Some people get excited over a new version of a favorite game.
Some people get excited over a new version of a favorite car.
For others, it's this season't fashions. Others look for this season's team.
But for a select, dorky set of us, it's the newest version of Bible software.
Yep, some of us are that way, I guess.
Beginning with last week Logos Bible Software started a countdown from 10 that should have ended yesterday. However, on Monday they stopped at 4 and announced the newest version of their software aptly named Logos 4. And I've been a little too excited about it ever since.
Now, I've been using Logos for about 10 years, starting with Logos 2, which was nice but, well, let's just say it was a nice start. Ability to look up Strong's entries quickly was really all I knew it for. It was handy for copying and pasting Bible texts into papers, too, but really it existed to me mostly as an eBook reader before we knew what an eBook reader was.
Then they released Logos X. The tools were better, the resources more useful and better arranged, but still the program was slow and ugly. I'm sorry, that's just the truth.
Then, Logos 3. New features, new tools and, as far as I can remember, a new translation. I thank Logos 3 for introducing me to the ESV and for making all their tools work so well with a modern translation. The reverse interlinears were an amazing step towards helping those of us with mediocre original language skills delve deeper into the texts (I even bought a paper one!). But wit all the new features things never improved in the speed department. Or in the looks department. The dank color palate never did it for me and doing any in depth word or passage study would provide volumes of valuable information...eventually.
Then I switched to a Mac. Great OS, lousy Bible software. So I ran Logos 3 in a virtualized environment. It wasn't the best solution, but it worked. Until the powers at Logos reached down and delivered the Mac version. Finally! A great Bible study tool on a great platform. Only...not so much. The Mac version, when it finally shipped, was crippled, slow and, somehow, still ugly. By this time, though, I had abandoned running Logos 3 in a virtual machine and instead had a separate boot partition set up pretty much just for Logos. Yeah, I'm that hard core.
So, this week's announcement of Logos 4 had me pumped. No warning, no delayed promises (except one) and no hype, just a new version of the old program.
So how is it?
After it loads, it's not bad. Of course, this installation process is just about the most ridiculous thing I've ever had with a program. From start to finish I believe the process took almost 5 hours. Yes, you read that right: 5 hours. Vista installs faster and it's a whole dang OS. The first 2 hours were spend downloading data. 3.08 GB of data. In Logos' defense, going with the DVD would, in theory, shorten that experience, but still, 2 hours was just an amazing long time to download that much data. Then the data was downloaded, which means I get to use it, right? Well...no, not really. You see, now we have to index everything. This will, eventually, make things much faster but, for now, it's going to grind my entire computer to a near halt for 3 hours. Both cores pegged. You can pause the indexing if, for some reason, you would like to use your computer for anything else, but you're not going to see the full power of the program until that index gets built. And that index, for the record, will probably stretch your hard drive out another few GB. My entire installation has grown to almost 9 GB. That's 3 GB downloaded that now shows up as about 7 GB (compression?) and another 1.5 GB for the index, plus some other data hiding around. It amazes me that half a GB of data is there and I'm just rounding it off because I don't even feel bothered enough to find it.
Also, there have been some updates that run a few MB each time (26 MB was the most recent). Sometimes it also prompts me to install the update. If one of these makes me redo my index, though, we will have words. I do expect that these will slow down as the platform "matures" over the next few weeks, but it's just one more annoyance for right now.
But, after the long wait, it's gotta be worth it. Right? Right?
Pretty much, yes. The advantage of that huge, long indexing process is that searches happen in moments, not minutes. If you're used to starting a search, getting a cup of coffee, playing a round of golf, doing your taxes and getting back just in time to see the last part load, you're going to have to rethink your life. The speed at which this thing does passage searches and word analysis is staggering. So, let that index run all night and then in the morning be prepared to get stuff done. Having said that, though, it does take a minute or two to start up each time.
Plus, stuff works now. The Biblical people add in makes sense. It not only links people by relationship, but it's much better at showing who might have just been in the same story. Very useful. And the selectable icon sets make inserting this into a handout or slide show much better since you can match it to the style a little better. Nice.The timelines are missing, though. I remember some really nice timelines that could be layered and zoomed and exported but those disappeared somewhere along the line and I still miss them. Those were hugely useful for historical group study and survey courses and their loss is lamentable. You can still make a nice word search, though, which is...um...nice. I guess. If you're into that sort of thing. I'd rather have the timelines.
