I absolutely love Logos 4. I have been a loyal Logos customer since the early, early days. The program is so versatile, and improving all the time.
One thing I have always appreciated is the openness to customer suggestions on the part of Bob Pritchett and others at Logos. With this in mind, I am sending this to numerous Logos forums, hoping that my suggestion in this post will be given careful consideration.
As much as I love Logos, I truly believe one of its current weaknesses is the appearance of the Biblical Places tool. I am a Bible Geography teacher at a school of preaching, and I very much believe in using visuals in the classroom. I am constantly looking for good, clear maps that I can project up on the screen. I would love to do the same with the Biblical Places tool, but, in my judgment, it could use some tweaking for optimum classroom use.
Let me illustrate my suggestion with the screen shots below. I use L4M most of the time, but I believe the same suggestion is needed with regards to the L4 Windows version as well. Besides, my understanding is that the best and only chance to get my suggestion incorporated into the Mac Version may be to convince the powers that be to put it into the Windows version as well.
In all sincerity, I believe this suggestion would be useful in either format, especially for those who wish to project Biblical Places upon the screen without having to create an individual PowerPoint or Keynote presentation every time they want to show a map to their students/hearers.
When the map in Biblical Places first appears, it is framed between the top and bottom ribbons, but the map size is too small for viewing on a projection screen.
Of course, clicking on the Actual Size tab does enlarge the map quite nicely, but then a large percentage of the map is obscured by the top and bottom ribbons, as shown below.
Of course, one can drag the obscured portions of the map into view, but not without obscuring other parts of the map.
I do see the value of being able to gather information about a particular place just by clicking on the resource links in the upper informational panel, but there are times when all the Bible student wants to see is the map--with nothing else cluttering up the screen. The screen shot below depicts the small amount of space actually devoted to seeing the map.
The concept of a button to collapse a panel/ribbon, or to expand it at the user's wish, is by no means unknown to modern software, as the examples below clearly show.
In Preview, the sidebar to the right of the picture above can be reduced in size by dragging it to the right...
or it can be removed altogether simply by clicking on the sidebar button, as shown below
Clicking on the sidebar button then allows the picture to be viewed without any surrounding clutter
This same functionality is available to the user in Google Earth...
If the user wishes to remove the sidebar and focus only on the map, it is as simple as clicking the sidebar button...
The removal of the sidebar grants an uncluttered and fuller view of the big picture.
In fact, Logos 4 is already employing this functionality in other portions of the software, as depicted below:
With just a single click of a button, I can go from the divided view above, to the more focused view below:
Logos 4 even offers more than one way to remove the sidebar from view, as seen below:
Of course, if I need to expand the panel back again, then all I have to do is click the button on the far left, as seen in the picture below.
In my humble opinion, Logos 4 was extremely wise to leave the option in the user''s hand as to whether they want to show the contents pane or the locator pane.
In my judgment, it would be every bit as wise to grant the viewer of Biblical Places the freedom to choose when they want to see the information panes at the top and bottom of the map, and when they just want to see only the map.
I am aware that certain maps can be opened without going through Biblical Places to get to them. However, unless I am mistaken, this cannot be done with all maps, and even if it can be done, it would necessitate hunting all the maps down, thus eliminating the convenience of having the software populate the maps automagically.
If sidebars and side panels can be toggled back and forth for user convenience, then cannot the same thing be done with the top and bottom panels in Biblical Places?
Please and thank you.
P. S. I am not too proud to beg if necessary! 
