Logos 6.0: What features do you want?

George....we read and study The Bible....but we also are studying "Great Doctrines in The Bible".  I am talking about being able to find something easily and quickly really.[;)]

Lynden Williams said:

I ran a sermon starter guide on the word "Sabbath". The synopsis that it gave is that the Sabbath was eventually changed to Sunday. Not a good strong selling point among Sabbath Keepers.

Although there is a history of referring to Sunday as the Sabbath, that has never actually been true.  The Sabbath was and always will be Saturday.  Note what Ignatius had to say regarding the matter:

9. If, then, those who had lived in antiquated practices came to newness of hope, no longer keeping the Sabbath but living in accordance with the Lord’s day, on which our life also arose through him and his death (which some deny), the mystery through which we came to believe, and because of which we patiently endure, in order that we might be found to be disciples of Jesus Christ, our only teacher,

Epistle to the Magnesians 9

Lynden Williams said:

So then the next version of the software, should have the topic guide, sermon starter guide,etc., tweaked to reflect the faith tradition of the various denominations. If I type in the command box and tell it to set Verbum to yes, the results on a topic like "Mass" or "Sacrament", should still pull from your library (the user has Platinum) + Verbum Capstone, but the hand edited summary that comes up should reflect that of the tradition of the adherents of the Faith which it appeals to. This requires a lot of coding, and close consultation with the scholars of that particular faith.

That is not at all what I said (or want). 

What comes up should be the same for all. The order it comes up in is already 'tweaked' by our prioritizations. No extra work needed in that respect.

What I'm talking about is that it is impossible to even run a Topic Guide for Papal Infallibility, or Transsubstantiation, or Dormition (or Theotokos or Consubstantiation, for that matter). Those topics simply don't exist. Perpetual Virginity exists, but comes up empty. And Immaculate Conception gives me something else (the birth of Jesus, instead of the conception of Mary). That's 'simply' a matter of adding a lot of new topics to the LCV, and then correctly tagging articles with those topics.

Lynden Williams said:

Customizing the shortcut bar.

Do you really want to wait until L6 for that?[:O]

Lynden Williams said:

  but it will be independent of WPF, .Net and all of the other stuff that handicaps the software.

The problem there is that if you do not use someone else's programming library then you need to reinvent the wheel and write your own programming library to do the same thing.  [not sure exactly what they use those libraries for but part of it handles different computer configurations without the programmer knowing what computer the program will be running on] One "FIX" would be to write the entire program in native mode assembly language.  That might make it say 100 times faster but would also take say 100 times longer to write it and then we might need a different version for each brand and model computer.

Hopefully sooner than version 6 but...

Better reading progress indication.

When I'm reading a paperback I have an accurate sense of how long it is till then end of the chapter and so on. With Logos books it is hard to tell because of changing font sizes etc whether I am reading a heavyweight or a pamphlet. I think kindle are introducing something like a time to end of chapter feature?

I would suggest something like the auto bookmarks that appear as little lines in the scrollbar but one which is a different colour eg. green and indicates the end of the article/chapter. When hovered it would give you an indication in terms of time to get there. ie. 2000 words remaining in chapter, reading at 300wpm (as an average pastors reading speed?) 6mins to end of chapter.

Page numbers in the table of contents sidebar would be great too.

A similar feature for ipad.

Collections in Android.

Faster audio reading speed when I use read aloud. 2x is not quick enough for a busy person;)

Cheers,

John

David Ames said:

Lynden Williams said:

so that when Logos 7 is released 

SEVEN?  We have yet to finalize our dream Logos six!

Of course we do.  We want one that is so fast that things appear even as we think about them and which automatically adds any new feature we might conjure up.  It takes only 1 k of memory and fixes lunch and washes up afterwards.  [;)]

John Goodman said:

I wonder about building on the faithlife / biblia foundation and going fully cloud? The speed of these sites means I'm always going there first before logos but I miss lots of features like the info pane, the popups etc. Even word studies and passage guide are on library.logos.com.

If those sites became the new logos 6 then it would be truly cross platform. Possibly even with offline mode like google docs in chrome?

That would make this linux user happy!

But it would make everyone else unhappy.  [:(]

I would like to have a customizable exclusive front-page devotional page that changes depending upon the date.

More usable content on the homepage rather than dinky tiny blurbs would be nice.

Also, touch functionality that works for 8.x versions of Windows (yup broken record on that one...anyone remember phongraph records?)

How about a scripture line-by-line streamlined search for novices at a Bible Study who do not want everything on a passage but only Bible versions and selected commentaries without having to create a filter for it...built right into the application as a quick pulldown.

JoshInRI said:

depending upon the date.

One other item on DATE is PLEASE, if the dead line is gone by then don't show us that we could have saved $50 but not we can not.

None of the stuff from L3 that I wanted to be added to L4 or L5 have been included so far...I don't see why I should expect that to change in L6.

Lynden Williams said:

Customizing the shortcut bar. http://community.logos.com/forums/t/74109.aspx

I forgot I started that thread till I saw this reminder. Yes, I still hope this happens. It's not a deal-breaker, but would sure help practical functionality.

Agreed. I'm treating my Logos library as a subset of a seminary library.

Lynden Williams said:

Daniel Yoder said:

Also useful for seminary/academic work would be Hebrew and Greek vocabulary flashcards. 

This is available in part at least. logos4:Help;ref=word 

Thanks Lynden.  I did not know about this feature.  I will have to play around with it. 

Ben said:

I have one very very simple request, which is nevertheless unlikely to be met. 

I want a simple keyboard shortcut to the command line, like Esc. That's it. I'm a BW power user, and rarely need my mouse, but Logos requires me to either mouse up to the line (which I usually have to do) or else Option-Command-L. That's hardly intuitive. It's no command-alt-delete, but still, it requires both hands and three fingers and is just a bit awkward, since the first two keys are next to each other. 

RATS !!  [:D]

Nathan Parker said:

Practically everything I've been suggesting. :-) Continuing to tightly integrate the Logos Ecoystem would be good too.

I can not read through the whole thread right now due to challenged eyesight but I would love to see  comprehensive voice navigation.

Ed Wurth said:

I would like an option for highlights to apply only to a saved layout.  I would also like to be able to change the highlight color of notes.  The current one is too light.

Ed, you don't have to wait for Logos 6 [:)] you can change the colors and style of your highlights as you like. See wiki help here.