Check out this video at http://homepage.mac.com/rmansfield/thislamp/files/20090731_libronix_vs_Accordance_1.html. While this video covers the mac, I can tell you that the Windows version is just about as slow. In the comments, I see that the same search in BibleWorks 8 returned the results in 0.36 secs. I confirmed that WordSearch 8 returns the results in less than a second.
While this video covers the mac, I can tell you that the Windows version is just about as slow.
We know the Windows version is slow compared to BibleWorks, etc and trust this will be redressed in v4! I'm surprised the mac version appears to be just as slow (more later when I see the video).
Later:
I'm shocked - what do Mac users think?
I will admit that Accordance is faster than any version of Libronix, but what is the value of this demonstration? What is the practical purpose of searching the entire Bible for "David"? No matter how slow your software displays the results, you can't read that fast! The only practical value of such a demonstration is bragging rights. If you want to make a comparison of something useful, try using the various packages for serious Bible study. (Accordance will outshine Logos Mac ever more).
Jack
The only practical value of such a demonstration is bragging rights. If you want to make a comparison of something useful, try using the various packages for serious Bible study.
The point is why is a native Mac implementation so slow? It seemed that my v3 search in Windows 7 was slightly faster and there have been claims (Logos) for v4 speed that put it in the same ball park as BW etc.
BTW I do agree about speed of single word searches vs more complex word relationships (e.g. x before y), but there is a correlation wrt speed.
The only practical value of such a demonstration is bragging rights. If you want to make a comparison of something useful, try using the various packages for serious Bible study. The point is why is a native Mac implementation so slow? It seemed that my v3 search in Windows 7 was slightly faster and there have been claims (Logos) for v4 speed that put it in the same ball park as BW etc. BTW I do agree about speed of single word searches vs more complex word relationships (e.g. x before y), but there is a correlation wrt speed.
Dave
My point is that we become so enamored with the speed of certain functions that we lose sight of the overall usefulness of various applications. Logos Mac has a lot of other problems that are far more serious than the speed of a search that has no real value other than to see how fast you can display a long list of verses. This list has no other practical value.
So this is LDLS running on a Mac - another reason to not get a Mac. Of course, that's what he's comparing: another Mac Bible program with LDLS.
I notice a couple of things:
first it looks weird: there's no 'workspace' background and he has no Bible open. (I've only used Speed Search with a Bible open - since it's default is to search the Bible in the active pane.) So I'm not sure that it's a handicap, as he suggests, to have the material open in another part of the other program.
I also notice Speed Search is much, much slower on his machine than on mine. I got the list fully populated (well 1st 1000 results) in about 3 seconds with the NIV, and about 13 seconds for the NASB.
Regular search was also noticeably longer on his machine than mine. And once again the NASB took much longer to finish displaying the verse text (35 seconds) compared to the NIV (7 seconds).
This makes me wonder if the Accordance NASB is as fully coded as the LDLS NASB. If not, he is comparing apples with oranges (if you'll excuse the pun). Remember that the LDLS version of the NASB has all the Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek lemmas associated with the English words. This means that LDLS has to find the verse (which it does almost instantly), and then choose to display English data only. This is going to take noticeably longer in the NASB than searching an English only version -- and my search results show that searching the NASB takes about 4 or 5 times longer than searching the NIV. --At least play fair--
Third we have no way of knowing what his configuration is, and how (de)fragged his LDLS version of the NASB is. He obviously has a lot of stuff on his system and LDLS seems to be a later addition (increasing the opportunity for file fragmentation).
But it's no surprise to us that LDLS is slow doing searches. That's been talked about for years.
Bob promises search results will display much more quickly in version 4. (Though it will probably take a while to port v4 to the Mac.)
2. The speed at which "Speed Search" and the regular search feature display results in the video is comparable to what I experience. 40 seconds or longer to display only partial results..
3. The Accordance NASB is also fully coded with Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, so we're definitely comparing similarly-tagged texts. I've performed the same test with the HCSB on both Logos:Mac and Accordance with the same results..
4. Macintosh computers have built-in OS-level defragmentation. Fragmentation is a Windows thing, not applicable to the Mac..
5. "It will probably take a while to port v4 to the Mac": I wouldn't hold my breath, considering Logos:Mac isn't even comparable to v3 yet. But hey, as of yesterday's update, we can finally print!