I found it. It was hiding, but it's there. Open the library, then type in "timeline" and they show up. Not the most intuitive way to get where you’re going, but at least they’re there. However, they cannot be layered and combined, it's one timeline at a time per screen. So...um...yay?
However, Logos also snuck in some great visual aids into this pack. They all have the same general "feel" to the images so that they will look good together. The text on these seems to be mostly vector based, so that portion will scale rather nicely (small or large). The graphics, however, are a mixed bag. Anything with texture to it starts to look worse and worse after blowing it up past "original size," whatever that means on my laptop screen (for an example, compare the images of the Armor of God vs. the image of the Egyptian Chariots. The first looks great all the way down, the other, not so much).
To go along with these graphics (and some pictures from other resources) Logos now handles the creation of handouts and notes within the program itself. While I find that this works pretty well, it's no replacement for a dedicated word processor. Furthermore, Logos still has a problem exporting tables from books. The text will go, but the table itself gets mangled in the transition. It’s a little disappointing since typing text hasn’t been a problem for me, but duplicating a complicated table might be.
Another neat trick Logos has pulled of is a feature I use much like the ribbons on a traditional paper Bible. When you search for a text in the Bible (say...Leviticus 1) a line appears on the scroll bar on the right side of the screen exactly where Leviticus 1 would be in that Bible. Search for another text and another line appears. Hover over that line and a clip of the text appears in a pop up. The advantage here is that you can bounce back and forth between references rather quickly. The disadvantage, though, is that your right scroll bar can become cluttered rather quickly. Since these lines appear to persist even after a restart (admittedly, kind of nice) time will probably not be kind to this feature unless I can find some way to clean them off. And, apparently, they will grow darker the more time you spend at that point in that kind of resource. It might be useful if you could reset it per each study session, but it's probably going to become more annoying than it's worth very shortly.
Switching between resources, though, is much better. The tabbed system that's been around for a little bit has really come into its own here. When you add a new tab to an existing window it assumes you want to stay somewhere around the section you're looking at, so the main box consists of pictures of the most related books (Bibles will show Bibles, commentaries will show Bibles and commentaries, not sure what other things show or how they figure it out) and then a list of additional, but less directly related resources will appear to the right. Clicking on any of these opens that resource to the section you are in (or as close to it as possible). It's a simple thing, done well, that really helps make this feel better and better.
And the interlinears. Oh, the interlinears! Several Bible translations have this ability now. I'm not sure how they pulled it off, but using the NASB as a reverse interlinear is a great experience. Same for the ESV, NKJV and the KJV. I'm not sure yet which other versions have it, but just those 3 makes me happy. (I know Holman and NIV do not have this feature...yet).
While on the topic of original languages, it’s worth mentioning that the word study tools here feel quite familiar. Almost...too familiar. The major difference: it takes virtually no time compared to the old system. That indexing, they put it to good use.
Oh, and did I mention the whole thing is pretty? I know I got on them for ugly programs, but this one just seems to work well enough for me to give it a pass. The blue and gray with green accents will probably seem dated in a few years, but for now it works.
Now, about the Mac version. Well...keep waiting. There is a pre-release Alpha (it's like a Beta that's promised not to work, as opposed to one that just might pull it off) that is almost worth using. It displays books. So, right there, it's almost on par with the Mac version we all actually paid for. The searching is...well...it's not there yet. Logos promises the same features as the Windows version, but we've heard that before. Call me skeptical, but I’ll hold out compete judgment until I at least get a full, working copy of the software.
And all this would be remiss without a mention of the iPhone version. It works, it’s pretty and it allows you to do basic searches and word studies right from your phone. The magic here is accomplished by offloading the higher end functions to some magical server somewhere and allowing the iPhone to just display the text. Sounds great, right? Well, almost. It does make things snappier and more responsive...but only if you have signal. Once your wi-fi or cell connection breaks, you’re staring at an empty screen. Also, I’d be concerned about uptime during, say, Sunday mornings as hundreds of thousands of requests start pinging that server all at the same time. I trust that Logos has come up with a way to handle it, but for now I’m sticking with my actual paper Bible or one of the apps that actually lets you download the texts. Logos claims they’re working on this, though, so it might just be a matter of time before we see downloadable books.
