I read with interest over the last month or so LaRosa Johnson’s 30 Day Challenge. He wanted to see if Logos was best suited to meet his Bible study needs.
In his own words,
The reason that I came up with this challenge is because my needs and wants for Bible software are changing, and doing so rather rapidly. When I first started studying the Bible and using Bible software, I was someone who only occasionally made use of commentaries and dictionaries, but never even dared to try to use the original language tools that I had available. . . . Now that I am actually learning to read the original languages (Greek and Hebrew), my desire to do more with this knowledge has grown tremendously. . . . With these changing needs, I figured that it would be best to evaluate which software applications would be best for making this happen, especially when taking into consideration how I study, where I want to go, and leaving an open door for growth.
What is the 30 day challenge? Well, the challenge is this: my goal is to exclusively use Logos Bible Software for 30 days . . . and see how well I am able to adjust to using their software and see how well it suits my needs.
He journals his progress in these six posts:
- Logos Bible Software: The 30 Day Challenge
- The 30 Day Challenge: The First Few Days
- The 30 Day Challenge: More Thoughts
- The 30 Day Challenge: Praises and Complaints
- The 30 Day Challenge: A Few More Wants and Some Cool Features
- The 30 Day Challenge: The Conclusion
At the end, he concludes,
For what I'm trying to do in my personal and academic studies, I have to wholeheartedly admit that Logos is the best application to suit my needs. In doing this challenge, the biggest thing that sold me was the ease at which I was able to study in the original languages.
LaRosa certainly has courage and grace. His conclusion makes sense for anyone who wants to dig deeper into the original languages--ending up with Logos, BibleWorks or Accordance. Or some combination of those.
I really hope Logos 4.0 will fix the gripe LaRosa identified in his 5th post (copied below). Can you give us any info on that, Phil?
"One of the main things that I have a gripe with is the inability of Logos to save the current state (results) of the Passage/Exegetical Guide or Bible Word Study when I open/close/save a workspace. Instead of saving all of the results that it gave when I first ran the search, it has to perform the search each and every time I load a workspace that contain any of those reports. This can really bog down a system when loading a workspace, plus it means that I have to wait before I can dive back into my study. I just wish that it could save the state and just return the previous results"
LaRosa,
I can empathize with you brother, for I, too, use both products. I invested "heavily" in WS as it was a little more affordable. But, I got a great deal on Logos (and most of my co-workers use it). Now I'm constantly switching between the 2 resources and using what the other doesn't (currently) have to the best advantage (at least I think so)!
Keep making WS a great product, and I will keep using it and wishing it were more like Logos and vice versa.
"Keoman"
I concur with LaRosa's comments on the 5th page of his challenge in respect of the Logos software Bible Speed Search. One feature that I would like to add to this, though, is being able to search more than one version at a time. I know that I can type in my keywords and then change the version, but why do something in 2 or 3 steps that could be done in 1, not unlike the options in the Parallel Versions feature.