Same old Mac Problems

Sam Pedigo
Sam Pedigo Member Posts: 71 ✭✭
edited November 2024 in English Forum

Was expecting that  5 on Mac would now be a stable platform, all the posts I read seemed to indicate it might be.  Still have all the same old problems when using Notes.

1.  Crashing when deleting through a list .  Crashing over and over again (This has this been a known issue for a long time).

 

2.  Default Notes font still does not work.  I have mine set for Calibri as I did with L4.  Works fine for awhile but then at some point  I will try to add something new and it will now default to "Skolar PE"  (in L4 it always defaulted to Athelas).  I am constantly having to select text and change the font back to Calibri.

 

Logos, why keep selling me a product with known faults?  

 

Comments

  • 1.  Crashing when deleting through a list .

    Wonder about screen shot(s) to illustrate ? or reference to thread(s) showing crash issue ?  Curious how to replicate ?

    2.  Default Notes font still does not work.

    Logos is actively working on an improved Notes editor => http://community.logos.com/forums/p/60010/426853.aspx#426853

    Caveat: no date (yet) for improved Notes Editor, which will include automatic creation of hyperlinks on OS X.

    Logos, why keep selling me a product with known faults?

    Logos has a release early and often strategy for software development.  Many features are usable before software is complete.

    Personally Thankful for Logos 5 full screen on OS X 10.8.2 plus a number of new features and data sets.  The new features have parity between OS X and Windows.  Wiki has a list of known Logos 4 Mac feature parity items => http://wiki.logos.com/Mac_and_PC_User_Interface_Differences#Feature_Parity that have been gleaned from forum discussions with confirmation by two or more Logos users.

    Likewise Thankful for awesome improvements in Logos 4 Mac releases; looking forward to many Logos 5 improvements and new features.

    Keep Smiling [:)]

  • tjluoma
    tjluoma Member Posts: 24 ✭✭

     

    > Logos has a release early and often strategy for software development.  Many features are usable before software is complete.

    The assumption there is that stability will arrive. Personally, Logos 4 is _still_ slow and unstable.


    It's great that you're optimistic and thankful, but your reply dismissed the original poster's issues. He was raising valid questions about the day to day usability of the software, and you replied with "The Notes editor will get better… someday… but we don't know when" and "I like these new features."


    That would sort of be like someone complaining to me about the quality of my sermons and me replying to them "Isn't our new praise band great?"[1]


    I realize that bug fixes are neither exciting nor profit generating, but I hope that Logos, Inc. will be spending a good deal of time in the v5 software cycle working on optimizations and stability. I had thought we were going to see that with version 4's move to a more unified code base, and now that there is even more Windows/Mac parity on the surface, I hope that means that fixes 'under the hood' will benefit users of both platforms.



    [1] not that I'm suggesting that would ever happen… we don't have a praise band.
  • Jack Caviness
    Jack Caviness MVP Posts: 13,636

    tjluoma said:

    your reply dismissed the original poster's issues. He was raising valid questions about the day to day usability of the software

    The present problems with notes is Logos are due to limitations in the Apple provided rich text tools. Logos is now building their own rich text editor so that these issues can be addressed.

    KS4J did not dismiss the original poster's concerns. He asked for screenshots and logs. The problems he reported are not typical of the experience of other users of L5—or even L4 for that matter.

  • Apologies: no intent to be dismissive.  A number of forum threads have a variety of complaints about Notes.  The # 1 User Voice suggestion focuses on Notes => http://logos.uservoice.com/forums/42823-logos-bible-software-5/suggestions/1619077-rework-notes-function-in-one-or-multiple-phases

    On 2 Jul 2012, a reply by Bob Pritchett (CEO) => http://community.logos.com/forums/p/49472/379384.aspx#379384 included:

    We're actually doing quite a lot on the desktop, but as you observe, much of it is under the hood. Sync v2 migration is almost complete for all document types, and it will dramatically improve many things, including speed of syncing. We're also working on a very major bit of plumbing code that will hopefully speed up notes editing, but none of that code has shipped yet.

    Apologies: personally have no idea when the improved Notes editor will be ready for public use, which needs to include migration of existing "Notes" that are GB in size for a number of Logos users.  If the migration is not stable, the ensuing uproar will be deafening.

    1.  Crashing when deleting through a list .  Crashing over and over again (This has this been a known issue for a long time).

    Found an older thread => Logos crashes when working with Notes that has an "Out of bounds" crash in a Rich Text Editor section of code in Logos 4.5c SR-3 running on OS X 10.7.4; looking in Logos4Error.log file, noticed an earlier error "index 4294967295 beyond bounds [ 0 .. 0]" so am wondering about the size of Note being edited ?

