β7 anticipation
Wow, has it been seven weeks already? Apparently it has. How's you're stamina holding up? How's your experience with L4 shaping your thoughts on L3? As we await the inevitable (?) release of β7 let's take a few moments to reflect on where we've been and where we think we're going.
My Turn...
L4 is at least adequate
My own philosophy of a beta test is that I should use the software as I "normally" would if it were "gold". To that end I've barely fired up L3 over the last seven weeks. A few times I've cross checked books in the library or read portions of PBB's that aren't in L4 yet. Perhaps a few other times I've had cause to fire up L3, but so far I've done (or attempted) to do the lions share of my Libronix based studies in L4. While there are many features missing, there are still many present, and quite a few additions which make L4 a better experience. Case in point: infographics and Biblical People/places/things as a nice expansion beyond L3's capabilities.
While there is doubtless more to come, for my purposes L4 is at least adequate. Of course there are some significant rough spots (i.e. handouts) but for study I'm finding L4 a good pile of code. I like where L4 is going.
L4 is improving
When I first loaded β1, like many of you I experienced a series of crashes and instabilities. While I still am dealing with lockups, or perhaps I should call them system slow downs, L4 is improving. Stability appears to be growing.
Speed of searching is vastly improved, thanks to indexing which itself has been improving. That first round of indexing is painful to be certain, but better than it was. Now with the sixth and soon the seventh beta I'm grateful for the separate index made for new books. That single improvement has made a huge difference.
β7 and beyond
Handouts have got to be fixed: Never select anything by default, never autofill pages by default. Never force fill anything ever.
More stability. Even though I note improvements above, I'm still seeing too many program freezes. They are temporary and they hold my study hostage for anywhere from 10 seconds to 5 minutes. The downside is that they appear kind of random right now - but they need to go away. I wish I knew how best to report a program freeze but I'm a bit lost here.
Optimizations. There seem to be a few every round and I'm grateful but there are I hope far more to come.
Control. With each round of beta and each spurt of requests we gain bits and pieces of control. I'm all for simplicity and L4 goes a long way there. But for me and apparently quite a few of us, simplicity doesn't mean "do it the way we think you should." It means, "Set good defaults and let me change them if I want to."
Scrolling with spacebar and middle click scrolling with the mouse button.
I'm sure there are more but I can't think of any without another pot of coffee.
You're turn.
Sarcasm is my love language. Obviously I love you.
Comments
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Thomas Black said:
More stability. Even though I note improvements above, I'm still seeing too many program freezes. They are temporary and they hold my study hostage for anywhere from 10 seconds to 5 minutes.
There are many things I love about L4, but this is a do or die issue. I assume they will get it resolved, but it is maddening to have my study constantly interrupted by these lengthy hangs.
Thomas Black said:Stability appears to be growing.
Absolutely yes.
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Great analysis Thomas - I am enjoying hanging out with you on here more and more!
I cannot explain why this bugs me so much, but the changing layouts bug drives me crazy! I can deal with the pause (even though I hope it will get faster), but the re-sizing of the entire program just sends me into crazy-land. A little OCD perhaps?
I am really looking forward to the final product. I am getting a better feel for V4 all the time, although some things are still not as intuitive as I would like.
One huge feature for me that is missing, and the only one I cannot do without is speed search. PLEASE tell me this is eventually coming, Logos. I miss this terribly. It is the only reason I open V3 anymore.
Going to try to spend some extended time in v4 today.
Jerry
iMac (2019 model), 3Ghz 6 Core Intel i5, 16gb Ram, Radeon Pro Graphics. 500GB SSD.
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