Preparing your library???

a) it shouldn't take that long and b) A 5 came out last night.  Upgrade

Have a happy Thanksgiving

Michael Kares

Rosie Perera said:

I'm a Windows user. Just curious. I've been bummed enough by the bugginess and incompleteness of even the shipped version for Windows to feel great sympathy for the poor Mac Alpha users.

Rosie Perera said:

They've already superseded it.

Point being though, Windows does all their beta testing on "release" candidate software and sometimes their beta test quality software is just dumped for Windows 7. :-)

Just upgraded to Logos 4 -- and I too have gotten the "Preparing Library" for about half an hour now. How long should it take? (I'm on Alpha 5)

JackCaviness said:

Rosie Perera said:

The rabid Mac users like you who were giving Logos a hard time about not having a Mac version yet would have been prime candidates to use the Alpha. But foisting it on unsuspecting new users is not fair.

I do enjoy your posts, but do you really think I deserve this? But then, you could think I am getting better than I deserve

Oh Jack, I was only using your own words. I did not at all intend to call you a name you wouldn't have been proud of. Because of the construction of your two sentences, which I did read very carefully, I thought you were including yourself in the "rabid Mac users" group and that you were using that word in a positive and sarcastically ironic tone, and it amused me.

JackCaviness said:

The Mac community—myself included—has given Logos much flack over the time it has taken to produce a Mac version. When L4 was released for Windows, perhaps Bob & company thought ti better to release a public Alpha than to endure more grief from rabid Mac users.

Then again you've got a smiley here, so maybe you aren't really questioning my response. Sometimes I do take people too seriously. I'd rather assume people are joking when it's unclear (and I usually do). It avoids much grief.

John Moyer said:

However, it's one of those circular thought patterns where "if you don't know then I can't tell you" situations. 1) I would expect any legitimate company NOT to release a half baked version of anything for consumers 2) Consumers would have to know the meaning of "ALPHA" to understand the pitfalls

 

Very good observation. People wouldn't be expected to know they wouldn't want an Alpha version unless they'd tried one before and been stung by it. So it'd be a Catch-22 if it were up to the users to decide whether they wanted an Alpha release or not. (I was suggesting that warning only as a way to put the horse's rump back in the barn; too late to put the whole beast back in.) However, I expect legitimate companies (especially Christian ones) to be good shepherds of their users and prospective users and take care of them in areas where their users might be uninformed. So that means not putting out an Alpha version for the whole world to see, but rather only inviting (privately) a few known power users to try it out to get the kinks worked out. That's how they did the Beta for the Windows version, so it really surprised me to see them doing the Alpha publicly.

John Moyer said:

3) Disclaimer or not, to have to navigate to another page to read the disclaimer when said consumer is ready to purchase/checkout is deceptive.

Definitely!

John Moyer said:

Thanks for the reply but you didn't present any solution, you just ranted a bit.

Sorry for you having to read my rant; this was just the most logical place I thought of to put it at the time (in the context of yet another new user having problems), though perhaps if I'd thought about it a microsecond longer I wouldn't have. Too late to move it now, alas. As of course you understood, it wasn't directed at you. And Bob (CEO of Logos) read it and I think appreciated it (he knows me well enough by now to not be put off by anything I might complain about).

And sorry as well for not presenting any solution. I'm not in a position to be able to do so, as I'm not a Mac user. I don't know the Mac at all. Sounds like someone else helped you out, for which I'm glad. I hate having to see people struggle with this awesome software. I was trying to be sympathetic to you, but it didn't come across that way, so again, I'm sorry.

Donovan R. Palmer said:

Indeed, this new world includes a term In encountered in the last year called "public beta". (some may know of it before that, but it was the first I saw it used in conjunction with software that I am using).  Devonthink and 1Password have both been in public beta. (1Password just went full release). If you install Devonthink 2.0 beta, you will see at the top a large ticker warning tape. Some of the buttons don't work and there are menu items that don't execute anything because not all the features are there.  Devonthink 1.5.4 is still their last full release, but it is clear most people are using 2.0 beta 7. It seems to me, five years ago we would have never seen anything like this. (at least that I can remember) 

Is this a good thing or a bad thing? In general, providing people know the risks, I think it is a good thing. Enthusiastic users get to give input in the design of the product and help test it. I think in the end it is a win/win for the vendor and customer.

