Future for Logos Web App

I just got the email regarding updates to the web app. Looks great. Very good! Glad to see that you are getting closer and closer to parity with the desktop edition. This is nice for me as a Chromebook and Linux user.

I have a question for Logos folks. Are you aiming for the web app to eventually gain full feature parity with the desktop app? The improvements you have made are great, but there is still quite a way to go. In the past, I have been skeptical about the possibility of the web version of Logos to ever reaching feature parity with the desktop version. However, with recent announcements about new technologies (like webassembly) being adopted by a number of key browsers (Chrome and Firefox), I've wondered whether the likelihood of such a goal might be improving. Let me summarize my question. In brief, what are the goals for the web app, and do you expect emerging web technologies to help bring you closer to these goals (possibly feature parity) any time soon? Thanks!

Find more posts tagged with

Web App

Comments

Alan Palmer (Logos)

what are the goals for the web app

Broadly, our goal is to provide the best Bible study tools available on the web. That is much more nuanced (and exciting) than just full feature parity with the desktop application.

We'd love your feedback as we do so. Are there things on the desktop you particularly miss? Are there things we could be doing on the web app that you might use other online resources for? We appreciate you taking the time to talk to us about your experiences.

do you expect emerging web technologies to help bring you closer to these goals (possibly feature parity) any time soon?

A couple years ago, we made an early bet on web assembly by utilizing emscripten to bring our resource display code to the browser. We have been following their progress and are excited to watch as browsers continue to adopt these technologies. You mentioned Chrome and Firefox, but Safari and Edge both have recently discussed upcoming support as well!

That said, web assembly is no silver bullet. It isn't always obvious in during development of web apps how much code/data should exist in the browser and how much should be served through web requests made to servers (a lot of considerations to be made there regarding performance, security, latency/bandwidth, etc). Furthermore, most of our desktop code is in C# and while there are some people who are working on web assembly compilation targets for .NET, I don't expect this ever to be more than .NET Core which limits the usefulness in our case.

We will continue to follow industry trends and be wise with our technology choices in order to serve our customers the best we possibly can.

Sean McIntyre

That is much more nuanced (and exciting) than just full feature parity with the desktop application.

From a user perspective that sounds more mysterious and non-comital.
Do you actually mean nuanced, e.g. the same (parity) with a subtle difference or just following its own path?

From an end user perspective, Logos is a work tool. What I need is to move from one platform to another and have the same workflow. New, exciting and different just tells me that I will have to keep changing my workflow and equals inconvenience.

I would love to be able to be able to switch to a chromebook. For that I need parity and offline features.

Also, I am paying you to be a beta tester, which is a very odd state of affairs.

Keith Pang

I would like to see the web app have the same function as the local desktop program as well. This would make working from either one not a difficult transition as Sean points out.

Phil Gons (Logos)

We don't currently plan for the web app and the desktop app to diverge in significant ways. (They may diverge slightly in some ways necessitated or facilitated by the platform and technological constraints and enablements. For example, the desktop app is going to have much better offline support than the web app. We may eventually do some basic offline support (TBD), but you'll need to rely on the desktop app if you need offline functionality.)

We will likely use the web app to experiment with new approaches and improvements to features. If they prove to be successful, we'll likely bring them back into the desktop app to keep them as close to parity as appropriate. The homepage and search are two current examples of this.

Now, it's possible that the userbases for the two platforms will end up being very different and have very different needs, in which case we'd be open to exploring further variance between the two platforms if that was the best way to serve both audiences. But that's not currently our plan, nor do we anticipate that happening.

Finally, we may not bring every last desktop feature over to the web. Some of the more obscure features that don't get used as often may not ever make it into the web app. In those cases, we'll either have lack of parity or we may consider retiring the feature from the desktop app to keep the two platforms more closely aligned. That's still a ways out, and we'll be sure to get your input once we get into the long tail of desktop features.

But Alan's main point is that we're not planning to merely build the desktop app as it exists today for the web. We want to build the future of the desktop app in the web and then bring that into the desktop app (subsequently or in some cases simultaneously) whenever appropriate.

Doug Newby

I am paying you to be a beta teste

I think it is important to remember that the web app is a feature of other services. Those services being Logos Now and Logos Cloud. I see it as a perk of being a subscriber of those services but not the main reason for the fee. However, as a logos cloud subscriber I would gladly pay an extra fee just for the web app if that meant we had guaranteed major month feature updates. I would love to have the ability to use a chromebook for my Logos use and never need to use the full desktop version.

Kevin A. Purcell

I think it is important to remember that the web app is a feature of other services. Those services being Logos Now and Logos Cloud. I see it as a perk of being a subscriber of those services but not the main reason for the fee. However, as a logos cloud subscriber I would gladly pay an extra fee just for the web app if that meant we had guaranteed major month feature updates. I would love to have the ability to use a chromebook for my Logos use and never need to use the full desktop version.

The recent speed of development makes your suggestion of monthly feature updates hopeful, but I'd want to see the progress continue before I'd every pay for it.

In fact, the main reason I subscribed to Logos Now was for the access to the Web App. I use a Chromebook regularly. At the time that it came out they didn't run Android apps. Currently I own a Samsung Chromebook Plus which does support the Logos Bible Android Mobile app so it's less important than it was then.