Quo Vadimus 4.4?

Now that we have reached the RC stage for 4.3, perhaps Logos would entertain suggestions about some priorities for the next stage in the development process. I realize that this is not a democracy, and I am equally sure that the good developers at Logos already have a roadmap in place for Logos 4.4. Nevertheless it might be helpful for them to hear what the users feel are priorities going forward.

In any case, here is what I would like to see as priorities after the release of 4.3.

(1) CLEAN-UP — There needs to be an effort to tidy up things that are just ‘not quite right’. For example, often when I click in a box text-entry box (as in the search window, for example), the program looses its focus and the text that I type does not get entered into the text field. There are a number of niggling little things like this that are not big, but they are a nuisance and there needs to be a conscious effort to get them taken care of.

(2) PERFORMANCE OPTIMIZATION — This is still a significant problem in two areas that I experience regularly: (1) scrolling text often leads to prolonged ‘beach ball watching’ even in resources that are not linked to other windows or that have special highlighting; and (2) the length of time that it takes to display search results, especially with 2 or more resources involved. For example, this morning I did a morph search for a particular lexeme in Hebrew (using BHS WMH 4.2) to check how it was translated in the LXX. The search itself was quick enough, finding 1,135 results in 1,040 verses in 3.26 seconds, but the display of the results (in two columns with BHS in one and the LXX in the other) took 12 seconds to show up. That is just too long. Also, the text, when it finally showed up, was so small that the Hebrew was almost unreadable and the Greek was only slightly better. Which leads to my next point ...

(3) FONT SCALING — The results of searches (see above) and the pop-down list of terms when entering Greek with ‘g:’ or Hebrew with ‘h:’ (and a few other places) are painfully small. This is a known issue that has been around a long time. Now is the time to get it fixed. And don’t say that the answer is to use the screen zooming feature built into the Mac OS. Yes, it works (though the text becomes blurry as it zooms in), but that feature makes the whole screen zoomed-in and creates other problems having to work around the user interface. It is not an acceptable long-term solution. Users need to be able to set the font size for these things to a setting that is comfortable for them to use on a regular and on-going way.

(4) NOTES — This is not a high priority for me since I do not use them, but for many users this is an important feature that remains broken. This really needs to be fixed/improved before going on to things like fixing the handouts feature. For myself, I would have placed this as a priority ahead of the introduction of Personal Books feature (though I am glad to have the latter).

Please do not take this as a criticism; I am well-pleased with the progress overall and remain very enthusiastic about recommending Logos to other faculty, to my students, and to other pastors. But as someone who wants to see Logos be a great product on the Mac, I recognize that there a few things that need to be taken care of before the product can move from the category of a 'very good' program to the category of an 'excellent' program.

Well, as I said at the outset, I realize that this is not a democracy, but these are some things that I would like to nominate as priorities to be taken care of after the release of 4.3 before any new features are added. I would like to hear from other users about things that they would like to see.

Congratulations on reaching the RC stage for 4.3, and thanks for all your hard work and great support of your users.

–– DLA