collinge said:

Rev Chris said:

I'm learning to just ignore all Logos projection dates. I think there are more delays than fulfilled promises/estimates.

Personally, I have never seen Logos even come close to any projection date they have published.  When any of my prepubs is first given a date, I have always added two months to this date, and Logos has never came in on time with I include my two additional months.

NOTE: I do not track prepubs that I am not buying.  Therefore, other prepubs could have made their projected date.

I think I've seen some single-book releases get published on-time, but it seems that multi-volume works never do.

J. Wright said:

Honestly, the delayed pre-pubs don't bother me as much (I don't purchase many pre-pubs as the Silver library has a lot of resources I use regularly).  But a promised feature to be included in the software - which is used as a selling point of why one should upgrade - that frustrates me.  I upgraded because PBB was promised to be included within a few months.  I spent money on something that I still can't use as advertised.  We're now over 12 months past that original deadline/promise.  Never in my life have I had a business tell me if I purchased something and they would throw in such-and-such features/extras have I waited well over a year to actually receive it.  And there's still no official word on when it may be available.  As stated in the Princess Bride, it's truly "inconceivable".

Missing production dates is simply bad customer service. 

We are now basically 2/3 of the way through the second quarter.  There is no way Logos can now get PBB into their production environment by the 2nd quarter of 2011 as they state on their website (unless they skip the entire beta cycle).

Just goes back to the theory that they should stop giving us projected dates for things that are too difficult to reasonably estimate.

Well, I know lots and lots of people who are IT professionals, so I
fully understand the timing that's involved with code work.  It's
tedious, difficult, and takes very special attention to detail.  I
understand this very well.  Nevertheless, I've made a ton of software
purchases through the years, and never has a promised feature/patch gone
over a year without being made available. 

As for your #2), I can see why you may have a reservation there.  But I only made the purchase based on the promise of PBB support.  I paid $...Logos didn't provide what I paid for.  I believe I've been lied to...and I don't like being lied to.

All that said, I think I've stated everything I needed/wanted to say.  Rant=officially over.

Rev Chris said:

J. Wright said:

I believe I've been lied to...and I don't like being lied to.

 

I generally think of a lie as an intentional misleading of truth.  Now, we can't possibly know the intentions of the Logos staff, but I'd venture a guess as to say they were just wrong - not that they lied to us.  The problem, as I see it, is that they are wrong way more than they are right and should probably be way more conservative in the estimates they give people.  For something like PBB, nobody is going to be upset that you promised a 2-year waiting period and then delivered it in 1 year.  (I can see people getting upset with early delivering of prepubs where money is at stake, but even then if you give a fair notice I think people would be generally happy).

I agree.  And I made the decision to upgrade based on statements made
then about PBB (and other features) being available within the next 3
months.  "Order now for this special price...and while these features
aren't available yet, they will be in the next few months."  That was
essentially the quote.

In essence, in this particular situation I
DO believe it was an intentional misleading of truth.  To be over a year
late, somebody somewhere had to know and be saying, "There's no way
we're going to get this feature (and some others) out there anytime soon."  But there it
was on the website, "Order now for this special price!..."  

As a
student of all things scripture, I understand the virtue of patience,
the fruit of the Spirit, etc.  But in the end, I believe I was lied to
in order to get a sale.  I believe I, and many others were intentionally
mislead by the marketing, the "special price", and the "these features
are coming soon" campaign.

I'm not the kind of person that wants
something for nothing.  I just want what I paid for.  And honestly, I
don't think that's too much to ask.

To my fellow long-suffering Logos users

May the Peace and Joy of Jesus settle deeply into your souls!

I understand the many frustrations vented in this thread.  Although I had wanted it for a long time, I finally ordered the Personal Book Builder because I was upgrading to Logos 4 anyway and Logos told me the PBB would be updated for use within Logos 4 within a certain number of months (long past now).  I was so excited to get it that I started building many public domain Logos books with the older software anyway, but the enthusiasm eventually died out and I decided to wait for the new version (also more pressing matters forced me to shelve these projects).  So I and we still wait.  Not only for the PBB but also for highlighting within the Logos iPhone application.

On the good side, Our Lord Jesus is perfecting our patience!  God knows that these technological marvels will be useful not only for our own study but towards the re-Christianization/rebaptism of our culture with His Love and for His Glory.  Logos' position as a Christian witness at the cutting edge of our technologically advanced "post-Christian" Western culture is an important ministry and a very special blessing to all of us, and although we can be tempted to complain about delays in the particular features we most desire, we can use these feelings of frustration as opportunities to PRAY for Logos and its many projects-in-process, utilizing the power the Holy Spirit of our adoption into God's Family has given us to unleash angels into human affairs. 

