A few thoughts on the 4.0.5 beta

To specify, everthing is related to:
4.0.5 beta
Android 4.1.2
Samsung Galaxy S3

First of all I am thankful for being a beta tester, and generally speaking I think this update of the android app is just great. It feels much more like a complete application now. Gone is the confusing navigation from the previous version, and many nice features have been added. Although I have nothing to back it up with, I feel that it is both faster and more smooth now. Since I pretty much stopped using the old one, I am not sure about every feature, whether it is new or old, but I'll comment on some of the features anyway. I consider this a part of testing beta software, so here goes...

I love that the page number is shown on the bottom

And the verse selector is just delightful:

Info panel in reading view

If one long-presses a word in reading view, and chooses info, one will get the info panel. I do not know if this works with everyone else, but unless it is a greek/hebrew word this panel comes up empty. I get the spinning wheel, and then nothing. I would have expected an english definition from either Webster or a bible dictionary. Of course, when the spinning wheel disappears the cancel button is replaced for one that openes a bible word study. Logically a bible word study should provide the desired definition, but alas no, definition comes up empty: (I am guessing this is a bug)

When testing this I came a cross another peculiarity. In order for it to be of value I guess that I need to explain exactly what happened. (1) I opened UBS4 to Philippians 2:8. (2) I long-pressed the seventh word in the verse, which is the second Thanatou. (3) In the contextual meny I pressed "Info" (4) Now here is the strange thing. The heading for the info-box shows Thanatou, but the info is for the following word. This does not regularly happen, but in this specific case it does.

Another peculiarity is that when I press "Bible Word Study" the app seems to look up the surface text first, and then redirect to the lemma. Why not just look up the lemma to begin with?

Selecting long text

Selecting longer pieces of text is easier now that you can scroll with two fingers - that is, as long as the text is able to fit into the window. As far as I can tell there is no way of selecting more text than what fits into one page. Is it possible to allow selection of text across pages?

Library navigation

With the old app, if you turned off the internet the app would only show downloaded resources. The new app shows them all regardless of internet connection status. This is probably a good thing, but I miss the ability to hide online resources - or if nothing else, order by download status. The best thing would be having a button to show only downloaded resources.

Search

The search dialog allowes a search to be confined to a specific resource, which I believe you need to have downloaded. The drop down list shows a couple of standard options as well as all the downloaded resources. Problem is that it only shows the short title, and it may not be obvious what this short title really means. Could it not be both. Begin with the short title, then a separator followed by the full title. In the example below this would mean: "EF : Exegetical fallacies", "ESV : English Standard Version" and so on.

Notes error

It seems to me that some notes documents cannot be opened. If I try to open this one, for example, the wheel spins a while, then the screen goes black for a moment and the app crashes:

I also cannot see highlights in my notes documents (those I know to contain highlights), like you can see in this post: http://community.logos.com/forums/t/76509.aspx

Text comparsion

Text comparsion is great, but I cannot figure out how you choose which versions to compare. Obviously I opened the help file, which directed me to the website. There is no real help text, and I certainly did not want to watch videos on my celluar data connection. In any case there was no straightforward way of doing it:

Panel behaviour

Panel behaviour has been discussed a bit, and there seem to be a few different opinions. It seems to me that this needs to be more straightforward. Here are some thoughts:

Could there be different colors on the panels, e.g. a gray background on the bottom panel and sepia background on the top panel, so that you can immediately distinguish between them?
Could one long-press a link to choose in which panel one wants to open a tool or resource.
Could there be a toolbar button to choose default target: Top panel, bottom panel or auto.

Topics in passage guide

This is a feature I think needs a little more polish, and it took me a moment to figure it out. First there is no clear separator between topics. It gets especially confusing with some topics containing a comma. Then, if you press on a topic, it appears under the list with a link either Naves topical Bible, or some other resource. I guess it is all right, but not quite as I would have expected. Rather I would have expected something like the list "opening up" and the links to resouces appear in the empty space. (You know, like pressing the plus sign in the Faithlife study bible)

Well, that's it I guess

Thank you again for the app - it really is great.

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Comments

Juan M. Liao

About info for a word it would be great if it find words on the english-spanish dictionary for fast translation lookup.

Gabe Martin

First off thanks for your very specific feedback and screenshots. This is great info!

I'll attempt to summarise your findings and respond to each of them. If I miss something let me know.

