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Hi, I am new to these forums and am dreaming about owning BibleWorks. I know this has been talked about before, but I am wondering if there are any indications as to when BW10 will be released. I do not want to buy 9 and then see 10 come out the next week. Does BW announce new releases in advance? Any thoughts you have on this would be helpful. Thanks.Quote:
Originally Posted by Michael Hanel
Officially, there is no immediate sign of a BW10 release. Generally, BW won't really announce a new release until after beta-testing because once a new release is announced people will stop buying and wait until the next version to come out instead. Since BW isn't a monster company, it is greatly hurt by those periods, which is why they minimize the time as much as they can.Quote:
Originally Posted by DanDan
Unofficially (I have no insider knowledge on this, this is just speculation), I would guess that BW10 will come out next year sometime, but my guess is later in the year rather than earlier (I'm still of the mind that 3rd quarter of the year is a good time to release because of SBL and such, but I'm just an armchair speculator). I have no real foundation for this claim, it's just my hunch. The owner has said he's working on BW10, but hasn't dropped any hints about a release, so I just think if you were in need of BW, it'd be foolish to wait because you could be waiting for quite a while.
Though I must say, I'd be more than happy to be wrong on this one. It's always exciting to see what a new version has to offer :-)
[This post has a little bit more of the context for my guess (based on release cycles)]
As Michael H. indicated, a new release, while impossible to predict, is probably not imminent. In any case, my recollection is that the BW people are very righteous about upgrades for recent purchasers: they don't charge the full program price or even the full upgrade price to people who have bought the current version of the program within a certain recent time span.Quote:
Originally Posted by DanDan
Thank you for your comments Michael and David. All that I need to decide now is if BW fits into my current budget. I would love to buy it before the end of the year. Thanks again.
1.Just the way the .bna files provide the way to type the reference in my own language (Russian) - without pressing INS each time - to change my current language to English,
would be great to be able to have maybe .bva files for each language - to provide aliases for Bible versions in my own language. I do not know how many times I have to press INS.
2. Switching between tabs, setting search limit, etc also requires to press INS to swich from my language to English. It would be great to have either text file - where I could set a pair in local language to these English commands ("b", "l", etc) - it would change the work speed dramatically!
3. Disregarding current keyboard language when pressing shortcuts in other BW windows (like when pressing "b" in browsing window.
If this will be implemented - put it in the list of changes - so that me and other users like me would know this - and thus would be encouraged to switch to a new version.
Maybe forgive me for sounding a little testy here, but I'm trying to convey that there are serious usage problems. People buy BibleWorks based on my (Youtube, 'brainouty') videos showing it, and then are shocked to discover how high is the learning curve. So my testy rhetoric below, is partly on their behalf.Quote:
Originally Posted by bkMitchell
1a. EASIER ACTIVATION. The current system is a royal pain. It's bad enough you have to type in each long module code, let alone go through activation per module code also; and of course not all of them allow internet activation, but you aren't told which ones; you're only given ALL internet or ALL manual, and the process for manual is unbelievably complex. Seems unfair to the BW staff to use individual emails for activation. If one has the download, or has the DVDs, can't that be enough 'proof', just to get the thing activated and up-and-running? Especially, since the individual module codes have to be typed in, as well?
1b. OPTIONS WINDOW WHICH CAN BE SIZED. This is a deal breaker, if not fixed. The buttons are masked. My Dell Latitude 6510 has FHD, but no matter what resolution I chose, because I couldn't SIZE the options window, couldn't select version order. That inability, renders the entire BW program useless, on that machine. Dual monitors don't help. This isn't a problem on non-FHD screens. OH WAIT! There is a fix for FHD so that the buttons aren't hidden: and it's the SCREEN that needs to change; but this 'fix' only works in BW9. (Yet BW8 still won't work with FHD; vertical scroll bar disappears, and because the Options Window cannot be resized, the buttons are hidden.) Here's how I got those buttons back in BW9. In Windows 7, Select Control Panel All Items, then look for the 'Performance Information and Tools' option. Then, first upper left option, 'Adjust visual effects'. Then, at the bottom of that listing, UNcheck 'use visual styles on windows and buttons'. This reverts to the classic Windows Blue and Gray from 3.11 days. But then, back to Personalize, select Windows Color, and you have the old XP style selections. Make them as you choose (much better, imo, because now you can size and color your fonts and backgrounds). After doing all that, then again Personalize, then Display (lower left corner of Personalize window), then select 'Medium' font (125%).
