20 wanted new features for Logos 10
Björn Pettersson
Member Posts: 7
So, the ideas I have for your next Logos upgrade, could be for the major one expected to be Logos 10, or for smaller upgrades during the Logos 9 era, whatever you want.
The ideas that I have are:
1. Interlinear resources improvements – the Inline Reverse Interlinear window layout of the English texts with more flexibility and with more Accordance alike use of different font sizes. The main text should have bigger letters than in the other rows so that you easily find the text always, and thus smaller letters for other rows. All to improve readability, to be able to read faster and get a nicer look. To the left in the text, in the beginning of each verse, the used resources should be listed, and headlines such as Manuscript, Manuscript Transliterated etc., so you easily see what you have in each row, see (1).
2. The Reverse Interlinear Pane layout should be possible to change font size and screens size by drag and drop of the upper border – currently it often takes too much space in my opinion, especially with a bigger screen. Another improvement would be to bold something, e.g. the greek letters, decrease the letters for the Morph so that two letters for each abbreviation could be displayed to make it easier to read, decrease the letters for Sense so that it won’t take so much space, add another field for the “part of speech” and spell it out with all letters.
a. The constant space between the rows should be eliminated, and the two colours indicating different rows as well. This will give much more flexibility to bold important text where the eye should fall, to spell out more letters for increased readability, to give two or three Senses etc, in the same time as using less space, using space in a more efficient way.
b. If you want to keep the classical Logos view of the Reverse Interlinear Pane, then please make this configurable, and add a new view, the view described in a., and call it something else, Modern view or similar.
3. Possibility to have interlinear functionality in the Greek NA-28 text and similar Greek and Hebrew texts, similar to Accordance, see below in the screen dumps, (1)-(3). Thus, it should not be required to purchase special original language interlinear texts to get that functionality.
4. A better, closer to text and more information in an “instant display” that currently pops up in the bottom when hoovering of e.g. bible texts – but instead should either 1. be a constantly shown window in the bottom of the program or even better, where you place it, e.g. in the middle of the text to always have it fairly close to where your read or 2. pop up as the instant displays you use for links to quotes or bible verses in other-than-bible-text books. Thus the type of display should be possible to set in a user setting, with the pop-up display as default.
5. It should be possible to hoover over a Greek och Hebrew word, to get that word marked without prefixes or suffixes, translated with morphology etc in such an “instant display” as defined in 4. and that the program instantly also marks the translated word in the multiparallell resources, as you have it in (3). This will be an invaluable help to read and translate a Greek och Hebrew text very rapidly, even if no expert. This should be possible both in original texts and interlinear texts.
6. The content of such an instant display when showing information of a word in a bible text, should be comparable to the content of the Instant Details display in Accordance. That is, you should be able to find at least the following information: Manuscript Manuscript transliterated Word Word transliterated Tag (e.g. Verb third singular present middle indicative (with those words spelled out completely)), Translation (with several alternatives of translation of the word) Strong’s number (and I would also like to have a link to one or two preferred) Links to dictionaries.
7. Such an instant display should, if set to pop up when hoovering over it, stay visible and constant if clicking on the word until clicking on it again to make it disappear. Then the font size should be possible to change in the window, the content should be possible to copy and the links to dictionaries should be possible to click.
8. In the multiparallell view (multiple resources display), it should be possible to set the width of each window.
9. I would prefer to have it popping up above the marked/hoovered word in the bible text.
10. I would also like to be able to mark one word in the text making the corresponding word in any of Multiple resources displays be marked as well, by just hoovering over (if it is fast!). It could also be a user setting with the alternative to click on the word to mark that word and the corresponding word in the other Multiple resources displays.
11. Optional: Increased flexibility should be added to the layout of Multiple resources display. It should e.g. be possible to split the windows both vertically and horizontally in a combined way, and easily move around by dragging and dropping the different multiple windows as you prefer.
12. The Notes functionality (which is already much better than Accordance) should be extended. Since I have too many Notebooks already, it is quite a bit to scroll in the list. I would suggest adding a possibility to build up a directory tree of Notebooks in the Notebooks view of Notes. Thus adding and editing and moving around both folders and notes, expand and diminish folders and sub-folders, i.e. functionality similar to a File explorer. A note should be possible to copy and add to several folders.