I love that the page number is shown on the bottom

Page numbers are not new to the 4.0 app, but they will only show up in resources that have Page number metadata in them.

And the verse selector is just delightful:

Thanks in the 4.0 redesign we have so far changed the layout of the verse picker so its better following Android design guidelines as well as moved the Recent verses to the verse picker when a book containing bible references is opened. Also the verse picker remembers which tab you last had selected.

If one long-presses a word in reading view, and chooses info, one will get the info panel. I do not know if this works with everyone else, but unless it is a greek/hebrew word this panel comes up empty. I get the spinning wheel, and then nothing. I would have expected an english definition from either Webster or a bible dictionary. Of course, when the spinning wheel disappears the cancel button is replaced for one that [opens] a bible word study. Logically a bible word study should provide the desired definition, but alas no, definition comes up empty:

Long pressing on a word in a book that's not a bible does result in an empty dialog window appearing. It shows the selected text in the dialog title and gives you the option to Search or perform a Bible Word Study. If you choose Bible Word study it should show a definition for the word in the BIble Word Study panel from a dictionary resource you have access to. For me it showed a definition from the Concise Oxford English Dictionary along with common translations to Greek and Hebrew. Do you see definitions for some words? If no definition is found for a specific word then it did appear as though the resulting Bible Word Study pane was pretty empty. I'll talk to our designers about the Word info dialog window that comes up following a word selection. It could definitely be improved so it doesn't show up as empty when selecting a word that does not have additional info about it.

Selecting longer pieces of text is easier now that you can scroll with two fingers - that is, as long as the text is able to fit into the window. As far as I can tell there is no way of selecting more text than what fits into one page. Is it possible to allow selection of text across pages?

Not currently, this is a feature we'd like to address sometime in the future though. It's not currently scheduled.

With the old app, if you turned off the internet the app would only show downloaded resources. The new app shows them all regardless of internet connection status. This is probably a good thing, but I miss the ability to hide online resources - or if nothing else, order by download status. The best thing would be having a button to show only downloaded resources.

The Library catalog should auto filter to only downloaded resources when offline. This is a regression and we appreciate your report. It is possible to filter your library catalog to only downloaded resources by typing "local:" in the filter. We will adding back the v2 functionality that filters the library list to only downloaded resources when you are offline in a future update. Thanks again for the report.

The search dialog [allows] a search to be confined to a specific resource, which I believe you need to have downloaded. The drop down list shows a couple of standard options as well as all the downloaded resources. Problem is that it only shows the short title, and it may not be obvious what this short title really means. Could it not be both. Begin with the short title, then a separator followed by the full title. In the example below this would mean: "EF : Exegetical fallacies", "ESV : English Standard Version" and so on.

It doesn't show downloaded resources necessarily but rather recently viewed resources. If your device is online you can search any resource in your library and it doesn't necessarily need to be downloaded to your device. The online search functionality is much better about the results it returns than the offline search functionality. Excellent suggestion about showing the full book title in expanded "Search In" list instead of the abbreviated title. I'll create a case to address that.

It seems to me that some notes documents cannot be opened. If I try to open this one, for example, the wheel spins a while, then the screen goes black for a moment and the app crashes:

Hmm, this is concerning and we'll want to look into this. Is this the only note document you experience a crash when opening or is it multiple ones? If it's consistently reproducible we'd love to get more info about this crash. After it crashes could you reopen the app, choose the Help option from the nav drawer and tap on the "Send Support Info" option. Thanks!

Text comparsion is great, but I cannot figure out how you choose which versions to compare. Obviously I opened the help file, which directed me to the website. There is no real help text, and I certainly did not want to watch videos on my celluar data connection. In any case there was no straightforward way of doing it:

I agree that there's not a straightforward way to set which versions it compares. The way I've been able to somewhat manage the list of translations is by changing my default bible setting. Setting your default bible moves the specific resource to the top of a preferred bibles list so setting it multiple times has the side effect of changing lesser preferred bible resources. I think there's a more direct way to manage this list in the Desktop app but I'm not positive about that.

Panel behaviour has been discussed a bit, and there seem to be a few different opinions. It seems to me that this needs to be more straightforward. Here are some thoughts:

Could there be different colors on the panels, e.g. a gray background on the bottom panel and sepia background on the top panel, so that you can immediately distinguish between them?

Could one long-press a link to choose in which panel one wants to open a tool or resource.

