A while back ago I received an email from Logos asking me to be a part of the secret beta program for version 4. I said, sure, however I was a bit frustrated that I had to print out the NDA and fax it to them. I wish I could do this without printing – I do so little printing from my computer now. There was a time I taught more and would have liked the ability to print out more for my classes, but I now study for myself. So, anyway, I didn’t really worry about Print issues.
I was told I would be a part of the DVD test group and to please wait for the DVD to arrive before testing it on my main machine. When the DVD finally arrived, I installed it and started trying to learn it. The Beta group had exploded in activity in the meantime and I was behind in learning this thing. I also maybe made a big mistake. I tried to be stupid and act like a user who didn’t know what was going on with the program and didn’t want to know and just wanted hand-holding through the whole deal.
The thing is that even if there are many places in Libronix where I was not really a “power user”, my personality is the kind that wants to get in there and look at how things work and try to break the way things work. So, in effect I did neither that well.
I found ways to crash the automatic guides or get misleading information from the guides. And the early versions of the guides were a bit rough around the edges. I saw pretty eye candy, but some basic content was missing from these guides, and so I thought that this was all about pretty visual stuff and not about basic stuff you need for bible study.
I think it was about 2 weeks before I even tried the search menu, and much longer before I got comfortable with it. So the thing I didn’t notice was how much the core WAS solid and how many of the basics L4 does well, and how it can pull out things I didn’t even know I had. I was grumbling about the reports and various wacky tagging issues. At this point some beta testers were talking already of goodbye 3.0. I was thinking no way! No parallel passage info in passage guide. No collection search in passage guide. Bible word study is having problems counting how many times a word is used. Default preferences were bizarre. What are you thinking?
About two weeks ago they started to fix more and more of this and I saw that L4 Is indeed the future and once it is fixed, it will be a step up. Bob said release is coming soon, and It seemed a bit premature to me, but was showing promise.
Then last week we got a RC1, and I was blown away. Surely they can’t be thinking it is that close. But we got quite a few RC’s, as well as the rebuilt resources later in the week and I found that it really did work better. Even the handouts started to look like they had promise.
But there are holes still. L4 does very good with L4 stuff for an integrated library. However, if you look for user added content, it is not there. Yes, I know it is coming, but no note import hurts many. No pbb is quite annoying for me since I like to look at how scripture is read across the ages and many of these writings are from pbb’s. And none of the xml user contributed stuff.
On the other hand, Libronix 3 now feels clunky when I use it. I want to keep it for a while because it does some stuff that Logos 4 doesn’t, but I enjoy using L4 and don’t for L3.
So was Logos rushed out the door too early? Well, I hear SR-4 is about to come out. Updates are released more often now than during beta, on the other hand, they seem to be smaller tweaks that the difference between beta drops. In my opinion, it probably could have stood to stay in Beta another week or two. On the other hand, over all, it is a better product than L3, at least for most users.
