Slow menus

Mitch Davis said:

My guess is that you've just downloaded/installed Logos 4...which means you have an initial indexing going on WHILE you are using the program.

No, I understand that it is slow during indexing. It is slow all the time. Monday after the program went public on the Logos Web site, I demonstrated Logos 4 to my Hermeneutics class, which is learning to do various interpretive tasks with version 3. The first comment was "I thought it was supposed to be faster than the old version!" Although the searches are faster, there are many things that create an overall impression of sluggishness: slow menus (even fixed menus, like Guides, and Tools; times when you click on something and nothing happens without an hourglass to tell your computer is working; very slow pop-up menus; the long delay time on the information window; etc. Logos 4 is the slowest program I use. It even makes a resource hog like Adobe Lightroom seem like a racing car!

Bob Pritchett said:

What kind of system are you running, and with how much memory? Desktop or laptop?

The biggest help is usually more memory. Makes a huge difference. Older machines and certain processors can be slower, too, and most laptops have 5400 rpm drives instead of the 7200 rpm typically in desktops....

Dell laptop with 2 GHz processor, 2 GB ram, 5400 RPM drive. I recognize that a faster machine would make it work better, but that is not always an option for people. More and more students are buying Netbooks and they have similar capabilities to laptops of a few years ago.

Basic menus, such as File, Guide, Tools do not change and should pop up instantly. As it is, they take a few seconds to display with no indication that the computer is working.

It don't think the primary problem with the pop-up context menu is the speed of the machine. It is because Logos 4 wants to figure out every time what books it will list in the menu. The point of the pop-up context menu is a quick way of looking up information. If I want to do a whole library search I can do that with a regular search, but if I want to see the parsing or look up an word in a lexicon, I want to do that quickly, as I could with version 3. Certain menu items will always be the same and should always be there. Certain books will nearly always be in the menu (e.g. my first 5 Greek lexicons will always be needed for a Greek text). I think the basic menu should pop up instantly with standard options. The parsing should also be virtually instantaneous as it is for the balloon help. The only think that should be filled in gradually is the list of dictionaries and this could be faster if the list is cached.

Another thing that has always bothered me about Logos is that it does not show an hourglass when it is working. At least that little feedback tells me to be patient. As it is if I double click on a word, it takes 3-4 seconds before a book opens. So it is not clear if the command was not received. I have watched students repeatedly try to do the command (such as double click), because they think the computer is doing nothing. In version 3 that was harmless. In version 4 that could open up several windows as the multiple commands are executed.

The end result of these problems is that the new program feels less responsive. It is all a matter of perception. When I showed students version 4 in a class demo on "opening day", many commented that the program was slower than version 3.