Sorry for the hate mail, but after beta testing this program and spending countless hours messing with it, I am concluding that Logos 4 is a waste of my time. The most powerful features of Logos 3 are not there, and what really disturbs me is that I don't even see them on the list of "Missing Features" to be added. Others have complained about these gross deficiencies during the beta test, but it seems our complaints have fallen on deaf ears.
My biggest concern is the lack of Parallel Resource Associationes (PRA's). The resource prioritization scheme in Logos 4 is nearly worthless, compared to the power of Logos 3. The user needs to be able to define PARALLEL RESOURCES as well as KEYLINKS (which I'll mention below). PRA's are the most critical missing feature of Logos 4!! In Logos 3, I had my whole library arranged into various parallel resource groups, so I could just press the arrow key and scan all the parallel resources with just a single key click. For example, I could open Langes Commentary on Matthew and just by hitting the arrow key scan through each commentary on Matthew in my "Matthew Commentary" PRA. In Logos 4 I can set up a collection for "Matthew Commentary" but it's not very useful. I can tag all commentaries, I can rank all my commentaries, and i can prioritize all my commentaries or my commentary series, but I still have virtually NO control over what Logos 4 lists for parallel resources. For example, in Logos 4, when I open Lange's Commentary on Matthew, and I hit the + tab (or use the control-arrow key), it shows each of the books in the Lange's series as parallel resources! These are serial resources, not parallel!! And then it lists a couple commentaries of Matthew, but the list is very incomplete, and then not even from the series I've prioritized in the library. Furthermore, they are not even automatically hyperlinked to the verse I was studying in the original commentary. It is extremely frustrating and time consuming to use Logos 4 this way. I basically have to manually open my Matthew Commentary Collection and open each resource individually.
The bottom line is that I simply don't have enough time to waste using Logos 4 until they can restore the control of Parallel resources that made Logos 3 so powerful.
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My second
biggest concern is the lack ability to prioritize resources (set keylinks) by
Data Type as in Logos 3. This was much
more intuitive in Logos 3. Logos 4, we
have no idea how to keep track of what is linked to what, and how to view
quickly the options for a given Data Type. Although we can use the advanced
link to prioritize according to data type, it is very impractical to use when
you want to modify things. You have no way of looking at the prioritized
list for a given data type, other than looking at the properties associated
with each resource. SUGGESTION: It would at least be nice to have the
OPTION of separating the priortized list according to data type, so we could
then see at a glance how each data type is prioritized.
The third biggest concern is the loss of the powerful "keylink options" that appeared when you right-clicked on word in Logos 3. In Logos 3, when you right-click a word and go to the selected text submenu, you would see the top 8 prioritized resources
for that data type. So for example when I click on a name in an English Bible, with just one click I can open a priotized Bible Dictionary. And then if I want more information, I can just "arrow" from that dictionary to all the other Bible dictionaries that I associated in the PRA for Bible Dictionaries. This brought unbelievable power and speed to Logos 3.
I am having a hard time believing that with all the hype of Logos 4 (and I know it has fast searches and other useful features), we are actually coming out with a tool that is taking some huge steps backwards. So huge are these steps backwards that I just can't see it as worthwhile until these most critical features are given priority.
