What would you like to see in BibleWorks 10?

[brainout]

If I understand brainout correctly, you can still go back to the previous verse. Above the command line, to the upper right of the 12 tabs for favorites are two buttons, a left-pointing arrow and a right-pointing arrow. If you click on the left-pointing arrow, your browse window goes to the previous verse you had been looking at, and you can keep going back to previous searches by continuing to click on the button. Then you may click on the right-pointing arrow to go back to the verse you left. My guess is that this is not called the "context" arrow, since most exegetes who hear the word "context" would think of verses surrounding the current verse, not previous verses we had searched. Does this help?
Mark Eddy

That function is not really the same. In BW5, you got a drop-down menu where you SAW a full list of the contexts used in the session, and could select among them. Granted, the back and forward buttons above the command line in BW9 are better than nothing, but they are only linear, and don't give you a list to choose from. So if you have a great memory for exactly what path you took, fine. If not, then not so fine. Especially, if you're looking at a LOT of verses.

I'll go now and look at my BW8, to see if it suffered the same fate. I never used BW8 much, so maybe the context is there. Look: I own three full copies, plus version 4 (version 5 was an upgrade, I think). So I'm not trying to knock BW. I don't even want to live, without BW. Seriously. But were I a scholar or even a pastor (wrong gender, lol), I'd really want to be able to quickly cycle through many verses being compared, while analyzing the text. It's an important feature.

[Mark Eddy]

That function is not really the same. In BW5, you got a drop-down menu where you SAW a full list of the contexts used in the session, and could select among them. Granted, the back and forward buttons above the command line in BW9 are better than nothing, but they are only linear, and don't give you a list to choose from. So if you have a great memory for exactly what path you took, fine. If not, then not so fine. Especially, if you're looking at a LOT of verses.

Have you tried using the "Verse History" or "Word History" lists? There are icons for each of these. If you open these, you can see the last 100 verses you searched and the last 100 words you searched. If you just scroll between verses, these are not recorded, but searched verses are.
Mark Eddy

[brainout]

Have you tried using the "Verse History" or "Word History" lists? There are icons for each of these. If you open these, you can see the last 100 verses you searched and the last 100 words you searched. If you just scroll between verses, these are not recorded, but searched verses are.
Mark Eddy

Yes, I sometimes use them. But as you just said, they don't track your looking up verses, but only your searches. You already have those wonderful tabs at left, for the searches. But as you go through the verses in each tab, the verse history and word history list don't track all that. Thank you!

[brainout]

The subject here (for those who've lost their index to this absurdly long thread) is the display of the text in the Browse Window or Browse tab of the Analysis Window with each verse as a separate paragraph when in single-version mode. Brainout, I don't know how you're getting this mode without this verse-by-verse display. Heaven knows, I could have overlooked a setting.

It's difficult to just ignore the verse markings, since each verse is a separate paragraph. This becomes even more of a problem when copying and pasting multiple verses into word-processing software, for instance. Since the program clearly knows where the paragraph divisions are (since it is possible to use the Browse Window Configuration Options to show paragraph markers), I'd think it would be fairly easy to include a configuration option to just have paragraphs display as paragraphs, with verse numbers shown within them.

To be sure, paragraph divisions are also artificial. But they are also part of most modern translations, and reflect important translational decisions, which I think should be represented in digital displays of them.

You can turn off the verse and version markers in Options Flags. Or, you can size them to be small. So I don't notice them when in Browse Window, though frankly I've no need for the paragraph feature, as I don't use translations except for searching. Sorry I can't be more helpful!

[brainout]

My replies are in Green, interspersed in the text.

BW9 already has easier activation than previous versions. You do not have to type in all your access codes. You just copy them from the e-mail which BW sends you when you buy them, and paste them all at once onto the activation window in BW, and once you click the right button to activate them, you're activated in seconds. Or, if you are upgrading, BW9 automatically searches to see if you owned modules previously, and those codes are imported into BW9 at activation. The only people who have had problems are those who uninstall and reinstall multiple times. That raises a red flag at BW, that perhaps someone is passing around a single copy of BW to multiple users. That's when the phone call clears things up. Actually, this isn't true. My BW9 copy with the codes was NOT in email, but paper. I couldn't paste anything. The codes have to be input, because they have those little boxes. Worse, the previous registrations for BW8 and 5, no longer can be done by computer, but have to be done manually. The BW9 registration wiped out the prior, so now it's a bigger hassle than ever.

I can read Arial just fine, and I'm no spring chicken. Great for you, but not so great for those who aren't sitting with their noses to the screens. I can read any text when my face is a foot from the screen, too.
To each his own. BW allows you to change fonts, if you like. I know that, but my complaint was about the related stuff which cannot be changed.
The programmers find it salutary to look at a daily dose of God's word before they get down to programming. Maybe we all do. One can get a daily dose by picking any passage, instead of it being forced.
What would you suggest as the alternative? When a new release of BW comes out, there are always small bugs, and the programmers fix them promptly, so checking for updates every other day makes sense. After a release has been out for a few months, you wouldn't have to check for updates that often. I don't see why you bring this up, as my post was on what I'd like to see in BW10.

My eye doctor call what you have presbyopia (older eyes). When we were younger we used to be able to distinguish small contrasts. The older our eyes get, the more contrast we need. And the relevance of this is...?

Again, BW9 already fixed this. Once you have set up favorites, BW9 can copy them into its BW900.ini file. Also, when you are setting up favorites, when you start at new one (Display_01) it automatically starts with the contents of the favorite which was open previously. Isn't that the same as a "clone"? So, before you start a new Favorite, be sure to open an existing Favorite which is close to what you want the new one to contain. I know that too, but when deploying BW on multiple machines of which I'm the only user, it doesn't work.