13. Optional: A library window/sheet should be possible to add easily to the layout:
a. Since it is not obvious that it is possible to drag and drop the Library icon to a window, under Tools/Library could also be a selectable “Library”, shown as the icon that is shown beside the Home icon in the upper row.
b. From the top I would say that Subject, Type, (User defined) Collection, Tags,… should be the priority. However, it should be possible to drag and drop the order of the categories.
c. It should be possible to select an All view, which is as the current view in Logos 8, or a Layout view, which is as follows. After having saved a layout the first time, the opened resources (texts, books, grammars etc) should be ordered under the same filter categories as in the All view, but no other. If updating the view, all newly opened resources in that layout should be added to the view and sorted under the categories. A “Recently opened” and a “Recently closed” category should be displayed on the top, above the Subject, Type etc. Under that, another new category could be defined, “Recommended”. Depending on which resources that are opened in the Layout, an algorithm could try to recommend 5-15 books within each of the most useful categories. Under that filter category, the Subject, Type, Collection etc. should come.
d. However, it could optionally be possible to choose a setting in Program Settings that uses a more compressed view (I would say it is useful if you have a small library only), that does not take so much width – instead of Open two windows when choosing the filter view, each filter views may be expandable, showing the alphabetically sorted books/texts.
e. With such a library window it will be possible to close some windows in your layout without being afraid to forget the book, which may be needed soon again in your layout, thus making the layout work faster with less windows.
14. A faster browsing through the opened resources in a window should be possible to do, which I think requires another method. If many windows are open, which I always get into, it takes many seconds to go from the rightmost to the leftmost resource in the window and it would save lots of time if there is a possibility to open the list of the resources that are hidden to the left or right. Thus, another arrow or similar is needed, above or beside the current arrow. It could also be an arrow possible to expand, so that the feature could be used only in layouts where there is a need for it, i.e. when lots of resources are opened.
15. The list window, shown when clicking on the new arrow (from feat 14) and showing the list of the resources that was hidden on that side before showing the list, should preferably use a Tile view that you currently use as one selectable option in a Library window/sheet.
16. The colour scheme should be updated to give priority for the eye to reach the text, with darker fields for other tasks and more flexibility should be added to some of the displays/panes:
a. In Program Settings/Resource Panel Background should have another colour, which is just a slightly bit darker than “White”, the current White could be called Light White and the new one White. Maybe another new colour could be slightly lighter than Paper, “Light Paper”. The Light Gray colour could be slightly lighter, thus closer to Very Light Gray and the Gray could be as Light Gray is today.
b. The configurable colours for different fields and texts, highlighted text etc should be more flexible and configurable. The following is to be regarded as a minimum of configurability.
i. The Instant Displays, the Note/Highlights and possibly the scroll bar (sometimes my eyes tells me that there is no scroll bar. I can understand that you do not want the scroll bars to disturb the layout, but it could be a setting to choose whether the colour should be contrasting or not) should be darker than the text and other resources. Especially the scroll bar is currently to hard to see. There should be a setting to choose whether those fields should match the colour chosen for Resource panel background, or if it should be a gray colour matching the nuance of the chosen Resource panel background colour, i.e. reasonably darker than that nuance.
ii. The active workspace should be possible to mark with a fine line in another colour, like the darker blue below. The keyboard keys will be active there (as is today). The mouse will be active where the mouse is on the screen (as is today), which should be marked with a lighter colour of that chosen colour, below in a light blue colour. No other windows should have a fine line marking it active.
iii. It should be possible to choose a Default Light Gray colour scheme, and a Default Light Paper colour scheme, with good matching contrasting colours, fine line colours and colours for the other fields/displays, scroll bars etc. Two examples of colour schemes for Accordance are shown below for inspiration of default colour schemes. The second where I use different colours for the text and for books to increase readability.
iv. The colour of the field in the Modern view/Accordance view described in 2. a. and b. should be in the same matching colour as described in iii. above. In this view, no rows with different colours should be configured, one single, contrasting colour will be fine.
17. The next release should also have a faster performance when browsing, selecting words in interlinear mode and Multiple resources displays, better performance when doing search, open notes, executing a guide or tool, and well, generally better performance in the next upgrade.
