What would you like to see in Bibleworks 11?

[Rokas]

Hallo,

in the spirit of the thread "What would you like to see in Bibleworks 10?", which proved to engage our minds and imaginations of what's possible and needed, I suggest this new thread for already upcoming Bibleworks 11. I know that it's really early, but the earlier, the better! And who knows, some things may be implemented much sooner - like my request last week is already available this week (!!) - so we have nothing to lose and much to gain!

I will begin by one idea I had this morning for Forms tab:
The ability to choose morphology according to which forms should be grouped. For example, at the present, if I hover over some Greek verb, the Forms tab shows all forms (in other words, it may be too detailed in many cases). I however may be only interested in how many aorist vs present indicatives are out there (and not "aorist active 1 person singular", "aorist active 2 person singular", ... , "aorist passive 1 person singular", etc).

[Jim Wert]

The Search Tabs (those little buttons at the top of the Search Window, by default named 1 through 12) are one of BW's great features.

It would be nice if clicking on one that is not empty (that has one or two asterisks displayed) would restore that tab's environment a little more completely. Two very ''nice-to-have''s would be:

1. Restore the window configuration of 1-4 columns, with their contents. BW already restores the contents of Search and Browse windows; this would mean adding the contents of the Analysis columns (windows) and the sizes of the window(s).
   It would be nice if this would include things like lexicon order in the Analysis tab, contents/order in the Resource Summary tab, etc. (for the Analysis tab(s) active in a particular Search tab).
2. Restore the version display order.

There may be other things that would be useful as well; these are the ones I have bumped into.

This is probably an oversimplification, but it looks to me like it would mean moving global specifications (.ini) to a tab level (.swc).

--Jim

[Glenn Weaver]

Hi Rokas,

Not to diminish your suggestion about grouping forms in the Forms Tab (the suggestion is worth considering), but I wanted to let you know that there is some semblance of that already in the Forms Tab. The grey background that appears on some words when the Forms Tab is sorted by form signals a change in morphology grouping. Place your cursor on a Greek verb and notice how the grey background highlights a change from tense, voice, or mood.

Blessings,
Glenn

[dmiller]

I will begin by one idea I had this morning for Forms tab:
The ability to choose morphology according to which forms should be grouped. For example, at the present, if I hover over some Greek verb, the Forms tab shows all forms (in other words, it may be too detailed in many cases). I however may be only interested in how many aorist vs present indicatives are out there (and not "aorist active 1 person singular", "aorist active 2 person singular", ... , "aorist passive 1 person singular", etc).

+1 to this request. It would be great if the Forms tab displayed at a glance the number of occurrences of Hebrew verbs in each Binyanim and/or the total occurrences in each verb form (perfect, imperfect, infinitive construct).

[dmiller]

The Search Tabs (those little buttons at the top of the Search Window, by default named 1 through 12) are one of BW's great features.

How about allowing users to customize the version display order for each tab?

[dmiller]

One more request for Bibleworks 11: I would love to see Clines, Concise Dictionary of Classical Hebrew or even the unabridged edition available in Bibleworks as an add-on.

[cmyktaylor]

It would be good to see some updates to this old tool. Nothing fancy, but having the ability to add notes and maybe categories would be a good start.

[Rokas]

Hi Glenn,

not at all, thanks for pointing it out! At the moment this is available for Greek only, right?

What I had in mind could be maybe something like Bibleworks has for Word/Context tabs, which is quick to access:



There could be separate categories/fields for each part of speech, and one could quickly check/uncheck what information one wants to have. For example, for verbs one could quickly check/uncheck whether grouping should have person, number, tense, mood, voice, etc; for nouns case, number, etc; and so for all parts of speech. By few clicks only could be achieved what dmiller suggested - sorting Hebrew verbs according to form (perfect, imperfect, etc), Binyanim (Qal, Niphal, etc), etc

It would also be cool to somehow be able to choose the ordering of all this info - like if for Hebrew verbs I have tense/form and Binyanim checked, so that I could choose whether it sorts first by tense/form, or by Binyanim, and then respectively by Binyanim or tense/form.

Clicking on items on the list would carry out search (like it does now) - in that way one could quickly search (for the example above) over a few tabs all occurrences of that verb in Qal, Niphal, Piel, etc.

Finally, like Forms tab has now two compartments, maybe it could have three in total - those it has right now + modified one mentioned above, so that for example if I sort Hebrew verbs by Binyanim in the first compartment and then hover over one of them, the second compartment lists all present forms for that selection - what the present top compartment does if I hover over a Hebrew verb in Browse window.

OR

Instead of an option mentioned above for ordering all that info, there could be two compartments with separate options - then in first I could for example choose Binyanim, and in the second one tense (or vice versa).

[MWMiles]

I'd sure like to see BibleWorks as a native OS X application. That would be "the bomb" as the kids say.

[MBushell]

I'd sure like to see BibleWorks as a native OS X application. That would be "the bomb" as the kids say.

There is a bit of confusion on this score. The BW9/10 Mac version IS a native Mac application. It does not run on an emulator. It uses a compatibility library to enable it to interface with the Mac OS, but then the PC version does exactly the same thing. It just uses a different library. The Mac version is no less a native version than the PC version. The difference is that the versions running on the Mac and the PC are functionally the same (have the same code base) and since it was designed originally with the PC platform in mind it still has the flavor of a PC in some places, though this is less so for BW10 than BW9 and it will be even less so as development continues. This has advantages and disadvantages. It reduces the amount of development effort for us (though we pay a significant amount of money to the developer of the compatibility library for ongoing development). That helps keep costs down for us AND the end user. Another advantage for the end user is that in an academic environment teachers can work with students on both platforms and have an identical user interface to deal with. We realize that in the short term this has disadvantages as well (like a few minor features that don't yet work on the Mac version) but that will change over time. And another advantage is that this approach encourages technology that may well open up other platforms for us (like Linux and maybe Android). Well, that's my two cents worth. The bomb is there. It is just ticking a little more slowly than some people might like.
Mike