β7 anticipation

     Wow, has it been seven weeks already?  Apparently it has.  How's you're stamina holding up?  How's your experience with L4 shaping your thoughts on L3?  As we await the inevitable (?) release of β7 let's take a few moments to reflect on where we've been and where we think we're going.

My Turn...

L4 is at least adequate

     My own philosophy of a beta test is that I should use the software as I "normally" would if it were "gold".  To that end I've barely fired up L3 over the last seven weeks.  A few times I've cross checked books in the library or read portions of PBB's that aren't in L4 yet.  Perhaps a few other times I've had cause to fire up L3, but so far I've done (or attempted) to do the lions share of my Libronix based studies in L4.  While there are many features missing, there are still many present, and quite a few additions which make L4 a better experience.  Case in point: infographics and Biblical People/places/things as a nice expansion beyond L3's capabilities. 

While there is doubtless more to come, for my purposes L4 is at least adequate.  Of course there are some significant rough spots (i.e. handouts) but for study I'm finding L4 a good pile of code.  I like where L4 is going.

L4 is improving

When I first loaded β1, like many of you I experienced a series of crashes and instabilities.  While I still am dealing with lockups, or perhaps I should call them system slow downs, L4 is improving.  Stability appears to be growing. 

Speed of searching is vastly improved, thanks to indexing which itself has been improving.  That first round of indexing is painful to be certain, but better than it was.  Now with the sixth and soon the seventh beta I'm grateful for the separate index made for new books.   That single improvement has made a huge difference.

β7 and beyond

Handouts  have got to be fixed:  Never select anything by default, never autofill pages by default.  Never force fill anything ever.

More stability.  Even though I note improvements above, I'm still seeing too many program freezes.  They are temporary and they hold my study hostage for anywhere from 10 seconds to 5 minutes.  The downside is that they appear kind of random right now - but they need to go away.  I wish I knew how best to report a program freeze but I'm a bit lost here.

Optimizations.  There seem to be a few every round and I'm grateful but there are I hope far more to come.

Control.  With each round of beta and each spurt of requests we gain bits and pieces of control.  I'm all for simplicity and L4 goes a long way there.  But for me and apparently quite a few of us, simplicity doesn't mean "do it the way we think you should."  It means, "Set good defaults and let me change them if I want to."

Scrolling with spacebar and middle click scrolling with the mouse button.

I'm sure there are more but I can't think of any without another pot of coffee.

You're turn.