I'm guessing the Logos 5 release will be "sooner than you think."
I know that many users felt Logos 4 was released too soon, and I'm sure some will think that of Logos 5, too. So I want to give you our reasons in advance, so at least the beta testers will have come to grips with it by then. :-)
Logos 5 doesn't have a long list of "things that are missing" from the previous version. So there are fewer existing expectations to meet.
Logos 5 contains some very large, very important new data sets. We've been working on some of these for three years, and it's time to get them out to the world. Others are newer -- and by some definitions incomplete (in some cases, theoretically never complete) -- but still very useful in their current form. For example, people are now completely tagged, including every referring expression and place where they are the implied subject. But this is only for the 66 book canon. The timeline data contains thousands of events, and is linked directly into many books, but there are a near-infinite number of events, and thousands of books in our system that could get explicit event linking. I expect work will continue and updates will download for years.
It's time to refresh our base packages; we have new content we want to get out (including some core text editions never-before-available), and we have publishers who want their content added, and others who want it removed, from our base collections.
Like Logos 4, Logos 5 will have many no-cost updates and improvements; we have a long list of small features, minor tweaks, requested improvements, etc. that aren't going to make the first cut, but which will follow in the coming months.
Shipping Logos 5 now doesn't mean we consider this the "final release." Development will be ongoing.
Since this isn't a major platform re-write, and we haven't made fundamental changes to architecture, we expect that the update will go smoothly; we really appreciate the feedback here in the beta forum, and we're working hard to address the issues and bugs brought up. But a few of these things are "annoyances remaining from Logos 4", and I can't promise we'll address them all before releasing Logos 5. We won't stop working on improving then, though, and after releasing 5 we will have the major new features mostly out of the way and be able to take some more time polishing and tweaking in response to user feedback.
Could we hold Logos 5 another year and "get everything right" and optimize and re-write and tune and polish? Yes. But the distance from here to there is still a year, and holding Logos 5 won't speed that up; it'll just keep the new content, new features, and new books out of everyone's hands longer.
And, importantly, shipping now will let us start bringing in income against the three years of content development and coding we've been doing since shipping Logos 4. This is an internal argument that only means something to us, not the users, but if you want us to be here for you in the future, we need to ship major releases at least this often (if not more often). Despite the web, downloads, etc. large "pro" software packages like ours are still funded by an upgrade cycle model. And it's been three years.
The good news is, since Logos 5 is built on Logos 4 and moves forward from it, there shouldn't be the "missing features" concern of Logos 4. Of course, you can choose to stay on Logos 4 anyway -- just like you could choose to stay on Logos 3 -- but in this case you don't give anything up in your primary tool if you move to 5. It's all there, just with more great tools and content.
Our team is working very hard to get Logos 5 done, and released far enough before Christmas (which still drives our strongest sales quarter) to put it at the top of everyone's list. :-)
-- Bob
P.S. A specific example: We've been writing a new notes editor, based of our book display engine, for many months. It's already shipping in the iOS app -- it's how we let you edit rich-text formatted notes on the iPhone. But putting it on the desktop requires more functionality, interface, etc. (We don't let you DO rich text formatting on the iPhone, but will on the desktop.) Most importantly, it requires a lot of testing to make sure it doesn't "eat" anyone's existing notes. (Example: Notes don't support tables, and have no table editing user interface. But some users have used the paste loop-hole to get tables into their notes. Switching notes editors from the built-in editor on WPF / Mac to our own means we have to make sure we don't munge tables, which may be in a completely different layout model (and for which we still don't have an editing UI).
The new notes editor is an important upgrade, but it's "invisible" to most users. Many users don't take notes, and many who do don't do anything fancy or complicated; they just do some highlights and type some short plain text.
We're not confident that the new editor will be ready in time, and we want it to be thoroughly tested. So it won't be in Logos 5.0, but will follow shortly after (a couple months, I'm guessing) in an update.
Holding the new notes editor, but still shipping Logos 5, doesn't take anyone "backwards". And it'll still be part of Logos 5, just not in the first release.
