Logos 9 Wishlist

I could live with that.  Thank you

Audio Hebrew Bible, please. Yea ASAP, if not sooner (in Logos 8)[:D]

Phil Gons (Faithlife) said:

What are the most important things we should solve for Logos 9?

• What general themes or areas should we focus on?
• What bugs should we fix?
• What improvements should we make to existing features?
• What new features should we add?
• What new data sets should we build?
• What new books should we include?

Please specify desktop, mobile, and/or web, where appropriate.

What does your ideal Logos 9 upgrade look like? What would make Logos 9 an irresistible upgrade for you?

If different, what should we do to win the next generation of new users?

Please include links to forum threads, User Voice requests, etc. where applicable.

We've reviewed the User Voice feedback for desktop, mobile, and books, but I want to make sure that the priorities there are reflective of the current priorities of our forum community.

Thanks for taking the time to share your feedback!

Affordability is the key issue for me. For example, some works, like Keil & Delitzsch, are free, open-source materials, yet cost $50 for a digital edition. If the material you're getting is available for free elsewhere, it should at least be fairly cheap. I would buy a lot more of your resources if I could afford them. I do appreciate the payment over time option, but feel that the materials which are already in the public domain could be significantly reduced in price.

As a new user, one of the perhaps bug-fixes or feature requests I would also appreciate, is that when your existing feature-set (e.g., "basic features") does not contain a reference necessary to populate a feature (e.g., "Example Uses" in the Bible Word Study option), that the a notification comes right out and says that, giving you a link to the set you need to upgrade to, to get that resource. This does happen sometimes, but not always.

For example, the mobile version for Logos 8 includes the resource "Example uses" (derived from the resource "Andersen-Forbes Hebrew Grammatical Relationships"), and populates this on the mobile version

The PC version does not do this, and doesn't inform you why you don't see the information populated:

It took me several hours in the community area to discover that I had to upgrade to a higher feature-set, to access this feature in the Windows version. Bringing this to people's attention and giving them a link to click for the upgrade, would probably also help improve sales. I know Logos does do this sometimes, but evidently not for this particular feature, at least.

JT (alabama24) said:

The FL model is free software, paid resources. The revenue needs to come from some place.

I was surprised by the ICC sale. I remember one today with a regular price at over $90 ... one of the public domains. And other PDs in the $60 range. The resulting sale of older books is above my pay grade. I remember last year $2 each I think. 

Do you have any idea how intensive an effort it is to take an extremely terse and complex commentary like the ICC and digitize it? To this day my problem is that there are still so many typos, especially in the Hebrew text of the old ICCs, badly tagged references, etc. BUT, where’s the money going to come for continuing this mammoth work, if not from us? Just a friendly reminder...

(PS, I write this on my iPhone, it’s incredibly hard to do on this non mobile site!)

Nicholas Petersen said:

Do you have any idea how intensive an effort it is to take an extremely terse and complex commentary like the ICC and digitize it?

Yes, I do it all the time. And I don't even charge myself. And remember Hermeneia and others are more complex, require royalties, and are cheaper (sale). Just a friendly reminder ....

Denise said:

Nicholas Petersen said:

Do you have any idea how intensive an effort it is to take an extremely terse and complex commentary like the ICC and digitize it?

Yes, I do it all the time. And I don't even charge myself. And remember Hermeneia and others are more complex, require royalties, and are cheaper (sale). Just a friendly reminder ....

True, but you only have to do it once, then you can sell it again and again with no additional work. I made bunk bed plans once. Took me about three weeks. But then, they sold at the rate of about $100 per year, for the next ten years. You don't have to charge $50 per unit, for the next 100 years, after you get your money back.

Allow Morph searches for multiple terms using WITHIN and similar operators to cross verse boundaries and allow Basic searches for multiple terms to do the same across chapters.

JT (alabama24) said:

Lee Gordon said:

It's free on E-sword. I've also seen a number of places on the Internet, claiming it's public domain and offering free digital editions of it.

