Photos from a Logos Fan

Archive - August, 2005

If You Can’t Afford a Quarter

Bob Pritchett | Wed, August 31, 2005 | Misc 1

…then you ought to give a dime. If everybody gave then we could save the Blue Water Line.

The Kingston Trio wanted to save the home town depot and old engine number nine. I just want to make more books available to Logos Bible Software users.

Our Community Pricing Program is an attempt to let users collectively set the price of a book production project as low as possible. The more people who pre-order, the lower we can make the cost per unit and still cover our production costs.

Community Pricing is an experiment, and it is working. Together you have moved several projects into production and in each case the price per unit has been much lower than it would have been as a traditional Pre-Publication project.

What surprises me, though, is how many orders come in after a project covers its costs in the Community Pricing Program and before we ship it. When a title covers its costs in Community Pricing we move it to the Pre-Publication program and raise the cost. We have been getting as many as 20% more orders after moving a title.

That’s fine with us. The costs are covered, so those orders represent profit for us. But if those orders had been placed in Community Pricing, instead of Pre-Pub, the cost would have been lower for everybody. If you are at all interested in a title in the Community Pricing Program, place a bid now. (Some titles allow bids as low as $2!) If you placed a bid on a title that is hovering around 60%, a small increase by all the bidders can move the book into production right away.

Toggling Zoom with a Custom Toolbar

Bob Pritchett | Tue, August 30, 2005 | Training 2

The Libronix Digital Library System is a very modular framework. The user interface is separate from the system internals. This modularity not only makes for a better application architecture, it allows us to deliver new features and user interface without changing the underlying system. (Below I am going to show you how to add a “Toggle Zoom” feature right now, without downloading anything.)

The Libronix DLS exposes its internal interfaces publicly, allowing external applications to control it. It also allows users to add their own functionality, either with an external programming language or with JavaScript inside custom toolbar commands.

The documentation for the scriptable object model is available as a free Libronix DLS compatible resource. The automation newsgroup is where you can ask questions about automating the Libronix DLS and get help from Logos programmers and other users.

I’m going to show you how to add a custom toolbar with a new command that toggles resource windows between their default zoom and 200% zoom. (This is really useful when you are projecting Logos Bible Software in a classroom, or even just leaning back to read.)

Liddell-Scott-Jones (LSJ) as a complement to BDAG

Rick Brannan | Mon, August 29, 2005 | Products 0

I was all set to start to write a post about how I use LSJ as a complement to BDAG when I’m looking into word meanings in the Greek New Testament.

Then I realized I’d already written such a beast, and it’s been on our web site for awhile now. If you’ve been wondering why a lexicon that covers a large range of classical material (like LSJ) would be useful in studying either LXX or New Testament Greek, then you may want to check out the article.

And, if you’re interested, you can read an overview of how we (Logos) came to the decision to produce LSJ as a Logos book. In the process, you’ll learn a bit about how we take stuff from print to electronic via the Pre-Publication Program.

Mouse Gestures

Bob Pritchett | Fri, August 26, 2005 | Training 5

It is always a pain to switch from keyboard to mouse and back. “Power users” tend to master the keyboard shortcuts of their favorite applications so that they can keep their hands in one place.

The keyboard is not as convenient as the mouse, though, for navigating a page full of hyperlinks. But when you are following lots of links it is a real pain to keep moving your mouse between the list of links and the back button, or moving your hand back to the keyboard to press “Alt-Left”.
Mouse gestures are a powerful shortcut that can cut your mouse travel without touching the keyboard.

In an open resource window, click and hold the right mouse button while dragging it just a short distance to the left and then releasing the button. This “gesture” executes the Go > Back command. (Assuming you have already followed a link or scrolled, so there is somewhere to go back to.) Right-click and drag to the right executes the Go > Forward command. Up moves to the previous article, down to the next. A “C” shape (left, down, right) toggles the contents pane.

I am not sure who invented mouse gestures, but we first saw them in Opera and Mozilla. These browsers support a long list of gestures, but I don’t often make an “M” shape to view the tags for a page, or “S” to view the source. I do use forward and back all the time and can’t imagine working without them.

I call mouse gestures a hidden feature because they don’t have any visible user interface and so most users never find them. But now you know. A complete list of the gestures supported in the Libronix DLS is in the Libronix DLS Help, under Appendixes > Gestures. Give them a try, and let us know if there are any other commands you would like to access through gestures.

Photos from a Logos Fan

Daniel Foster | Thu, August 25, 2005 | Misc 2

Not only do our users send us random shipments of hot sauce from time to time, but sometimes we get photos like these sent from Logos user Michael Sinclair. Click either photo to see a larger version.

Michael is running Logos on Windows XP on this dual-boot Shuttle XPC (a compact PC). Notice the Logos wallpaper layered onto the front of the machine.

The shuttle coexists peacefully alongside a dual processor Mac G4–Michael says he plans to install Logos Bible Software for the Mac on that in December.

Thanks for the pics, Michael! You’ve got a cool setup there…