Logos 4 review

The Logos Home Screen: Click to enlarge

I've just started using Logos 4 since Christmas Day. It is quite different from Logos 3 even though many of the concepts have been carried over.

Aesthetics. The look and feel of the program is completely different. It is much crisper and modern looking. Greater emphasis has been placed on making all the resource material more accessible. The home screen is illustrative of the change in design thinking applied in Logos 4. It is almost newspaper or magazine like in appearance, providing a potpourri of little article excerpts that tickle the reader's curiosity and hopefully leading him or her to click the "read more" link. Many hours can be whiled away reading all the interesting articles, exploring the many corridors of your resource library. It reminds me of childhood memories sitting beneath our bookcase, with many volumes of encyclopedias opened out as we followed the referrals at the end of each article.
PDQ Searching. By far and away, the most significant improvement is indexing. Indexing has improved searching by an order of magnitude. Database Indexing is analogous to looking up an alphabetical index in a book to go straight to the right page rather than looking for your item of interest by searching for every page. The earliest known indexes and concordances date back to medieval times. Database indexing creates another list of some of the contents of a data table, arranged in a way that the database engine can find information quickly. By organizing table contents deliberately, this eliminates the need to look for a row of data by scanning the entire table, creating considerable efficiency in searches.

Logos 3 Reverse Interlinear Bibles look like this (click to enlarge)

Greek or Hebrew Interlinear Bibles. Instead of having separate resources for reverse interlinear bibles, the original language text has been integrated into the base English bibles. Highlighting different English words in the text highlights the corresponding words in the original language ribbon.

Logos 4 Interlinear Bibles look like this (click to enlarge)

Installation. The biggest initial hurdle to overcome is the time required to install Logos 4, load all the resources and building the index for the first time can take, literally, hours. Set it going late and let it run through the night. On my ThinkPad, Logos 4 and the index takes up over 2GB. Having Logos 3 beforehand just means that new licenses don't need to be purchased, so it doesn't speed things up much as Logos 4 resources are structured differently.

Annoyances. One of Logos' greatest strengths is the breadth and depth of the resources they have available in the searchable Logos eBook format. They list over 124 bibles, 600 commentaries, and 28 encyclopedias alone. Although Logos says buying their collections is the best "value for money" method for purchasing resources, I disagree. Much of the resources are irrelevant and redundant to the reader and searching through all those resources under Logos 3 used to be so... slow. Indexing on Logos 4 has greatly alleviated this annoyance but nonetheless the principle remains. I think it would be far better to focus on building a core set of highly regarded and up to date commentaries, dictionaries, handbooks and other resources would, in my view be the most cost effective approach. Of course, the operative words are "highly regarded," for what might be well thought of in one circle might be considered a heresy in another. A most suitable subject for an upcoming blog entry.

Recommended system requirements. The required minimum system specifications mean that computers bought more than 3-4 years or go may struggle with the overhead. My desktop is a Windows 2000 machine, 1 GHz, 1GB RAM with about 50GB of free space on the hard drive. Sorry L4 doesn't work on Windows 2000. A faulty power supply led to the end of our family desktop and its replacement with a ThinkPad T60, 1.83GHz Core 2 Duo 2GB RAM, 100GB HDD with Vista Home Premium laptop. The T60 took all that Logos 4 could throw at it, in its stride.

On the whole. Logos 4 is a worthy upgrade the power of the new user interface and design features give users a lot more flexibility and indexing really has made the resources so much more accessible. Ecosystems are the order of the day in strategic software marketing. In the bible software development world, Logos' ecosystem is the most layered and expansive, largely because of the huge breadth and depth of its resources. A majority of the most prominent evangelical thinkers of the 20th and 21st Centuries are represented. Its nice to see more materials from a Judaic perspective appearing. It would be nice to see more works from Roman Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox thinkers as well. God is on the move, and there is a heavenly trumpet call to return to the Scriptures to solve life's problems and bring new life to a dark and violent world. This is the answer to irrelevance. Logos 4 is an excellent tool for the interested lay person, the professional clergy or the academic scholar.