OS X Lion, Open CL and Logos 4

Dear Jack: Not a problem, didn't take your comments as Flippant at all.

Apology not needed, but thank you for it.

I have read enough of your posts to know where you were coming from, where your heart is with the subject.

Actually, posts like yours , recounting your experiences, are helpful and should be seen as such by the development group.

Your install is another indicator of the situation.

Thankfully you are running fairly well, yet another is not.

This shows us that there are coding issues that make the program very "different" from machine to machine, install to install.

I have uninstalled and reinstalled, with different results each time.

In other words, the program ran differently after each install.

I think this is part of what we are seeing on the forums: Inconsistency across the board with Logos installs ( at least in the Mac environment ).

This is why we are seeing so many issues and results so "all over the place".

Yours is running decently, and believe me- I am glad for you-smile

I am willing to bet a dollar against a donut hole that : if you had four identical machines and installed lOGOS on them, you would get four differing performance results.

At any rate, I know you want everyone to benefit from the software and are always trying to help.

Blessings,

Hi Mike: They sort of already have this.

You can look at the page listing what changes people want, see the votes for issues and pretty much extrapolate the information.

Stange though- they took out the area about performance ( unless they put it back since I last looked).

As far as Mac layouts etc.

I am pretty positive at this point that Logos and it's developers really do not understand Mac/Apple and the sociology of the Mac community.

I tend to think they look at Osx as just another operating system like the different ones in the Windows community. To them Mac and Osx is just another "version" like Win 98,XP,Vista, 7 and thus  it is , to them, we just like things put in different places.

They do not understand the underlying fact that we think differently, do things differently and have entirely different expectations about how things work or should work.

I still work in both worlds, still do repair/rebuild and builds of computers for Windows platforms ( just as a service to people these days).

However, I would not own a Windows machine for daily use- Just couldn't go back to that ecosystem and way of living computer life.

I still have a test box to stay current and always have a copy of Windows to run in emulation to stay current so I can repair others machines.

Yet, again, would not use Windows myself for a daily machine- They are just horrible IMHO.

I think this is part of that the Developers at Logos do not understand- We don't want Windows "type" functionality-at all.

It's not the way we "think" it is not user friendly to us, it's far from it, convoluted, dysfunctional- to us.

It was, in my opinion, A mistake to think they needed to keep Logos Ui the same, I guess they thought since most would have used the Pc version, they needed this feature.

But the truth is: Many if not most of us never used their Pc version because it was made for-PC.

The other thing they missed is that if one is converting from Pc to Mac, they are having to learn the new system anyway and as soon as they do, they do no longer want Pc type functioning.

Mac folks want Mac Functionality, Dependability, Consistency , Ease of use and Linearity .

All my Programs ( other than Logos ) function a certain way, I can look in the same places to tweak/adjust them.

At any Apple Store they will tell you: Learn one Program, you can pretty much work with any program in the Osx world.

Logos missed that point.

Mr. Pritchard is a good business man, that is a known fact , he just missed what Mac folks are in setting up his business plan for Logos/Mac.

I honestly don't think the programmers are really "Mac Folks".

Lastly, To do a survey , it would have to be broken down by user types to be of any real use.

Those of us that use the program Professionally or, lets say, Academically require different things from the program than many others might.

We would probably be the smaller demographic and thus not worth Logos giving a lot of attention. Whatever the "numbers" are, that is where the focus will be because that is where the money is for the company and, there is nothing wrong with that, just good business.

Blessings all

Logos 3 was browser based but not client/server.  They tried to do a browser based client server app but realized they couldn't duplicate the features of Logos 4 (biblia.com replaced this attempt and is still a work in progress). The Ipad app is pretty much server based and tends to be slow for searches.  I definitely prefer to have the offline capabilities that the Mac and Windows version have.

L3 would break everytime Microsoft updated their browser and was painfully slow (it would crash occasionally too).  I'm one of the people that hasn't had any problems with L4 on mac (2011 Macbook pro running Lion) and my experience with it has been much better than L3 on Winxp.  L4 is still too slow with linked commentaries on both windows and mac but it is much faster than L3 (changing verses with a few linked commentary could take 20 seconds or more in L3). 

The two other major bible software programs are faster on the platforms they were written for but they aren't really cross platform (one requires a system 7 emulator to run on windows and the other  runs on wine and X11).  Logos is my primary program (I have about 7700 resources and a substantial financial investment) and their choices regarding a cross platform environment has allowed me the choice of switching to a Mac. 

Regarding browser based I think you've noticed that complicated browser based apps tend not to work across all browsers.  My day job is with a large government agency and we have several browser based apps that only work with Internet Explorer.  Also Logos has to deal with licensing (some resources aren't currently available for Biblia.com or the IOS/Android apps).

Phil Mills said:

At its heart, Logos has always been tied to Microsoft

L3 used IE components. Logos was a windows program for a long time before they came to the Mac with an in house program (Also, Bob used to work for Microsoft).  Early in the L4 release Bob talked about watching younger people use an iPhone and this entered into their design decisions (the iPhone app came out at the same time as L4).  I don't know if this entered into the design decision but .net allows for server based apps and desktop apps with a lot of shared code (Logos mobile apps rely heavily on Logos servers for several functions).   Their design choices result in programs that works on several platform but doesn't completely follow conventions on either Mac or Windows.  The alternative would be to write a completely different back end for each platform (the Mac interface components are native code).  Given the complexity of Logos I really don't expect this to happen. I do trust that the Logos developers will continue to improve Logos on Mac as well as windows.  SInce Mono is open source I believe that the devs can tweak the code if they find issues caused by Mono.[8-|] 

" rel="nofollow">Keep Smiling 4 Jesus said:

The Logos "client" could be a customized browser using an open source rendering engine, which could be upgraded in conjunction with server components (both in the application bundle and Logos servers).