That is why BW has so many videos to introduce how to do what it can do. And that is also why we have this forum, so get tips, if the videos didn't show you how to do what you want to do. But I suspect that if you suggest some functions to be included on future videos, you can probably get those included.
Mark Eddy

I'll just bypass your comment on the videos. I've been using BW since version 4.

More relevant are these three problems which hopefully BW10 will address:

1. Windows has its own colors for selected text; in BW5, these colors were passed on to BW, but in versions 8 and 9, the unreadable SLATE BLUE of the old Adobe programs, is the default highlight text which you can't undo. Granted, now there's the complicated COLORIZE function, but it's not as quick and easy as just allowing the user's own Select Text colors for Windows, pass through to BW.

2. This problem is compounded, by another default in the X-refs tab, which forces selected text to be WHITE. Here, the Windows Select Text default for the HIGHLIGHT is passed onto BW, but not the TEXT COLOR in Windows. So, if you use light highlight but dark text in Windows, you cannot read the selected verse in X-refs, as it forces the text to be white.

Click here for attached screenshot , showing the highlight problem. It matters a lot, if you're trying to show something to a colleague and you are recording the screen live.

3. The X-refs no longer operate like they did in BW5, where your Auto-info window would show in multi-version mode if your Browse Window was also in that mode. This was a handy feature, for you could easily click on a Cross-reference verse, and the versions would all show (i.e., you could see the Hebrew/Greek text, if you set up your Browse Window Favorites that way). So in BW8-9 you have many more steps to go through, to see a particular verse in X-refs, display fully for comparison.

The #3 might be hard to restore in BW10, but #1 and #2 should be easy. That, and restoring the BW4 ability to take apart the modules instead of forcing them all to occupy one window, would be the most helpful changes in the interface. I say all this because people buy BibleWorks based on my videos, and I end up using BW5 for the video recordings, instead of 8 and 9, which are frankly too hard to use. The last person who bought BW based on my videos complained about the difficulty, and wants me to do videos showing how to do the same things, in BW9. But what can I say? What I can do in BW5 onscreen, can't be done in later versions. Ergo my wishlist, above.

[brainout]

In BibleWorks 10 I would like to have:
1) The translation of the graphical interface of the program, so that a user can select a different language from English. (I am available to the translation of the graphical user interface in Italian language).
2) To be able to create a database/dictionary, personal dictionary as a new supported database, connected to the Greek Bibles as “The Lexicon and Dictionary Browser”. To be able to look up any word or entry in the Bible text. To be able to do wildcard searches on both the list of entries and on the entire text of the databases. To be able to search the body text for Greek and Hebrew words. To be able to copy selected text to the clipboard to insert in a word processor.

grazie
Pasquale

The items I marked in Green, you can already do. Creating your own database and linking it within BW is a bit complicated, but there is help on it within BW. The Help on SEARCH will answer how you do searching, and yes you can use wildcards. Although the program's own instructions won't be in Italian, you can do these searches and dictionaries IN the Italian versions. That's one way I remember Italian, by loading up the Italian versions and then searching on some ENGLISH Bible, then displaying the Italian versions. Best way to learn another language (and people have done it this way for centuries), is by learning Bible in a given language: for, you already know the verses in your own language version.

[Mark Hangartner]

I would suggest:

• a search interface that is easier to navigate - the current option of a single line with 3 clickable buttons and various options none of which are that obvious is confusing to the average user.
  
  
• having a "global reset" button would be helpful (we have a networked version in a library) .... this means if students get really stuck they can close a session and open a new one with everything reset to some defaults I have chosen. But the closing and startup can be time consuming. If the student could just reset to defaults that would help.
  
  
• having an ezyproxy verified internet version

[cmyktaylor]

First, we're getting close to two [oops, I mean THREE] years since BibleWorks 9 was released, so I'm hoping that it's too late for my input! That said, I would love to see BW include arcing or bracketing (see www.biblearc.com). Second, now that there is a better Mac platform, I'd like to see an iPad version (doesn't need full functionality!), which could be used remotely when away from the internet or my Mac.

[Donald Cobb]

I don't know where things are at on this, but, at the risk of hearing David Rensberger sigh loudly...

This is something I've been meaning to suggest for some time. I would love to see the reverse search of the Lexicons tweaked some. As it is now, if you want to look for the Greek equivalents of an English word in, say, the Middle Liddel or the BDAG, you have to do it one word at a time (for those who might not be aware of this feature, you can access it by clicking on "Lexicons" => "Edit" => "search").

It would be very helpful to have all a summary of all the entries appear at the same time. There are Internet sites and other programs that do this, but it would be appreciable for BW10 to add this feature!

I wanted to paste in a couple of images. For some reason, I can't seem to do it. But here is a link that gives an example of this:

http://perseus.uchicago.edu/perseus-...ONJUNCT=PHRASE

What are thoughts on this?

Donald Cobb
Aix-en-Provence, France

P.S.: Sorry for the "a" in the title. It was supposed to be: "No end to suggestions..."

[DavidR]

Oh, I gave up sighing over this a long time ago, Donald! I'm just glad I'm not one of the ones who have to work through this thread looking for suggestions that might be adopted.

In fact, this is a good idea. I've done my share of LSJ searching for English definitions, which can sometimes be vexing if the English word you're looking for commonly shows up in definitions unrelated to its own main meaning. I'll have to remember to use Perseus for this purpose!