Now call up BW, scroll down to Version Order. The buttons are back, easily useful. Yay.
1c. BETTER DEFAULTS. Who can read Arial font, now? It's thin and unreadable, the bane of using Windows; default font should be darker, thicker, more like Cambria or some other easier screen-to-read (best one is Comic Sans, for reading onscreen). Who needs that 'Daily Light' prompt as the default? Why isn't the default 'off', allowing the user to turn it on? Why are there defaults ON for accent/vowel point searching, and other things that are rarely useful? And the 4.0 style search box is still faster to use when changing Bible books in a search, than the default offered now. Also, why should the default for updates be every 48 hours, checked? Stuff like that.
2. Other than listed in 1 above, please retain what's there. PLEASE DO NOT CHANGE THE INTERFACE. That's why Windows 8 is a flop, they changed the interface. We need to have the same basic structure that's familiar.
3. Get rid of the problems listed above in 1a-1c. Also, please allow the user to use different colors or different 'something' to distinguish the buttons now in BW9. They look too much alike, now. Also, allow the user to CHANGE THE HIGHLIGHT COLOR when marking out text with the mouse. The default slate blue obscures the text. It's a nasty feature of Adobe Reader, and a nastier feature of BW, because slate blue on black makes for unreadability. Adobe never learned that. BW, can. (Honestly, I don't understand this trend of light grey text on glare white or glare blue backgrounds in websites and MS Office products, or dark gray text on dark backgrounds, too-thin font faces yet huge glaring pictures that tell you nothing. World has gone mad.)
The above kinda serves under '4', too. Here are two other items needing fixes or improvement.
4a. Make setting up Favorites easier: back in BW5, you could clone a Favorite and build on it. The whole setup is hard to do over and over and over. Since redoing that is a programming hassle for you guys, then restore the ability to clone a previous Favorite, to make a new one, rather than just 'Display_01' appearing anew. Better still, can't the Favorites be spun out into their own configuration file, and then be ported in? If like me you owned several full copies of BW, it's a real pain to have to do all those Favorites over and over per machine (as the sole user of them).
4b. PLEASE GET BIG KITTEL? I'm stuck using Logos for it now, and their interface is totally annoying. If TDNT could be purchased and used under a BW lexicon interface, that would be fantastic. I don't care what it costs, either. Better than hardback, if it's in BW; so if the hardback is $500 (price in Amazon), then how much more valuable, if in BW software? So far as I know, Accordance and Logos have licenses. Why can't BW get one, too? But I don't know how hard it would be, to fit it inside the lexicon modules.
All this being said, I live on BibleWorks, and wouldn't trade it for any other software on the planet. Even so, the folks who buy it because of my videos have a lot of problems learning it, so they need these changes even more than I do.
I've been using it for over 10 years, so for me these are annoyances to grouse about and then shut up. So, shutting up now, thank you for your time!
Why is that so important? Forgive me, I don't see the difference between what you're saying, and what I get when only one version is in Browse mode. Paragraph divisions are artificial, too. Just ignore all the verse markings, and go by syntax. Or am I missing something? Thank you for any time you spend in reply!Quote:
Originally Posted by DavidR
TDNT is $100 at CBD. I don't think there are very many users who would be willing to pay $500, or anything close to that, for a TDNT module.Quote:
Originally Posted by brainout
What is 'CBD'? Thank you for your reply. I find Kittel very useful, well worth the price, but hardback is too hard to search. In Logos, you have to use not only their interface, but their keyboard, which is a hassle. Too many advertisements and syrupy stuff, too.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lee
Christian Book Distributors. They have a bi-monthly catalogue which they can send to you. You can also find them online. Before I started using BibleWorks, I used to buy hundreds of dollars of books from CBD every year. Now I hardly ever use those books, because most of what I need is on BW.Quote:
Originally Posted by brainout
Mark Eddy