That was the direction I was thinking. But, of course, I know nothing of the technical hurdles from a programming perspective. I just know that it seems to work well in a few programs I am using that are truly cross platform and work well on all the platforms.

Phil

Logos for OS is a very "heavy"  program, meaning it runs sluggish and causes everything else on my mac to slow down, there is just too much there. The essence of OS is that it is powerful yet simple, and Logos fails to meet that guideline or standard in so many ways. I didn't even reinstall it after I upgraded to lion, hopefully Logos will catch up

Two crashes this morning and when finally up and running, scrolling through a Simple Old Testament search was almost impossible.

The Scrolling in Logos is just horrendous.

I really do wish instead of concerning themselves with new features ( as much as I would like some and, Notes working), what I really wish is that they would get what they have fixed.

It is Broken, i.e. : does not work right, is dysfunctional , does not perform as expected, is unreliable, cannot be trusted.

Not a Mac ready product, ( very frustrating ).

Don't know if it's Mono, open Cl or what, frankly, don't care, just want it to work.

I need the resources but, about ready to ask for refund.

Good thoughts Patrick and, Yes, I bet the Mac side is driving them as nuts as it is us, perhaps even more as we only deal with our personal installs.

I thinks its good to know the scrolling and resizing issues are not to be blamed on Mono- Poor Mono gets blamed for a lot-smile.

The scrolling today was the worst I have ever experienced on anything and , I am used to poor scrolling in Logos. ( overshoots etc. )

It was just horrible. sigh.

Here is what I think: At some point, no matter what the task, what the endeavor , one has to take stock of their progress, do an honest assessment of the situation.

In this case, in my Opinion, I would have to say: Not enough progress is being made within given timeframes to consider the current situation successful or efficient.

I don't know how many man hours are being invested per week, nor what the pay scale is for those hours, however, what I do know is that in the time I have had this product, very, very little progress has been made in actual functionality and usability.

The potential is there for this product, but something is going to have to be done to get it "on track" or the problems will soon start affecting its future pretty soundly.

Thats my opinion, I mean no disrespect to the software team, I'm just a results oriented guy. I set goals and schedules for myself and others, if they are not met, I have to know why, make adjustments, rethink. Find and do what it takes to get things where they meet logical expectations.

Anyway, good Points all Patrick.

Blessings.

Patrick S. said:

when I hover the mouse over the edge of a pane the mouse pointer doesn't even change to the resize mouse pointer.

Thanks for confirming a bug I've never had time to report, and haven't seen anyone else report either. 

Are you saying it only occurs horizontally for you? For me it's both ways.

Patrick S. said:

If I just click and drag anyway it is very slow and jerky.

Don't think I see that. It's a bit of a fluke, though, whether I can drag at all, or if I have to click sevaral times before I find the exact right spot to drag on.

Fr. Charles R. Matheny said:

Only in the world of Bible Software to you find people so willing to put up with dysfunctional products. Christians do not make excuses and pray for the car dealership if they give bad service.

They don't make excuses and tell people to pray for the staff of companies that sell them things that do not work properly,,,,,unless it's Bible Software.

Personally, after owning a lot of software- I think we get what we get, because we don't require them to do any better.

If the local Church does poorly, people move to a different Church, if the Pastor breaks his word, makes too many mistakes etc.

But Bible Software! It's like we should not demand the best for our money, we act as if doing so is some type of sin.

Bible Software Companies are just that-Companies. They make a product, for a profit. ( they do not love us, we are just customers )

Someone earlier mentioned that we vote with our money. Correct.

Absolutely agree.

On the 27th of April, out of sheer frustration with the performance, stability and bug ridden code in Logos4Mac, I wrote an extended email to Logos. I shared many of the sentiments, feelings and frustrations expressed by users here in this forum in my email to Logos. In my email I stated one important thing, I am no longer purchasing anymore product from Logos until such time as they meet certain conditions in relation to stability and performance in Logs4Mac which is in line with the innumerable other software products which perform reliably and reasonably responsively on my MacBook Pro.

Here is an excerpt from the response I received from Logos. [quote] ...so you can have a working Logos 4 on your MAC like all our other Mac users.

MY QUESTION to this Forum: This may have been posted somewhere already. How may people use Logos4Mac and what is the feeling generally on its performance and reliability amongst this user base? I.e. what numbers of people using Logos4Mac are having regular performance, stability & bug issues? Does anyone have any idea of numbers here? Are we talking about an isolated few or a more broad spread of Logos4Mac users? If it's the latter can we somehow come to some sort of consensus or how we might be able to apply pressure to Logos to take us more seriously?

Below is a good example of "immature software". It has been mentioned here already [quote] 2+ years in the software industry is a long time and we are still waiting for "mature software"

Blessings to you all in Jesus name.

Simon

Pretty rude reply from Logos that seems to sum it up pretty well, imho.

MacBook Pro Specs for reduplication of "feature(s)".

Sunday blessings for the Lord's day of victory

Simon

alabama24 said:

Do these glitches happen in other resources, or just the one?

Have a look at the image captures. As you can see the "glitch" is evident in two open resources.

;-)

Ok after some basic testing it appears this particular highlighting style was somehow corrupt(ed).

Deleting the style and recreating a new copy has cleared the formatting error. As to why this error occurred is something I as yet have been unable to determine.

Interestingly if a soft-return is inserted into label text then the text will be displayed incorrectly.

The first highlighting style below demonstrates what I mean with a soft-return added after "to" in the lead text "fred goes to town".

The second highlighting style is the recreated problem style and now displays correctly as one would expect. Again as to the circumstances which led up to this particular feature "manifesting" itself is unknown at this time.