I don't think so, but it could be. Can you provide a screenshot of the copyright info? The Logos version is: 

Resource Info said:

Keil, Carl Friedrich, and Franz Delitzsch. Commentary on the Old Testament. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1996.

The blurb states: 

BLURB said:

This is the 1996 revised edition from Hendrickson, and it features a number of enhancements to the text, e.g., Arabic has been transliterated, biblical references have been changed from Roman to Arabic numerals and long paragraphs have been broken into shorter ones so that the work is easier to read.

The version you cite is a "revised", 1996 version. They noted they added a number of features and enhancements. Hencrickson may own the copyright to the version they revised, but I don't think that applies to all versions. Otherwise, I could take a public domain title, modify it, then claim no one else can ever use it.

JT (alabama24) said:

Lee Gordon said:

Hendrickson may own the copyright to the version they revised, but I don't think that applies to all versions.

No, you are right. But that is the point. The version that FL is using IS copyrighted. It isn't the public domain version. Hence the $50 includes whatever fee the publisher charges FL. 

Logos chooses which versions of the resource they make available. The free, public domain version has already been digitized. Is it that there's no one who has offered to make that available on Logos, or is it that Logos has chosen to market a version that generates more revenue?

Lynden Williams said:

Develop a feature that can read resources in the app on the mobile platform. Like to listen to my books while driving on waiting inline. 

Even the mechanical voice in Windows 10 is adequate. Just make sure that it knows that Rev. 1:1 means Revelation chapter 1 vs 1. LEB should read Lexham Bible Dictionary.

The UserVoice feature request has been marked as "Started" for years... Very frustrating: https://logosmobile.uservoice.com/forums/190765-logos-mobile-apps/suggestions/3671914-enable-read-aloud-or-text-to-speech-like-in-the-de

It is the fourth most requested mobile feature.

Dennis Davis said:

Hi Phil, 

Great thread.  One of my primary pet peeves is with the guides.  If you follow a guide through each step by the time you reach the end, you've got a huge number of notes icons in your passage.  I think a good idea would be to simply have one note icon show up for each passage in which a guide is used.  This will still allow people to see the icon and refer back to the full guide but will de-clutter the passage landscape. 

Cheers and Happy New Year! 

I agree... I don't think they have to change the architecture of the workflow (though I wish they didn't proliferate notebooks!), but rather they could change the way consecutive notes are rendered. Whenever there are multiple note icons in a row, they should collapse them into a single multiple-note icon that you could hover over or click to see the individual notes.

Mark Barnes said:

I appreciate that to sell upgrades to Logos 9 you need something new, but I don't think that's what Logos needs right now.

My focus would be on consolidating datasets and tools and improving existing features.

Amen!

Just read that the CSB audio bible does not sync with the text.

To clarify my previous wish, I hope that any future Hebrew audio bible would include the necessary sync markers that would let the text follow along with the audio.

Thanks for considering how important the read along feature should be for future audio bibles.

Phil Gons (Faithlife) said:

What improvements should we make to existing features?

Give us the option to use abbreviated Bible references in the reference box so we don't have this issue: 

See here: https://community.logos.com/forums/p/184807/1064514.aspx#1064514 

I would like to see the next version of Logos focus on giving you various ways of organizing your library and notes, and more intuitive markup features. I use all digital books because I serve on the foreign mission field and hauling books is nearly impossible, but I miss having a physical library.

1. I would love it if there was a "hand markup" mode which could be used to set a reader page and text size and then to be able to use a stylus on tablet to make hand notes on a layer above that. Or at LEAST, a way to set up the books so that they had a wide commenting margin which tracked with the text, these could then be folded into the notes feature as drawings/handwritten notes. Bonus if it lets us import handwritten notes we have already written elsewhere. 

