FEEDBACK WANTED: New Resource Toolbar on Desktop

I'm sorry I haven't been as active in this thread as I intended. We've been reading all your posts, and we discuss this thread and other feedback we get on the dynamic toolbar frequently.

But, an update from me is overdue, so let me try and be as transparent as possible as to where our thinking is.

First, change is hard, especially when you've been used to the old way for years. Maybe you've built layouts that struggle to cope with the extra height of the dynamic toolbar. Maybe there are certain features on the toolbar that you use frequently that used to take one click and now take three or four. Maybe you memorized where your favorite visual filter was on the old toolbar, and now you can't even remember whether it's on View or Formatting. We get all that. And we're sorry for moving your cheese. We don't take those decisions lightly, especially on something as fundamental as this. We spent 18 months researching, designing, and building the dynamic toolbar — more, I think, than any other feature we launched last October. Much of that time was spent learning how people currently interacted with the toolbar because it mattered to us that our changes would be disruptive to some people's study, and we wanted to mitigate that as much as possible.

Second, the dynamic toolbar is here to stay. I know that will displease some of you who were happy with the old minimalistic toolbar. It certainly had some advantages, not least the amount of space it took up. But it had become hopelessly overwhelming for new users and even many experienced users. For their sake, we needed to change, and we aren't going back.

Third, the "old" toolbar will eventually disappear for all users, very likely this year. We can't maintain two entirely different systems indefinitely, and removing the old toolbar will ensure our entire focus will be on making the dynamic toolbar work for everyone.

Fourth, we've made around a dozen small improvements to the dynamic toolbar since it launched in version 37. Two are worth mentioning specifically. First, we added a keyboard shortcut to turn the interlinear on and off. That toggle was the one that had most extra clicks, and was also one which a small number of users used extremely frequently. Second, we made some improvements to inline search, so you didn't have to switch tabs to navigate.

Fifth, we're improving the accessibility of the dynamic toolbar, and those improvements should come in v40 and v41. This should make the dynamic toolbar much more usable than the old toolbar for blind and partially-sighted users.

Sixth, we're planning to add a prefer minimized Program Setting, hopefully in v41 (but it may be later). When this setting is toggled on, two things will happen. Whenever a panel is opened, the dynamic toolbar will be minimized. Whenever a panel is no longer active, the dynamic toolbar will automatically minimize. (By "minimized", I mean that you'll see the toolbar's tabs, but not the second row that contains all the buttons and menus.) You'll be able to unminimize any toolbar by clicking on a tab. It will stay in that state until manually minimized or until you select another panel. We hope this improvement will help users for whom vertical space is key.

But, you might say, even with those improvements, my Logos experience is still worse! Our experience has been that many people find the dynamic toolbar really helps them, some people find that its pros and cons roughly balance, but a small number (thankfully a decreasing one) find their experience is worse. If that's the category you're in, then I'm sorry. I wish that wasn't the case, and I wish that all change was positive for absolutely everyone.

Unfortunately, that isn't always possible, and I have to take responsibility and admit that we've made the dynamic toolbar a little bit worse for a small number of people in order to make it a lot better for a much larger number of people. I wish we didn't have to make that tradeoff. We tried very hard to minimize the trade-off so it could be a win-win. But the unfortunately reality is that it has been disruptive for some — and if you're in that small number, I'm sorry. This sort of thing will hopefully happen extremely rarely, but no software can guarantee that every change is always better for 100% of users.

I'll leave you with a chart, which might help you to better understand our position. The chart shows the behavior of a those people who used Logos throughout 2024 and are now subscribers, and have "Send Feeback" set to "All". (Thanks, it really helps!). It shows how many people in that group toggled the interlinear display on or off. I'm using this toggle as an example, because it's the one that we've had most complaints about, and therefore the one we've been most closely looking at.

You'll see that before version 37 was released in October, typically about 16% of those users toggled the interlinear on or off each month. But since version 37 was released, that's risen by nearly half, to around 24%. So, although this toggle can feel much less accessible to some of you, it's much more discoverable, which means it's being enjoyed and being useful to so many more people. That was always our goal, and that's why the dynamic toolbar is here to stay — and hopefully, to keep on improving.

If you narrow the panel so there is no room for the labels, the text labels will disappear, but the hover tips will remain. Steven and others suggest there should be a setting whereby the labels will disappear even when there would be room to show them.