The only practical value of such a demonstration is bragging rights. If you want to make a comparison of something useful, try using the various packages for serious Bible study. The point is why is a native Mac implementation so slow? It seemed that my v3 search in Windows 7 was slightly faster and there have been claims (Logos) for v4 speed that put it in the same ball park as BW etc. BTW I do agree about speed of single word searches vs more complex word relationships (e.g. x before y), but there is a correlation wrt speed. Dave My point is that we become so enamored with the speed of certain functions that we lose sight of the overall usefulness of various applications. Logos Mac has a lot of other problems that are far more serious than the speed of a search that has no real value other than to see how fast you can display a long list of verses. This list has no other practical value. Jack
I do not think it is fair to reduce the issue to a matter of vanity
I only use Bibleworks to do my Bible searches because I often need to find where a specific word or phrase is used in the Bible or in specific books.
with Bibleworks I can display the results in the entire bible and quickly move from the occurences in one book to those in another. repeat such searches a number of time and speed makes a world of difference, especially when you need to tweak the terms in your search and repeat.
the issue is not just how fast the results are displayed, it is also about how fast you can browse through the results
Logos clearly sees that as a problem since they are seeking to address it in version 4
Alain
It is a known fact in Logos that its competition is faster (PC Study Bible, BibleWorks, Accordance). However, its competition cannot compare with the packages that Logos offers, especially now with the syntactical databases. I would trade the difference in speed for the resources any day.A friend of mine that works for Logos said that one of the main improvments in v.4 will be the speed. Here is hoping, huh?
Here's the comment I posted on that video:
Ouch! We're going to have to work on that. Every product is a pile of compromises. Some products are almost entirely about searching, and assume that a text search of a single resource is the primary way people will interact with the material. So they're optimized for that.Logos product is designed with the assumption that using a large library of resources is the primary interaction. So we put the Passage Guide front and center, not single book searching. (You're going to do a side-by-side comparison of our Guides to the guides in other products, too, right?)In order to give the Passage Guide and other tools more flexibility in display, we used HTML for the interface for all our reports. On Windows it's IE, on Mac it's WebKit. The search is pretty fast -- the whole search is done as soon as the first result appears on the screen. The delay comes from A) loading the preview text and adding HTML to the web page that's hosted in IE or WebKit.HTML is a complicated format to parse, and HTML renderers are designed to take a whole page and process it all at once. They aren't as efficient when you're inserting new HTML over and over, which we're doing as we throw the previews in one at at time.On Windows, where IE has been designed to be a reusable component for a long time, the same speed search fills the screen in less than a second. But our port of this HTML based display architecture to the Mac clearly doesn't play to the Mac's strengths.I'm not making excuses; I'm just providing an explanation. The fault is still ours -- we chose to use HTML, we chose to port the architecture of the Windows app to the Mac, we released the product, etc.The feedback from most users has been great, though, and we consider Logos for Mac to be a success -- because most (not all) of the people using it are doing so to take advantage of the nearly 10,000 titles available for it and to use the automated research guides.The users who are most concerned with repeated searches of a smaller number of books will surely find other products to be more useful.The good news is that we're throwing away this architecture, which we first designed (for Windows) in 1998. It was cool and innovative then, and saved an enormous amount of work, allowing us to do more interesting things. But we have definitely gone beyond its usefulness.The next version of Logos -- on both Windows and Mac -- is being built from the ground up with a new, modern codebase. There's no HTML, and we're using platform specific display technologies to remove the bottlenecks.Comparison videos like this are great, and help developers in particular see what areas need the most attention. I just hope you'll come and revisit them with the future release, too!-- Bob (with Logos)
The next version of Logos -- on both Windows and Mac -- is being built from the ground up with a new, modern codebase. There's no HTML, and we're using platform specific display technologies to remove the bottlenecks.
The biggest sigh of relief should come from Mac users!
The next version of Logos -- on both Windows and Mac -- is being built from the ground up with a new, modern codebase. There's no HTML, and we're using platform specific display technologies to remove the bottlenecks. The biggest sigh of relief should come from Mac users!
May biggest sigh arises from the fact that the next version of Logos Mac is being built in parallel with Logos Windows (at least I think Bob said that).
Thank you Bob for that insight. As usual, your posts are most informative.
More like excitement. (though some could claim that I amstill a Windows user as much time as I am on Windows boxes these days).
The truth of the matter is that for the average user, these videos donot make that much of a difference. I know several Logos Mac users andnone of them have complained about speed, but rather more features. Iwould consider myself a "intermediate level user" and rarely has speedbeen an issue.
