Logos 10 is now released! In this blog post I write about some news and provide you with a discount link. 15% discount for new Logos customers and 30% discount for upgraders if you use this link: Logos 10.
News in Logos 10
With the launch of Logos 10, Faithlife wants to go back to the basics of what it means to “live in the Word”. The idea behind the update is to make Logos 10 easier to focus on Bible study, by restructuring, increase speed, stability and ease of use.
But the first thing I see when I open up my default layout, is a bunch of “x” everywhere. Every tab has an x next to the icon. It’s incredibly distracting. I wish the x would at most appear when clicking on the tab, rather than being visible all the time.
The other thing I quickly notice is that the toolbar has been moved to the left side. It used to be at the top. At the bottom of the toolbar is a small arrow that you can use to collapse the menu to make it as small as possible. The point seems to be to slim down the design so that the focus is on Scripture as you get more screen space for your resources. But I don’t understand why moving from the top to the left creates more space on the screen? Surely the toolbar still takes up the same amount of space, if the only difference is that it is moved? Well, luckily it can be changed back in the settings! Go to Application Settings > Application Toolbar Location > Top.
In Logos 10, the search tool has been improved. Previously, you had to type rather complicated search phrases to find exactly what you were looking for. Now they’ve fixed it so the search tool is simpler and gives more relevant results.
For those who own a lot of printed books, here’s some nice news. In the future, you will be able to mark that you own the print version of a book that is also available as a digital Logos book. Then search results from printed resources will show up along with the other digital books when you search in Logos.
If you highlight a text and right-click, you can now click Translate and get a translation! That is great for me as a pastor in Sweden who reads almost everything in English but writes my sermons in Swedish. Logos uses my favourite translation tool DeepL, and it is of a high standard as far as I can see. Unfortunately it was not possible to translate directly from the Greek text, which would have been a bit of fun.
For those who like to organize their sermons and get an overview, Sermon Manager is a very good tool. The problem in the past has been that most of us preachers write our sermons in Microsoft Word. But now it is possible to easily import a sermon written in Word directly into Sermon Manager and have all the Bible words tagged by Logos. Here I think Logos is doing the right thing in not competing with Microsoft and instead working out seamless ways to work in both environments.
Speaking of Sermon Manager, there is now a new feature called “Popular quotes”. If you type in a Bible text, Logos searches for popular quotes related to that Bible verse. Great!
If you click on the Table of Contents in any of your books, there are now two new icons “Notes” and “Favorites”. Notes, of course, are the notes you have made in your notebooks. But the interesting thing is that in Favorites you can add 9 Bible verses as “Quick Links”. These links can be quickly accessed by pressing “Ctrl” + the number with which the link is associated. A small detail that could speed up the work and reduce the number of clicks quite a bit.
In conclusion, I think it is clear that Logos has the ambition to be user-friendly for technology nerds. If you just know how to do it, Logos works as well, smoothly and quickly as it can! However, I’m not sure that all “normal” users will learn these features on their own. To take advantage of all the new Logos features, I think a Logos course would be useful for most people. There are plenty of these in English, but I think a similar one in Swedish would be very much appreciated here in Sweden.