Just not a fan of Logo software

R

revtup

Puritan Board Freshman
So I am an old school Bible software user going back to Wordsearch Bible (when it was its own company), Quickverse and Logos. While Logos had gobbled everyone up I just don't care anything for it. I have a ton of books in Logos 4 with the free Logos 9 patch and have spent 1K for the platinum version back in the day. Now you have to watch videos just to figure out how to use it or it may be indexing for the next 3 weeks.

I know about SwordSearcher and others like it but is there any software out there that gives any competition to Logos or could even remotely rival it?

Please don't hate on me if you happen to love Logos. If so, good for you. I just don't.
 
When Wordsearch was bought out by Logos I moved to Accordance, as they had a well priced crossgrade offer and I found their software easier to use than Logos. I recommend giving it a try if you prefer more traditional Bible Software user interfaces.

Having said that, I mostly use Logos now, as I have invested a lot of time learning it over the last year and found its more powerful features to be what I need. Accordance still has useful features (and commentaries that I do not have in Logos) that keep me using it on a weekly basis, however.
 
well.. indexing is pretty much a one time process which you can just literally leave it overnight... but anyway e-sword is free. If you sign in to your account, download the program. Press the Library button, you see all the books you have, then you can just open one of the books you spent a grand for. Why abandon the whole thing?
 
The interface is what puzzles me beyond words. What are they trying to achieve? Forget just showing your library and being able to open books and line them up on the screen. No, I want to want into what a tomb looked like in Jesus' day or how they ground up grain with rocks and etc
 
revtup said:
Forgive me, but I am not too up on ChatGPT. Please explain.
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ChatGPT is a language learning model AI.

You ask it a question, and then it gives you an answer.

Then you spend the next 10 minutes correcting the partially accurate answer until it acknowledges it was incorrect.

Then you do it again. It's the future of the future.
 
Screenshot 2023-06-05 at 8.06.59 PM.png

If you do not want the other fancy stuff, this is what you can do very simply. Bible on the right, Commentaries tracking the bible on the left. Double click on any bible word to bring Greek/Hebrew details.
 
revtup said:
The interface is what puzzles me beyond words. What are they trying to achieve? Forget just showing your library and being able to open books and line them up on the screen. No, I want to want into what a tomb looked like in Jesus' day or how they ground up grain with rocks and etc
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Writing from the perspective of someone who has sunk a lot of money into Logos and isn't always thrilled with it, I don't see any competitive alternatives in the space at this time. I've also got issues with FaithLife that are just matters of principle, like how they're aiming to appeal to as many broadly albeit nominal Christian denominations as possible, for example. But to your point about the user interface or UI, what they've really done is created a great place for Mr. Morris Proctor's content to thrive, because he's got the market cornered. He's the only authorized Logos trainer to date, but he also just passed in January of this year, so maybe other doors will be open to other authorized trainers going forward. His videos have a lot of good content, but there's a bit of fluff and padding in there when you want to find an answer to a specific question. That usually involves making a 15-45 minute commitment and sitting through the whole series on a given subject. The training also isn't free, and there's a ton of gotchas (stuff that used to work in one Logos version that doesn't in another) as FaithLife continues to expand and add various integrations to disparate applications within their platform's 'ecosystem' (e.g., getting notebooks that you can share with other individuals in FaithLife groups). There's a lot of functionality under the hood, but to your point, the learning curve is steep.
 
Do not be turned off by the many intricate things you can do in Logos. Things like sermon writing or entering the most intricate code to find something is not necessary. It is available for those who want to, but by all means avoid it if you do not want to. A bible-commentary-word study setup is easy to do (I don't see how bibleworks etc are different in this aspect).
 
kodos said:
Same here. Logos' workflow is tedious for language work.
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I am curious what I am missing here. My workflow is to:
1. Greek Bible open.
2. Right click for parsing info on.
3. Double click to open up BDAG entry
4. Drop down from BDAG to open up another dictionary for the same word if needed.
5. If needed, right click 'Bible Word study' to see its usage in other places.

Are there any other elements of what you do for your workflow that I missed out?
 
When I am away from my hard-copy library (which is in storage now until our just-purchased apartment is finished being renovated) I get by well with the Olive Tree Bible app, or Kindle books, or pdf books from various sources.

When I was in the states I was concerned about the electric grid being taken down and focused on hard-copy. Here it is not much of a concern. Now my concern is where to give my books (in a book-deprived church here) when I depart this life. The John Calvin Centre in a not too far away city is one possibility.
 
The nice thing about Olive tree is that it works across all platforms including android. It can dig down into the language layers if you have the resources and it's resource manager is stellar tying in all your resources at one time. Very intuitive as well and best of all, upgrades are free!
 
SolaScriptura said:
I miss Bibleworks sooooooo much!
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I still use mine, just as Bill does. I am going to keep using it until I can't. I tried Logos once. The thing I dislike in Logos is having to click any number of places to get to what you want to see. Plus, I don't need a library. I have a library. I read theology in hardcopy, because I read with a pencil. I find electronic ways of note-taking to be clumsy.
 
greenbaggins said:
I still use mine, just as Bill does. I am going to keep using it until I can't. I tried Logos once. The thing I dislike in Logos is having to click any number of places to get to what you want to see. Plus, I don't need a library. I have a library. I read theology in hardcopy, because I read with a pencil. I find electronic ways of note-taking to be clumsy.
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I only use it for exegetical work, which I confess goes a lot more quickly with software! But yeah, I do virtually all my reading in hard copy nowadays.
 
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