 

Yes, I'm aware of the increasing reliance on public betas. And I do think they are a good thing, providing people know the risks, as you said. However, there's quite a big difference between letting people use a public beta for free to help shake out the bugs and then pay to upgrade to the shipped product if they decide they want to ("DEVONthink 2.0 is currently in public beta and does not need a valid license code to work "), and charging people for the privilege of being guinea pigs (well-warned guinea pigs though they may be). Furthermore, the price of Logos is staggering even compared to the shipped stable verson of DEVONthink. The latter sells for anywhere from $49.95 (personal) to $149.95 (professional office). 1Password costs $39.95, and has a "Try it free!" button even for the full release version, as does DEVONthink; Logos has no try-before-you-buy deal and never has as far as I know). The cheapeast base product of Logos for the Mac costs $264.95 and it goes up from there to $1,379.95, and you have to pay up front to get it (Logos's historic 30-day money-back guarantee, if it's still there, is very well hidden). I don't care how open and postmodern it is for a company to invite users into its workshop to watch things unfolding and give it input on making the product better (indeed I do like that approach: see below), a company should never charge users that kind of money to do it. Once it's stable, if they want to keep using it, fine, charge them. But make the alpha/beta free and make it expire after the product ships, and then people can try it out and give all the feedback they want but not be depressed about having shelled out so much money for a work in progress if they don't like it. If you expect something for free from people (their time, their possible frustration, their bug reports) you need to give them a little something for free in return, at least temporarily.

Donovan R. Palmer said:

Alpha software is another matter. It should have HUGE disclaimers that it should not be relied on for work and ideally should be installed on a test machine (physical or virtual). 

Absolutely! There's no honest description of what the risks of using Alpha software are in the small print of the disclaimer page (which I finally read all the way through). Only this: "We are presently shipping a pre-release Alpha of the Mac version....The Mac version is not finished yet, though.....It just needs work at the user interface level....there will be no technical support for the Mac version until it becomes a final release." Understatement of the century. Nothing about how Alpha products are inherently more buggy and unstable than shipped or even beta products, even if it's "just the UI" that differs in the code. (I worked on a cross-platform Windows/Mac word-processor for two years and it ain't ever as simple as "just the UI").

The disclaimer goes on glowingly about how great their Mac developers are and how wonderful it is to be doing the Mac version in-house finally (agreed, this is much better for them going forward into the future). But I think they feel so apologetic for the fact that the Mac version has always been so far behind the indows version ("We're so sorry to be late with the Mac version again") that they jumped the gun big-time on this. They had to release it on the same day as the Windows version, that was their stated goal. And they did it. But boy, a wait of a month or so would have made a huge difference. You don't have to jump from having a product that tails its parallel platform version by a whole release to shipping them both (or pretending to have them both shipped at least) on the same day. There are gradations in between that would have made the Mac users happier than they are today.

Donovan R. Palmer said:

Is it irresponsible for a developer to even allow users to try alpha software because of this?  I don't think so. Though I am not that old, my thinking is probably a bit old school in that people need to take responsibility for their decisions. (The school of hard knocks).  One of the things about society is that we have certainly made improvements in the area of health and safety, but taken to an extreme we move to a nanny like care of people and they expect systems to protect them from bad decisions.

Oh, come on. I didn't say Logos shouldn't allow users to try the alpha at all. Nor would more visible warnings about the fact that it's an Alpha product, and what Alpha means in the software world, be the equivalent of nanny care. I'm pretty old school too. And I agree people need to take responsibility for their decisions, but they need to be able to make well-informed decisions. It doesn't hurt to inform people better about what they'd be getting into if they chose to download this software. Sure there will still be idiots who get burned in spite of how loud the warnings are, and while I might feel a bit of pity for them for being idiots, I wouldn't say Logos should have protected them from themselves.