There are a few interesting things about this video that amuse me:
All this said, I do think that these videos are good for the point that I do hope that Logos developers will use them to highlight things that can be improved. For example, I think the "workspace" and tabs that Accordance uses is superior to the Logos for Mac's reliance on expose to manage windows. I also like their use of tool bars.
I think the future looks bright and the real action in my opinion is still in the awesome resource library that is being amassed. Five years ago, many things I wished were on some Bible program somewhere are now on Logos. Believe me, if Accordance had this kind of library behind it and Logos didn't, I'd be walking!
And yes, who would complain if Logos for Mac could crank out results faster?!? [:)]
I am with you Donovan.Regarding your points.1. Yes, mine launches in two or three bounces as well.. something is wrong on his Mac I suspect.2. Amen to that3. My point exactly, even if the list is filling in below... who cares? I can't read that fast anyway :-)4. Good point One thing you mentioned in point number one has me thinking as well. You wrote, "presumably both Logos and Accordance would run faster" Not necessarily, Logos uses a different engine to run searches. It is possible that the recording program used by this guy impacted the Logos architecture and not the Accordance architecture. As it is, the video is admittedly flawed (as admitted in the comments section of the post).
I already said this once in a different thread on a different forum but I think it bears repeating. The search wasn't slow. The search completed in the blink of an eye. It was the updating of the results in the search results window that was slow and that's a consequence of the IE browser interface. That interface is being tossed out anyway, as Bob says above (although I doubt very much that I will install that version if it's going to break all my tools as hinted earlier).
Anyway, who waits for the search results window to fill up. It's hardly necessary. In fact, in the case of the simple bible search that the guy was demonstrating, all of the results are highlighted in the bible resource window almost instantaneously so I don't even need the search results window. In the extreme case of a global (whole library) search where the actual search does consume a lot of time I can start browsing the results immediately so why would I wait around for it to finish. On my old machine a search like that slowed my terminal response but not so badly that it prevented me from browsing results right off the bat.
It's interesting what you say about the bounces. I have the pc version so I didn't know what to think about that in a mac demonstration. My splash screen always comes up right away. Didn't you think the entire video seemed just a wee bit contrived? I.E. more like a commercial for Accordance than an honest product comparison. I mean all the points mentioned above were completely ignored. I think if you're going ot do product comparisons those things are worth mentioning, don't you? Either that guy is a very poor product evaluator or he was bound and determined to make the Logos product look bad.
Yours in Christ
John
I already said this once in a different thread on a different forum but I think it bears repeating. The search wasn't slow. The search completed in the blink of an eye. It was the updating of the results in the search results window that was slow and that's a consequence of the IE browser interface. That interface is being tossed out anyway, as Bob says above (although I doubt very much that I will install that version if it's going to break all my tools as hinted earlier). Anyway, who waits for the search results window to fill up. It's hardly necessary. In fact, in the case of the simple bible search that the guy was demonstrating, all of the results are highlighted in the bible resource window almost instantaneously so I don't even need the search results window.
Anyway, who waits for the search results window to fill up. It's hardly necessary. In fact, in the case of the simple bible search that the guy was demonstrating, all of the results are highlighted in the bible resource window almost instantaneously so I don't even need the search results window.
For Bible Search I don't view the hits in context in Search Results as I choose the Simple List option (Windows version) - so that many searches update almost instantly, together with the highlighting in the resource! That's always been my workaround for the slow HTML [more later]
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Speed was a major consideration for Windows users prior to v3, which provided a mix of search improvements and slower reports, but it ceased to be the major topic of earlier years. That "maturing" seems to be already present with users of the Mac version where the lack of features has been the major topic in the newsgroups and forum. But I was shocked to view evidence that is so familiar to users of the Windows version and then relieved to read Bob's admission that things would only get better - we've known for some time that v4 for Windows would be vastly improved.
For Bible Search I don't view the hits in context in Search Results as I choose the Simple List option (Windows version) - so that many searches update almost instantly, together with the highlighting in the resource! That's always been my workaround for the slow HTML [more later] Speed was a ..................................................
Speed was a ..................................................
Whoa. Stop. Go back..... Simple what? Never mind, I'll go figure it out for myself.
I'll be darned. I did not know about that. As a matter of fact I was just saying yesterday how nice it would be to have an option that would allow me to turn off all of those passage excerpts that I never look at. Thanks for the enlightenment.