Could there be a toolbar button to choose default target: Top panel, bottom panel or auto.

The panel linking behavior is mostly unchanged from the v2 versions of the apps with the exception that guide panels now support linking. I agree that improvements could be made to panel linking behavior. Thanks for the suggestions.

This is a feature I think needs a little more polish, and it took me a moment to figure it out. First there is no clear separator between topics. It gets especially confusing with some topics containing a comma. Then, if you press on a topic, it appears under the list with a link either Naves topical Bible, or some other resource. I guess it is all right, but not quite as I would have expected. Rather I would have expected something like the list "opening up" and the links to resources appear in the empty space. (You know, like pressing the plus sign in the Faithlife study bible)

I'm working on ways the core Android developers can work with the web team to make improvements to the responsiveness and behavior of these screens.

Thanks again for your very thorough feedback. Much appreciated!

Graham Criddle

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/540258#Comment_540258

Text comparsion is great, but I cannot figure out how you choose which versions to compare. Obviously I opened the help file, which directed me to the website. There is no real help text, and I certainly did not want to watch videos on my celluar data connection. In any case there was no straightforward way of doing it:

I agree that there's not a straightforward way to set which versions it compares. The way I've been able to somewhat manage the list of translations is by changing my default bible setting. Setting your default bible moves the specific resource to the top of a preferred bibles list so setting it multiple times has the side effect of changing lesser preferred bible resources. I think there's a more direct way to manage this list in the Desktop app but I'm not positive about that.

The versions used should be the version you are reading followed by the four highest prioritised Bibles in the desktop app.

Sakarias Ingolfsson

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/540258#Comment_540258

...unless it is a greek/hebrew word this panel comes up empty. I get the spinning wheel, and then nothing. I would have expected an english definition from either Webster or a bible dictionary...

Long pressing on a word in a book that's not a bible does result in an empty dialog window appearing. It shows the selected text in the dialog title and gives you the option to Search or perform a Bible Word Study. If you choose Bible Word study it should show a definition for the word in the BIble Word Study panel from a dictionary resource you have access to. For me it showed a definition from the Concise Oxford English Dictionary along with common translations to Greek and Hebrew. Do you see definitions for some words? If no definition is found for a specific word then it did appear as though the resulting Bible Word Study pane was pretty empty. I'll talk to our designers about the Word info dialog window that comes up following a word selection. It could definitely be improved so it doesn't show up as empty when selecting a word that does not have additional info about it.

I do not have the Oxford dictionary in my library, but I do have Webster as well as several bible dictionaries. The same problem is true even when choosing a word in a bible text – unless it contains a reverse interlinear. In that case the word study is done on the corresponding word in the original language, and the definition for that word is given. I think you need to look into this.

With the old app, if you turned off the internet the app would only show downloaded resources. The new app shows them all regardless of internet connection status. This is probably a good thing, but I miss the ability to hide online resources - or if nothing else, order by download status. The best thing would be having a button to show only downloaded resources.

The Library catalog should auto filter to only downloaded resources when offline. This is a regression and we appreciate your report. It is possible to filter your library catalog to only downloaded resources by typing "local:" in the filter. We will adding back the v2 functionality that filters the library list to only downloaded resources when you are offline in a future update. Thanks again for the report.

Well, I must have been mistaken, because when I tested it again today, it worked the way it should.
Thank you for the search filter suggestion, I´ll remember that

It seems to me that some notes documents cannot be opened...

Hmm, this is concerning and we'll want to look into this. Is this the only note document you experience a crash when opening or is it multiple ones? If it's consistently reproducible we'd love to get more info about this crash. After it crashes could you reopen the app, choose the Help option from the nav drawer and tap on the "Send Support Info" option. Thanks!

Yes, I tested it a little more just now. There are more documents that crash the app, and I´ve just sent a report like the one you asked for.

Text comparsion is great...
I agree...
The versions used should be the version you are reading followed by the four highest prioritised Bibles in the desktop app.

By your theory this features should show five different translations. Yesterday my app showed only three, and just now, four. The choise can be explained neither by which versions I have been using lately nor by my priority order in the desktop app.

Graham Criddle

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/540341#Comment_540341

Yesterday my app showed only three, and just now, four. The choise can be explained neither by which versions I have been using lately nor by my priority order in the desktop app.

Can you provide a few more details? (I checked this yesterday on my phone before posting and it seemed to work as described)

Can you give an example of which verse from which translation you are starting the TC from and which versions are shown in the results?