18. It should be possible to set two kind of bookmarks in a (any) book: 1. a bookmark that marks an especially important citation/side/two sides, that should be remembered, called e.g. bookmark memo help and 2. a bookmark that marks where you stopped reading the last time, e.g. called readers bookmark. Such a bookmark should be at least three-four, since e.g. when reading the bible one might read the OT, Psalm and NT continuously and in parallel during a year, and want to put one bookmark for each of that reading. Both 1. and 2. should be easily accessible for each book, e.g. from the sidebar menu in the upper left, to the right of the Note window, a new window called Bookmarks where these two types and all user defined bookmarks of those types are ordered. Or else if you’d prefer to order it in the Notes window, with two new types (called e.g. Bookmark memo help and Readers bookmarks).
19. For Hebrew and Greek students, it would be nice to have a possibility to reduce the speed of the read audio version “Audio reading of Hebrew old and new testament” and correspondingly for the Greek version to at least 0,5 and probably also to 0,25, so it is possible also to follow the text as a slow reading student. Even better, it would be nice to have a sync between audio and text somehow, e.g. an audio reading in the Hebrew (Stuttgartensia, Lexham) and the Greek Testaments (NA-28, SBL), i.e. a Read aloud option there, that also gives a marker that follows the text. Combined with feature nr. 3 in the list – improvement of the interlinear functionality so you have the morphology and the English translations in the text, that would be such a nice tool to read the original language text! A control panel that pops up when you “Read aloud” with Play, Pause, browse to preceding/next verse (< / >), browse to preceding/next chapter (<< / >>) would also be nice.
20. I do appreciate the Basics package a lot, it is nice to be able to recommend student colleagues of that one. However, I do not understand the asymmetry of having a Greek translation (SBL) but not a Hebrew (Stuttgartensia e.g.). So I hope you would like to add also a Hebrew text maybe?
The above features is what I really would love to see in upcoming releases of Logos. I hope that would be feasible to implement. Of course, you have all the options to change in my design as you prefer, the list is just set up to give you my view and initial ideas from my user perspective; I am sure that you have more, other and better ideas to bring to the functionality.
If you need more explanations or would prefer a more detailed specification, please let me know.
(1)
(2)
(3)
The screen shots (1) - (3) are added in files below.
Best Regards,
Björn
The ideas that I have are:
1. Interlinear resources improvements – the Inline Reverse Interlinear window layout of the English texts with more flexibility and with more Accordance alike use of different font sizes. The main text should have bigger letters than in the other rows so that you easily find the text always, and thus smaller letters for other rows. All to improve readability, to be able to read faster and get a nicer look. To the left in the text, in the beginning of each verse, the used resources should be listed, and headlines such as Manuscript, Manuscript Transliterated etc., so you easily see what you have in each row, see (1).
2. The Reverse Interlinear Pane layout should be possible to change font size and screens size by drag and drop of the upper border – currently it often takes too much space in my opinion, especially with a bigger screen. Another improvement would be to bold something, e.g. the greek letters, decrease the letters for the Morph so that two letters for each abbreviation could be displayed to make it easier to read, decrease the letters for Sense so that it won’t take so much space, add another field for the “part of speech” and spell it out with all letters.
a. The constant space between the rows should be eliminated, and the two colours indicating different rows as well. This will give much more flexibility to bold important text where the eye should fall, to spell out more letters for increased readability, to give two or three Senses etc, in the same time as using less space, using space in a more efficient way.
b. If you want to keep the classical Logos view of the Reverse Interlinear Pane, then please make this configurable, and add a new view, the view described in a., and call it something else, Modern view or similar.
3. Possibility to have interlinear functionality in the Greek NA-28 text and similar Greek and Hebrew texts, similar to Accordance, see below in the screen dumps, (1)-(3). Thus, it should not be required to purchase special original language interlinear texts to get that functionality.
4. A better, closer to text and more information in an “instant display” that currently pops up in the bottom when hoovering of e.g. bible texts – but instead should either 1. be a constantly shown window in the bottom of the program or even better, where you place it, e.g. in the middle of the text to always have it fairly close to where your read or 2. pop up as the instant displays you use for links to quotes or bible verses in other-than-bible-text books. Thus the type of display should be possible to set in a user setting, with the pop-up display as default.
5. It should be possible to hoover over a Greek och Hebrew word, to get that word marked without prefixes or suffixes, translated with morphology etc in such an “instant display” as defined in 4. and that the program instantly also marks the translated word in the multiparallell resources, as you have it in (3). This will be an invaluable help to read and translate a Greek och Hebrew text very rapidly, even if no expert. This should be possible both in original texts and interlinear texts.
