For the curious... silence from the Logos developers doesn't mean they are on vacation. It means they are working hard to deliver the things you're waiting for! :-)
There are concerns that Logos has abandoned this or that platform or feature, or that all the energy is on one particular area to the detriment of others. This isn't true. We have a large team split over many projects; the top priority projects generally have more than one person working on them.
Yes, if we cut the number of projects we could get a few of them done sooner. (Though it's often the case that adding 50% more people won't improve productivity by the same amount -- there are diminishing returns as more cooks stir the same pot.) But we believe these are all important things to deliver.
We are actively working on:
- Logos 4 Windows
- Logos 4 Mac
- Logos iOS improvements
- Logos for Android
- Proclaim for Mac/Windows/Mobile (remotes)
- A dozen miscellaneous but (trust me) very important projects related to improving our internal systems, cleaning up metadata, building out our platform, preparing unannounced things, etc., etc.
At the moment, we consider the platform wars "tied" for all of these. Windows has more users than Mac, but Mac is behind and needs improvement, and it is gaining market share on the way to 50%. We consider it equally important to Windows, and already are at the point where some new work is Mac first, then ported to Windows.
iOS has more users, but Android is growing very fast, and we're treating them as equally important. They have equally sized dev teams, though Android is a bit behind, and we're planning all new work/features for both.
We're even preparing for more (alas!) back-end re-writing / re-architecting, to enable us to share more code between all FOUR platforms.
Other mobile OS's are not getting as much attention, though Biblia.com and some HTML5 solutions are still getting some work.
Within the Logos 4 (dual platform) world, we're still working on things like PBB. PBB has been in development for many months, and is absolutely not abandoned. It just hasn't been ready to test or deliver yet. It's getting close.
SermonFile is a harder problem, because we don't like the way we used to do it. People wanted to put too many too different documents into that system, so we're planning a completely different approach that's web oriented. (More http://books.logos.com with document uploading than 3.x SermonFile.) Part of SermonFile functionality will be taken over by a much better PBB tool, part by this new web solution, which is further out than Q2.
We have somewhere around 40 full-time developers. Two started Monday. Two more are hired and starting in coming weeks. We have 14 software development interns this summer; 1 is already here, 6 start Monday, and then they keep coming on through June. We've added a UI designer, have two UI design summer interns, and we've hired more testers.
We are still hiring, and are willing to take at least 6 more full-time developers as soon as we can find them. We conduct multiple development interviews nearly every day. (Using valuable staff time, unfortunately.) We've sent our dev hiring manager to Wheaton, Baylor, and Seattle Pacific University in the past few weeks; we attended a four university career fair in Spokane before that. We've had the computer science faculty of our local Western Washington University in for lunch, and invited all the seniors to come by for a tour. We co-sponsored a local technical recruiting night. (http://bellinghamtechnight.com/)
We're not slacking off, and we're not abandoning your favorite planned features. If we're abandoning anything, it's sleep. :-)
-- Bob
P.S. Know a great software developer? Send them our way!
