What's your favorite undocumented feature?

My favorite undocumented feature is Facilitate Serendipitous Discovery (FSD).

It's not undocumented, but I'd never learned it before. Dave Hooton mentioned recently that you can use BEFORE 2-2 WORDS to ensure exact proximity, which is a special case of BEFORE x-y WORDS to give a proxmity range. That bit is mentioned in the wiki under Search_HELP, but it's quite buried. I'd read that page several times and never picked this up before. In fact, none of the search syntax is explained in the Help file.

Mark Barnes said:

And my new-found favourite: double-clicking the empty space in the tab bar (next to the plus) opens up the next parallel resource in a new tab).

This is SO COOL! Thanks Mark!

I know this isn't a feature, it's closer to an Easter egg. But I've noticed that sometimes when I click to get any resources information and the screen rotates you get a quick glimpse of this strange colored background (it seems to happen randomly and doesn't happen often). To me it appears to be snow covered trees (and maybe a swan??).  Does anyone else see this? Or am I going crazy?

Mark Barnes said:

Joshua Garcia said:

I know this isn't a feature, it's closer to an Easter egg. But I've noticed that sometimes when I click to get any resources information and the screen rotates you get a quick glimpse of this strange colored background (it seems to happen randomly and doesn't happen often). To me it appears to be snow covered trees (and maybe a swan??).  Does anyone else see this? Or am I going crazy?

It's a Mac feature. It's Narnia.

Thanks for the link to the thread. That's interesting indeed. Is there any other Easter eggs I should know about?

Jerry M said:

I keep this search on my shortcut bar.  It allows me to look, by hovering, at every English translation on a short or long passage quickly.

Clever! Are you positive that search will find every verse? I thought I'd come up with an example of one it would skip: John 11:35 ("Jesus wept" in most translations). But it does get picked up because some translations have it as "And Jesus wept." But couldn't there be a verse which really doesn't have any of those words in it, in any translation, that we just haven't thought of yet? I suppose if you ever found one, you could just add one more word from that verse to your search string.

Dumb question: Why would any software have undocumented features?

Dave Hooton said:

For the most part, an undocumented feature tends to so esoteric that only geeks would want to know (the developers may not even know!).

I am hoping the developers are leaving enough comments within the code for future programmers to know what is going on.  They are,  aren't they? [:|]

Paul Golder said:

Is there a wiki page for undocumented features?

Umm Paul,  

If there were a Wiki page written up on them, they would no longer be "undocumented" now, would they?

Maybe somebody needs to write "The Underground Guide to Logos: Easter Eggs, Back Doors, & Other Undocumented Features"

Bump.  When I want a better view of a resource, I right click on the tab and select open in a floating window.  I can maximize if I want and then restore down so that it becomes a floating window again. But instead of right clicking on the tab to dock this tab, left click and hold and drag it back where you had it before rather that it going somewhere else on your layout.  This may seem basic, but often newer users don't realize that they can drag a floating window back where it came from. 

Matthew C Jones said:

I am hoping the developers are leaving enough comments within the code for future programmers to know what is going on.  They are,  aren't they?

The only thing in the code that will help future programmers is the code itself. Roughly 14 nanoseconds after a "helpful" comment is added it is rendered worse than useless (i.e. it is wrong) by something else the programmer does.

Writing code well enough that it is self-commenting has been dubbed "literate programming". See, for example, Knuth - http://www.amazon.com/Literate-Programming-Center-Language-Information/dp/0937073806/ .

Donnie

Probably the Wiki are L4's best kept secret and are really good. If you go to L4's help (at least in 4.1), it points you to some simple help, the forums and training videos, but not the best part ... the wiki's.

Kevin Becker said:

The wiki is user-generated documentation. We asked for it shortly after Logos 4 came out because the help feature was so short! It also saves time in answering questions because we can refer people to it.

Rosie Perera said:

Kevin just said what I was about to say.

This I understand, I am neither new to the subject, or the content. I was just hoping that those who contribute to the wiki would consider adding a specific page that documented items that should be, but are not currently available in the help file.

Sorry that my lack of clarity led to the belief of any naïveté.  [8-|]

Mark A. Smith said:

Paul Golder said:

Sorry that my lack of clarity led to the belief of any naïveté.

I understood you perfectly, Paul.

Thanks Mark

If I told you then it would be documented...

Paul Golder said:

I see what you are saying Rosie, but on the other hand we have only seen the help file updated upon gold releases, and those are becoming less frequent as the code matures.

Just a thought...

It still doesn't sound like a fun task. I'm not volunteering. I won't delete the page on the wiki if someone(*) else creates it. That's all the cooperation I'll offer. [:)]

That someone could be you, by the way, if you think this would be helpful and are willing to take it on. Anybody can edit the wiki.

Dave Hooton said:

I nominate Steve not to create it

i second that !!! [^o)]

Paul Golder said:

Dumb question: Why would any software have undocumented features?

When I first asked this question I guess that I was lamenting something that was bothering me. I thought back to how software used to be, for example Microsoft Office.

When 6.0 came out it was feature packed, and came with a 1200 page manual, but it was far from intuitive, and had a steep learning curve for the new user. Who doesn't remember walking into the computer section of a bookstore, were there were shelves upon shelves of books on how to better use Office? Or the many seminars advertised: "This two day workshop will have your employees using MS Office like a pro...", or "Learn the secrets of MS Office". I'm not saying that this was an unusual thing, because it wasn't, pretty much all professional software with a large user base was the same.

Then Office changed, and most of those who had been using it for years complained that it was "too different". But something else changed as well, third party books on Office started to become less and less, the "how to" seminars weren't in high demand any more. The entire third party infrastructure supporting Office began to fade away.

And by all accounts this was a main goal with L4, "easy to use", "intuitive", "not your father's software" (so-to-speak). And yet somethings were held onto:

• "If you want to get the best use of Logos 4, there is a two day Camp you should attend..."
• "There are some really neat things you can do that they did not tell you about..."

I don't know, just lamenting I guess ( sorry about the OT Mark )

Mark Barnes said:

but I'm not sure the parallel's valid. That's because Logos is a research tool...the Guides in Logos (PG, EG and BWS) make the rusty research skills far less of a problem.

True, very true Mark. And the "type and go" features of L4 make it an infinitely useful tool right "out of the box" (or "off the wire", such as it is).

There is also the consideration of my double mindedness, if L4 was entirely straight forward, I would be complaining "I want power user functions!, I want to do more!"

[:'(]

On another note, What are the chances of getting a start-to-finish L4 video for Bible teachers (as in adult Sunday School, Small groups, and the like) ?

Mark Barnes said:

I think that one of the problems with that is that Logos does benefit from being set up well, with collections and prioritisation being particularly important. But you can't set it up, unless you understand the benefits of doing so, and to do that you need to use the program 'out of the box' for a little while. By current tutorial video series is designed to teach the basics first (which will probably take about fifteen lessons and four to five hours), and then move on to more intermediate steps, including collections, prioritising and better searching (probably a similar length). It's only at that point that a walk-through would be useful I think. But that will still leave advanced features (morph and syntax searching, sentence diagramming, visual filters, etc.). That's a long way of saying that a start-to-finish video isn't imminent!

I think I see what you are saying. Once you have a complete set of feature videos, then you can create any number of specific how-to videos that could reference the feature video library at the appropriate places. Correct?

Paul Golder said:

Rosie Perera said:

That someone could be you, by the way, if you think this would be helpful and are willing to take it on. Anybody can edit the wiki.

Do you know how much work that would be?

Now you know why nobody is jumping up and down to volunteer to do it.