6. The content of such an instant display when showing information of a word in a bible text, should be comparable to the content of the Instant Details display in Accordance. That is, you should be able to find at least the following information: Manuscript Manuscript transliterated Word Word transliterated Tag (e.g. Verb third singular present middle indicative (with those words spelled out completely)), Translation (with several alternatives of translation of the word) Strong’s number (and I would also like to have a link to one or two preferred) Links to dictionaries.
7. Such an instant display should, if set to pop up when hoovering over it, stay visible and constant if clicking on the word until clicking on it again to make it disappear. Then the font size should be possible to change in the window, the content should be possible to copy and the links to dictionaries should be possible to click.
8. In the multiparallell view (multiple resources display), it should be possible to set the width of each window.
9. I would prefer to have it popping up above the marked/hoovered word in the bible text.
10. I would also like to be able to mark one word in the text making the corresponding word in any of Multiple resources displays be marked as well, by just hoovering over (if it is fast!). It could also be a user setting with the alternative to click on the word to mark that word and the corresponding word in the other Multiple resources displays.
11. Optional: Increased flexibility should be added to the layout of Multiple resources display. It should e.g. be possible to split the windows both vertically and horizontally in a combined way, and easily move around by dragging and dropping the different multiple windows as you prefer.
12. The Notes functionality (which is already much better than Accordance) should be extended. Since I have too many Notebooks already, it is quite a bit to scroll in the list. I would suggest adding a possibility to build up a directory tree of Notebooks in the Notebooks view of Notes. Thus adding and editing and moving around both folders and notes, expand and diminish folders and sub-folders, i.e. functionality similar to a File explorer. A note should be possible to copy and add to several folders.
13. Optional: A library window/sheet should be possible to add easily to the layout:
a. Since it is not obvious that it is possible to drag and drop the Library icon to a window, under Tools/Library could also be a selectable “Library”, shown as the icon that is shown beside the Home icon in the upper row.
b. From the top I would say that Subject, Type, (User defined) Collection, Tags,… should be the priority. However, it should be possible to drag and drop the order of the categories.
c. It should be possible to select an All view, which is as the current view in Logos 8, or a Layout view, which is as follows. After having saved a layout the first time, the opened resources (texts, books, grammars etc) should be ordered under the same filter categories as in the All view, but no other. If updating the view, all newly opened resources in that layout should be added to the view and sorted under the categories. A “Recently opened” and a “Recently closed” category should be displayed on the top, above the Subject, Type etc. Under that, another new category could be defined, “Recommended”. Depending on which resources that are opened in the Layout, an algorithm could try to recommend 5-15 books within each of the most useful categories. Under that filter category, the Subject, Type, Collection etc. should come.
d. However, it could optionally be possible to choose a setting in Program Settings that uses a more compressed view (I would say it is useful if you have a small library only), that does not take so much width – instead of Open two windows when choosing the filter view, each filter views may be expandable, showing the alphabetically sorted books/texts.
e. With such a library window it will be possible to close some windows in your layout without being afraid to forget the book, which may be needed soon again in your layout, thus making the layout work faster with less windows.
14. A faster browsing through the opened resources in a window should be possible to do, which I think requires another method. If many windows are open, which I always get into, it takes many seconds to go from the rightmost to the leftmost resource in the window and it would save lots of time if there is a possibility to open the list of the resources that are hidden to the left or right. Thus, another arrow or similar is needed, above or beside the current arrow. It could also be an arrow possible to expand, so that the feature could be used only in layouts where there is a need for it, i.e. when lots of resources are opened.
15. The list window, shown when clicking on the new arrow (from feat 14) and showing the list of the resources that was hidden on that side before showing the list, should preferably use a Tile view that you currently use as one selectable option in a Library window/sheet.