Let us acknowledge our frustrations and then offer them to God in prayer for Logos Bible Software!  Let us pray that God sends both (technologically skilled) men and angels to Logos' aid!  In this way we can be part of the ministry which Logos has to our technological culture, supporting them AS ONE BODY by our prayers!

Besides, I have just been encouraged that Logos does not always take forever to respond to our requests.  My recent post about misleading information on the new Von Balthasar Collection Pre-Pub ( http://community.logos.com/forums/t/33614.aspx ) was acted upon in only a day (albeit by removing rather than correcting the misleading sentence).  So quick action is possible!  Let us support it in the many more complex matters Logos deals with by being Prayer Warriors on behalf of Logos and the important service to God's Kingdom they provide as "salt and light" within the technology industry!

May the LORD bless and keep you all.

I would like to add to these concerns that with all the functionality needs that have been voiced on these forums, UserVoice, etc., both the current beta (4.3) and the current release (4.2b) both appear to be updates that are virtually feature free.  It's nice some bugs are being fixed, and it could certainly be the case that infrastructure behind the scenes is laying ground work for a slew of functionality updates in the next 6 months, but if that is not happening we have gotten very little in terms of functionality updates on the PC platform since 4.2a in March.  The list of small features updates needed  is long too; there are a lot of small-ish improvements that are really needed to make Logos less clumsy and less oriented to the way some would have us use the product.

Money is being invested in resources on a  lot of platforms, and I too am not pleased that this has happened long before version 4 replaced ALL the functions that version 3 had. I am still miffed that I lost the lectionaries I used because the ability to create our own were taken away, and very few of the popular lectionaries have been made available (certainly not the daily Roman Catholic one that I use). I miss my PBB files greatly also, and I second Mark's suggestion if Logos could at least let us read them in the interim.  I am a small PBB reader compared to some, but I know exactly what resources I am missing - and there are 122 of them.

Version 4 really has a lot of rich functionality, and I love it. We should be here in summer of 2010 though, not now.  I think Logos has made me very wary of the future when it didn't finish the job and has moved on to other platforms to the expense of the PC platform.

Rosie Perera said:

Just as you can't make a baby in less than 9 months by adding more human resources to the task,

The Old Testament does document polygamy......................................................................        [:O]

I guess I have my answer - my internet was being slow

I for one was never anxious for PBB (sermon file here) however the functionality that you are explaining the new PBB to do sounds exactly like what the original Sermon File Addin accomplished. Will the first release of PBB allow for example the same or similar "tagging" fields as the original Sermon File addin to allow a sharp accuracy within meta data and searching? If so, I believe you will have made most, if not all the Sermon File users very happy with this type of release.

As for the old PBB files, I only used a few public domain resources in that format that really would not hurt my feelings to have to convert...

Bob Pritchett said:

Mark Smith said:

I would favor giving us the ability to at least read PBB files in 4.0 even if later on those same files need to be rebuilt so enhanced features can be incorporated. Let the once optional publisher be yet in the future as it is developed along the lines we have been promised. In the meantime we'd be able to read and search our PBB files. 

Um, you all are making me nervous about PBB. I'm wondering if we're on the same page.

We can not read the old PBB files in Logos 4. That isn't happening and isn't being worked on. Those old PBB books were built from HTML, and we viewed them by literally embedding Internet Explorer into Libronix to allow presentation of the books.

This had many problems:

A) The books weren't in the native Logos format. They lacked some important functionality, and never integrated with notes, etc.

IE broke us over and over, and we are no longer willing to be dependent on it. (I believe many of you have supported us in that decision.)

Writing a "stop-gap" that reads the old PBB isn't going to work, because we'd have to either introduce a dependency on IE (nearly impossible, with our current platform, and technical suicide even if possible), OR we'd have to write something that parsed HTML into our internal formats, and that would be much harder than rewriting PBB from the ground up.

The new PBB will read Word documents with the same markup as we used for the old PBB. Books will need to be recompiled from Word. (Old PBB books were technically compiled from HTML, but most people built them in Word and exported them to HTML.) This should, for most people, be much easier than the old system, will involve no exporting, and will work on Mac and Windows.

If you built PBB books in HTML directly, you'll need to bring them into Word.

If you hate Word / prefer OpenOffice, etc. we don't yet have a solution other than getting your book into Word's .DOCX format.

The good news is, the new PBB generates "real" Logos format books, with complete functionality.

The first release of PBB -- in a beta -- is imminent. It will let you compile and use books. It will not yet have support for sharing the books with others, because this is more complicated in a world of synchronization. It's coming, but it's a step behind our first priority, which is books compiling (on Mac and Windows).

Just out of curiosity, for those who are anxiously awaiting PBB, what are you waiting for? The ability to create PBB books? Or the ability to read them? And if "read", which ones, from where?