Also please advise the top five prioritised Bibles in your library

Thanks

Sakarias Ingolfsson

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/540436#Comment_540436

Can you provide a few more details? (I checked this yesterday on my phone before posting and it seemed to work as described)
Can you give an example of which verse from which translation you are starting the TC from and which versions are shown in the results?
Also please advise the top five prioritised Bibles in your library
Thanks

Yes, I can certainly help you with more information.

My top english version is the ESV, followed by NET and NRSV. Before those I prefer the norwegian bokmål bibles. Then there is the BHS with three different morphological databases, the UBS4, the majority text and two flavours of Textus Receptus (Elzevir is cut of from the screenshot). Westcott and Hort are nowhere to be found in the list. Neither is Darby.

So here are a few tests of the text comparsion. Run with the ESV in the top pane, and the text comparsion in the bottom pane. It makes sense to test texts both in the old and the new testament. So, lets begin with the old. I selected the protoevangelium, Genesis 3:15 for this purpose. As you can see I get three versions, the ESV, DARBY and NET. (If the priority order is important, where is NRSV?)

Then a new testament test, from Matthew 5:23. Westcott&Hort has been added to the results, so I now get four of them. It makes sense that a new testament resource will not show up in an old testament comparsion, so thus far there is no inconsistency. Of course it totally disregards my choises. Westcott and Hort are not even in the list of my preferred resources.

Now here is an interesting twist. If I try the first verse of any book, eg. Joh 1:1, the greek will be left out. Now I realize that many critical scholars do not so much as look at the title of any biblical book. It is just folly to them. However, that bible software should not only do the same, but also leave out the first verse of any book is a bit troubling :-) (This is only the case with Westcott&Hort, no other version that I know of)

New attempts

Well, lets not give up. I am testing a bit more as I write. I have now added GWT and LEB to the list of preferred versions, just below NRSV. I pressed the sync button and restarted Logos on the mobile. No change whatsoever.

So, on to tools and text comparsion on the desktop. My default set consists of BN15, NBMST (both norwegian), ESV, NET and the NRSV. In stead of those I now chose "English bible collection", consisting of 1901AV, AV, AV1873, D-R, ESV, GW, KJV 1900, LEB, LES, NET, NASB95, NKJV, NRSV and RSV. Sync and restart, but same results in the text comparsion.

I agree that there's not a straightforward way to set which versions it compares. The way I've been able to somewhat manage the list of translations is by changing my default bible setting. Setting your default bible moves the specific resource to the top of a preferred bibles list so setting it multiple times has the side effect of changing lesser preferred bible resources. I think there's a more direct way to manage this list in the Desktop app but I'm not positive about that.

Now, this actually works. Changing the default translation from within the app, adds the new default translation on the top of the list and nudges everything else downwards. This obviously needs to be more manageable.

Well, as you can plainly see, if you get one thing working, something else goes wrong :-( The font used in the text comparsion is unable to handle polytonic greek. (In the reader, there is a different font, which displays correctly - see screenshot in my original post)

I think you would also like to notice the percentage difference between the versions in the screenshot above. UBS4 and NA27 share the same text, and logically the difference is 0%. On the other hand, how a translation in a totally different language, and with a different alphabet can turn out to be anything other than 100% different is puzzling. Perhaps the spaces between the words are compared as well. :-) Of course one would expect that W&H would have more in common with the UBS4 than an english version does, but surprisingly: No! W&H is 100% different from UBS4. The only logical reply is that W&H used Tipp-Ex for their blank spaces, and therefore they have totally different blank spaces than UBS4 :-) Well, OK, they differ in their markings, but how on earth is this more different from UBS4 than a text in english?

Regards,

Sakarias Ingolfsson

Graham Criddle

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/541025#Comment_541025

Hi Sakarias

Many thanks for the detailed reproduction steps.

I can't reproduce what you are seeing and can't explain it - but hopefully someone from Logos will be able to look into it more fully.

With regards to the Westcott & Hort 100% discrepancy you mention I think this must be due - as you suggest - to the inability of the TC tool to manage some of the characters and so getting confused. So a different issue which probably needs a different resolution.

Graham

Dave Dunkin (Logos)

Text comparsion is great, but I cannot figure out how you choose which versions to compare.

A future version will support choosing a resource collection to use for the comparison.