16. The colour scheme should be updated to give priority for the eye to reach the text, with darker fields for other tasks and more flexibility should be added to some of the displays/panes:
a. In Program Settings/Resource Panel Background should have another colour, which is just a slightly bit darker than “White”, the current White could be called Light White and the new one White. Maybe another new colour could be slightly lighter than Paper, “Light Paper”. The Light Gray colour could be slightly lighter, thus closer to Very Light Gray and the Gray could be as Light Gray is today.
b. The configurable colours for different fields and texts, highlighted text etc should be more flexible and configurable. The following is to be regarded as a minimum of configurability.
i. The Instant Displays, the Note/Highlights and possibly the scroll bar (sometimes my eyes tells me that there is no scroll bar. I can understand that you do not want the scroll bars to disturb the layout, but it could be a setting to choose whether the colour should be contrasting or not) should be darker than the text and other resources. Especially the scroll bar is currently to hard to see. There should be a setting to choose whether those fields should match the colour chosen for Resource panel background, or if it should be a gray colour matching the nuance of the chosen Resource panel background colour, i.e. reasonably darker than that nuance.
ii. The active workspace should be possible to mark with a fine line in another colour, like the darker blue below. The keyboard keys will be active there (as is today). The mouse will be active where the mouse is on the screen (as is today), which should be marked with a lighter colour of that chosen colour, below in a light blue colour. No other windows should have a fine line marking it active.
iii. It should be possible to choose a Default Light Gray colour scheme, and a Default Light Paper colour scheme, with good matching contrasting colours, fine line colours and colours for the other fields/displays, scroll bars etc. Two examples of colour schemes for Accordance are shown below for inspiration of default colour schemes. The second where I use different colours for the text and for books to increase readability.
iv. The colour of the field in the Modern view/Accordance view described in 2. a. and b. should be in the same matching colour as described in iii. above. In this view, no rows with different colours should be configured, one single, contrasting colour will be fine.
17. The next release should also have a faster performance when browsing, selecting words in interlinear mode and Multiple resources displays, better performance when doing search, open notes, executing a guide or tool, and well, generally better performance in the next upgrade.
18. It should be possible to set two kind of bookmarks in a (any) book: 1. a bookmark that marks an especially important citation/side/two sides, that should be remembered, called e.g. bookmark memo help and 2. a bookmark that marks where you stopped reading the last time, e.g. called readers bookmark. Such a bookmark should be at least three-four, since e.g. when reading the bible one might read the OT, Psalm and NT continuously and in parallel during a year, and want to put one bookmark for each of that reading. Both 1. and 2. should be easily accessible for each book, e.g. from the sidebar menu in the upper left, to the right of the Note window, a new window called Bookmarks where these two types and all user defined bookmarks of those types are ordered. Or else if you’d prefer to order it in the Notes window, with two new types (called e.g. Bookmark memo help and Readers bookmarks).
19. For Hebrew and Greek students, it would be nice to have a possibility to reduce the speed of the read audio version “Audio reading of Hebrew old and new testament” and correspondingly for the Greek version to at least 0,5 and probably also to 0,25, so it is possible also to follow the text as a slow reading student. Even better, it would be nice to have a sync between audio and text somehow, e.g. an audio reading in the Hebrew (Stuttgartensia, Lexham) and the Greek Testaments (NA-28, SBL), i.e. a Read aloud option there, that also gives a marker that follows the text. Combined with feature nr. 3 in the list – improvement of the interlinear functionality so you have the morphology and the English translations in the text, that would be such a nice tool to read the original language text! A control panel that pops up when you “Read aloud” with Play, Pause, browse to preceding/next verse (< / >), browse to preceding/next chapter (<< / >>) would also be nice.
20. I do appreciate the Basics package a lot, it is nice to be able to recommend student colleagues of that one. However, I do not understand the asymmetry of having a Greek translation (SBL) but not a Hebrew (Stuttgartensia e.g.). So I hope you would like to add also a Hebrew text maybe?
The above features is what I really would love to see in upcoming releases of Logos. I hope that would be feasible to implement. Of course, you have all the options to change in my design as you prefer, the list is just set up to give you my view and initial ideas from my user perspective; I am sure that you have more, other and better ideas to bring to the functionality.
If you need more explanations or would prefer a more detailed specification, please let me know.
(1)
(2)
(3)
The screen shots (1) - (3) are added in files below.
Best Regards,
Björn
9
Comments
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Thanks, @bjornepagen-14, for the great feedback. It's most helpful to make each feedback item a single request. It's difficult to vote and prioritize a big group like this. It would be helpful if you could break these out into discrete suggestions.0
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"... And do not be grieved, for the joy of the LORD is your strength." (Ne 8.10)
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