    The index number implies a Note that is 4 GB in size.  The maximum size for a 32 bit application is 4 GB.  Logos 4 and Logos 5 are 32 bit applications.

    Wonder about splitting Note(s) into smaller sizes and/or using Personal Books ?

    Also curious if Logos 5 diagnostic log files have the same error ? Wiki has => http://wiki.logos.com/Diagnostic_Logging#Logos_5_for_OS_X

    2.  Default Notes font still does not work.  I have mine set for Calibri as I did with L4.  Works fine for awhile but then at some point  I will try to add something new and it will now default to "Skolar PE"  (in L4 it always defaulted to Athelas).  I am constantly having to select text and change the font back to Calibri.

    Likewise wonder if Note file size is affecting font ?  Notes are stored as XML with lots of tagging.

    Logos, why keep selling me a product with known faults?

    Bob Pritchett's reply on 29 Dec 2011 => http://community.logos.com/forums/p/42794/318689.aspx#318689 includes a Tangent about Notes:

    -- Start Tangent --

     

    I can appreciate that you have different note taking needs, and even define a note differently than I do. That's fine. But I resent the implication that we've somehow not been "honest about it" -- we've set out our definition, plan, scope, and will do / won't do list for the notes feature repeatedly for many years. I remember doing it in the late 1990's for the LLS 2.0, in the early 2000's for the Libronix DLS, and again in 2009 when we released Logos 4, and many times since.

     

    It's not a document store. It's not a place for attached files. It's not a place to write a paper, or organize a thesis, or to create a structured document. It's a place for notes on your Bible reading, to serve as the digital equivalent of writing in the margins of your paper Bible. This has been the definition of our notes feature since 1991.


    And none of this is news.

     

    And yet people keep "blaming us" when notes doesn't meet their need for something completely different.

     

    The first user to be really upset about notes contacted us in 1992. He was upset about performance, and how notes were slowing down the system. We couldn't understand how this was possible, since we kept them in memory for high-speed access with no need to hit the disk. (Our notes then could only be attached to a verse, with only one note per verse, and only supported plain text.)

     

    He sent us the note file.

     

    He had attached a note to every verse in the Bible. Each note contained the full text of the verse in Chinese, resulting in a 3 megabyte note file in the days when computers had 1 meg of memory.

     

    So was this poor performance design on our part? Or user error?

     

    We disagree on what "real notes programs allow." To explain what I think a real notes program is, take a look at http://notescraps.com, which is a notes program I designed. Notice that it doesn't support any formatting, templates, tags, rich text, or embedded images. I use it every day to jot down things from voicemails, store frequent flyer account numbers, keep random bits of information, etc. No individual note is longer than a few hundred characters. Because to me, something longer than that is a "document" and I have much better tools for documents: Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc. (PowerPoint is my favorite outliner, for example. Easy to tab, shift-tab, re-order, etc.)

     

    Now I'm aware that many people use and like Evernote, and consider it a "real notes" program. But I think Evernote is a heavy-weight app that gets in the way of my notes idea, which is one keystroke to take the note, and one keystroke to get into "find as you type" notes retrieval. I think Evernote is a document database. I hate that everything isn't in memory, that you have to hit enter after entering a query, and that there's the overhead of sorting, tagging, categorizing, etc. 

     

    And I think the fact that people do things like auto-copy every email they receive to Evernote makes my point: when you're copying your emails, or web surfing history, to Evernote, it's not a "notes" program, it's basically a database document store with full-text search engine.

     

    Am I right? Probably not to you. I am to me. It's a semantic argument. "What is a note?"

     

    I am willing to discuss changes to what we support, and even willing to implement features you want that I wouldn't particularly care for. I'm willing to believe that many people -- or even a majority of people -- define things differently than I do. But I'd like to stop making it a "you're doing it wrong" discussion, because that goes both ways. And I'd win, because I defined Logos notes in 1991, before you got a copy. :-)

     

    -- End Tangent --

    Looking forward to a future public beta release that includes the improved Notes editor.  Hoping for some Logos users with big Note files to participate in public beta testing, who understand the risks of beta testing.

    Keep Smiling [:)]

  • Noticed Logos 5.0 SR-4 (5.0.0.1835) has "Out of Bounds" error messages.

    Curious about size of Notes database file ? (that contains XML for all Notes)

    ~/Library/Application Support/Logos4/Documents/39lr3q7s.iq6/Documents/Notes/Notes.db

    Wondering if a Note row in a database table is over 4 GB in size, which is causing crash..

    Keep Smiling [:)]