2. I do not like the way that "collections" work, they try to be too automatic and are buried in the menus as an old feature, you can't do much with them.  I would love to see a "shelves" feature that lets me grab books that I'm currently perusing and put them into a visual collection according to whatever logic I want. I would really love it if they implemented some kind of a simulated "stacks" of your library, with the covers and the page count determining the size of the books. You could then lay out your shelves however you wanted in a "Library" module, or according to their actual locations in a Dewey Decimal system. I think one thing people forget is so useful about a physical library is that you often find other books of use sitting next to the one you were actually searching for, and the laser precision of the library search engine in Logos makes it so precise that I often miss other books I should page through. This could even work to sell more books, show me other books that would have been on the shelf if I bought them.

3. I want, no I need, full PDF (with search) integration into logos. The number of academic journals and important materials which are freely available in PDF format is astounding, and this is the final missing piece in logos with regard to academic use. The journals on offer in the logos format are a very limited selection. At the very least, if you could add a plugin for something like mendeley so that we could query our pdf database as part of a logos search. 

4. Reading plans need to be able to generate a plan based on a longer reading list than a single book. 

5. Ability to attach notes to "things", "persons" etc, not just bible references. The data is already there, this should be simple, but would allow me for example to keep all my notes on "Peter" to follow Peter wherever he appears in the text, or more specifically, my extensive notes on oil lamps whenever a lamp is lit in a text. 

6. The atlas feature is very badly in need of a complete rebuild, the level of detail it provides, even with several good purchased resources is not useful beyond lay bible study. I have traveled extensively in the Holy Land and have a lot of notes on individual archaelogical sites etc. I would like to be able to mark up the maps, and they need a far closer level of detail. I don't just want to be able to use atlas resources that I buy, but actually add my own layers. The research has been done enough that we ought to have functional detailed and modifiable maps of Jerusalem, places like Capernaum where we have the streets, etc. from the archaeology. I often have such maps in my library because of resources I own, but they are not able to integrate into the atlas. Let me drop a copy of the madaba map on the landscape for example and toggle it on or off. The ability to add and pin our own maps to a base GPS coordinate system would go a long ways towards this. For a random example, I would like to pin notes about the types of trees and animals which might be found in a particular area of the desert to that place, so that later when I am following the route of a Biblical character through that same place, my notes about the environment would be available there. This might seem like unnecessary detail, but it is what you discover by walking through these places. I also don't always agree with Faithlife on where an event took place, and would like the option to pin a text to a location on my own. 

7. When working in multiple languages it is a bit annoying that for example in my Spanish Bible it won't recognize if I type the references in Spanish, I have to type them in English, same for Greek. It should recognize the reference whatever language I type it in, at least for a resource in that language. 

James Neuendorf said:

3. I want, no I need, full PDF (with search) integration into logos. The number of academic journals and important materials which are freely available in PDF format is astounding, and this is the final missing piece in logos with regard to academic use. The journals on offer in the logos format are a very limited selection. At the very least, if you could add a plugin for something like mendeley so that we could query our pdf database as part of a logos search. 

[Y]

James Neuendorf said:

6. The atlas feature is very badly in need of a complete rebuild, the level of detail it provides, even with several good purchased resources is not useful beyond lay bible study. I have traveled extensively in the Holy Land and have a lot of notes on individual archaelogical sites etc. I would like to be able to mark up the maps, and they need a far closer level of detail. I don't just want to be able to use atlas resources that I buy, but actually add my own layers. The research has been done enough that we ought to have functional detailed and modifiable maps of Jerusalem, places like Capernaum where we have the streets, etc. from the archaeology. I often have such maps in my library because of resources I own, but they are not able to integrate into the atlas. Let me drop a copy of the madaba map on the landscape for example and toggle it on or off. The ability to add and pin our own maps to a base GPS coordinate system would go a long ways towards this. For a random example, I would like to pin notes about the types of trees and animals which might be found in a particular area of the desert to that place, so that later when I am following the route of a Biblical character through that same place, my notes about the environment would be available there. This might seem like unnecessary detail, but it is what you discover by walking through these places. I also don't always agree with Faithlife on where an event took place, and would like the option to pin a text to a location on my own. 

[Y]

good comments.  I hope they get somewhere.  I had mentioned before about journals that the ones that Logos carries are not the ones you see cited in scholarly works.