Further to this business of whether betas (and even alphas) should be public or not, you have swayed me somewhat in the direction towards open betas at least, but you have not at all convinced me that all products should go public for both beta and alpha software. Though you have given a couple of examples of new products which are going that direction (for beta anyway; I still have yet to see any other public alphas), there are plenty of new and cutting edge products that are keeping things private. (Google Wave and AnyClip.com, for example, both of which I've got invitations to test out, and no I'm not sharing with you, nyah-nyah [:)]) There is also the matter of protecting one's ideas from would-be competitors until the product is far enough along that they couldn't catch up if they tried. (Logos doesn't really have to worry about that too much, though they had really good reasons for wanting to keep L4 for under wraps until release because they anticipated quite a noisy backlack from their installed user base, and indeed they have been hearing it, and that would have been too much bad press too soon. But now that L4 Win is out, I see there's not much point in keeping the Mac version to a private set of test users. But I still think they should have waited for beta-level completeness in order to fling it out there so widely, and kept the alpha private, by invitation only.

Donovan R. Palmer said:

In general, I applaud the open approach taken by Logos. It certainly is very post modern and allows a bit of an 'open source' type of participation in a commercial venture. In another thread on here, users are commenting on the makeup of the Mac GUI and I think someone is actually going to do a mock up over the Thanksgiving weekend. I think this is brilliant and hopefully Logos will get a few gold nuggets in this process.

I agree. It is phenomenal. I love how responsive Logos has been to user input. And I love the way users have been designing mockups of suggested UI improvements and posting them here. All of that is really awesome and forward-thinking. But these are highly motivated, technologically savvy users. And for the time being, that unstable Mac alpha is the only version of any Logos Mac product that is available at all, so there is no way for Mac users to choose "I can't wait; yes I am willing to undergo the pain of a potentially unstable beta/alpha in order to get new features now" or "no, give me the stable shipped release, please." (There's supposedly going to "soon" be a "free download of the old Mac product with instructions on how to activate it....This is a bit of a hassle, for which we apologize." When is "soon" and what do people do in the interim if they bought the Alpha and now are itching to get started using it, or worse...got started with it and it isn't working for them or has frozen up their machine?) To tantalize people with something that isn't what they think it's going to be is false advertising. The disclaimers need to be more explicit and harder to overlook or to skim over saying "yeah yeah; get me to the product, already."

Incidentally, whatever outrage there may be in my virtual voice (I tend to express myself more strongly in writing than I do in person) is all on behalf of others, not myself, because I am not a Mac user, so I haven't suffered this experience that I've seen so many people write here about. I'm merely trying to "bind up the broken-hearted and preach release to the captives," if you'll forgive my borrowing of someone else's words whose sandals I am not worthy to untie. [:)] I hope you'll take my lengthy reply as the ramblings of a person with too much time on her hands who likes being thorough and perhaps a bit pedantic, rather than someone who has a bone to pick with you in particular. I enjoyed your thorough reply and agreed with a lot of it. So...peace, bro.

If you will permit me, let me give you a new Logos user's perspective.  I only discovered Logos 4 because I spotted their Mac announcement in some Mac news article.  I found their Mac alpha disclaimer perfectly clear, although it may have sounded too optimistic for inexperienced computer users.  Why did I purchase the Bible Study Library knowing the program may not run at all at first and there was no tech support?  Because a) the videos gave me an excellent picture of what to expect in the final product and b) the significant discount I received for purchasing a very incomplete product in advance.  Would I have purchased Logos 4 in Feb, Mar or whenever if I had to pay $264.95?  I seriously doubt it.  As someone who is retired, loves to study the Bible and loves his Accordance software, I am price sensitive in this case.  Furthermore, in addition to enjoying watching the product develop, I get to at least read all the resources (at least the 245 I have out of the 300 I'm supposed to have).  I'm also happy that, with Alpha 5, Passage Guide searches work (sort of) and give me a taste of better things yet to come.  I've been hooked!