Just Brief Suggestion for Logos

Michael Huffman said:

Perhaps that WPF format  is used because of the "extra" looks like the book covers and if they were removed they could go back to a reasonable less intensive format.

Logos made the decision to base their version 4 product on Windows Presentation Foundation because of the power and functionality that will come for "free" in future years.  Bible study, theological research, original language study, etc. will really need this capability. To think of our resources as nothing more than text is way more simplistic than what we will need. We will want and need to do sophisticated operations on text, graphics, and multimedia files, and we will need a software package that can do this graphically.  We will also need very powerful sort, search, and display capabilities.  All of this is way beyond the capabilities of the text-based platforms that Windows or Mac applications used in the past.

Years ago the most ambitious Logos user may have had 500 resources, 3 Bibles, 10 commentaries.  Now it is possible in the future those numbers will easily be multiplied by 10, 20, or 50!  The way we search, study, and use Logos now  won't work with that many resources.  We will stop buying, we will be disappointed that we are not getting value for the resources we have purchased.  It will be a great disappointment not to be able to do sophisticated things with large electronic libraries! How many Logos users  have more than 2000 resources today? I bet a lot!  Can you possibly read all those resources cover to cover in your lifetime? It's highly doubtful.  So to use what you have, and to want to buy anything else, you need sophisticated tools.  That's what WPF will offer as a step up from Logos 3.

By developing version 4 on WPF, we as users will have much more flexible control over layouts, the information we see, and how we arrive at the information we want. One simple example, fonts and their text display are much easier to support than trying to cram specialized fonts with the complexity of original languages into a text-based display/search/reporting product (this has been done in the past, but the approach is running out of steam). Logos will be able to build software that we as users can much more easily control and configure. 

To top it all off, the programming tools/model that Logos programmers use in Logos 4 is much simpler in the way this is done with technology like Logos 3, thanks to WPF.  Some of these forward looking capabilities would requires tons of complex code in Logos 3; the "declarative" (meaning tell WPF what you want it to do instead of how to do what you want to do) model of programming reduces complexity, reduces bugs, and gets product to us more quickly.

Logos 4 is capable of much more than what we have seen. Step 1 was duplicating version 3 and adding incremental improvements.  Bob has said as much.  But this is now a platform where Logos has designs for much more sophisticated search, research, and discovery of our resources, and this would simply be impossible without using something like WPF.  Grant you, these future capabilities will require more powerful computers.  But if Logos stayed with incremental improvements on the Logos 3 product permanently, they would be out of business in a matter of years either because competitors do what I am speaking about here, or Logos' customer base just loses interest to buy anything else.