Bible Navigation for People in Recliners

[Mark Allison]

I guess that may be true and I would have to try more to be fair.   Coming from Olive Tree and others, it is also a personal preference and not necessarily about speed for me, even though I can click pretty fast.  LOL!  Hopefully both can be implemented.

 

Sounds like an "Enter the Octagon"—style battle of the keyboard vs. mouse is in order.  :-)

[Drewster]

This is a really FUN topic! I so enjoyed catching up. I don't think keyboard/mouse is a man/woman Windows/Mac thing. I was raised on DOS and remember the introduction of Windows. I'm a keyboard nut thru and thru. I'll do anything if I can with a keyboard. My mouse gets very lonely. That said, what hampers my workflow is keyboard to mouse to keyboard to mouse to keyboard to mouse. If I'm on the mouse I'd LOVE to click on a control next to the Go To entry box and select book - chapter - verse from a pop-up. I can today click the drop-down and select a book. But like was said earlier, thereafter it's click click click on the chapter down arrow. It is really cumbersome. I'm at my desk and too lazy to go to the recliner to get my iPad to see what it's like there. But I'll bet the grid navigation control would get a lot of love (use) if implemented. 

 

And yes, when I'm already typing I like to tab from the search entry box to get into the go to box and type a reference. But often in Accordance, more often than in other programs, I'm mousing around. So I'd likely use the grid navigation control very often, maybe more often. 

 

Cheers!

[Erhard]

I find that I always use the mouse to get where I am going. Typing it in really interrupts my workflow so much that I typically use BW or e-sword for looking up verses. In fact, this is the one feature that prevents me from using Accordance as much as I would like.

[Michel Gilbert]

It not only disrupted my workflow, it influenced some of my purchasing decisions, e.g., if I’m using a competitor’s verse selector, I want the lexicon to go along with that Bible.

 

I am glad that new users are bringing up this issue again.

Michel

[whitelioncub]

This was the first thing I looked for when I first tried Accordance. Being a user of e-Sword, theWord and OliveTree I expected this was a normal feature. So it did cause immediate frustration. A church friend made similar comments when discussing Accordance. He was/is a Bibleworks user and was frustrated trying to change passages in Accordance. 

[Donald Cobb]

It's not just a matter of ease. There are times when I need to know how many verses there are in a chapter that isn't opened in a pane. With Accordance I have to go to that chapter, then to the end of the chapter to get my answer. So even today (admittedly less often), I will sometimes prefer to look in BW, simply because I can get the answer I need in a couple of clicks. This happens regularly when I'm preparing courses or writing material.

 

The problem is compounded when working with non-biblical texts such as the Apostolic Fathers or Philo. I only have the abbreviations in the go-to window on the bottom right (and abbreviations of the Latin at that, for Philo!) and I have no idea how many chapters there are in any given book or how many verses/paragraphs in a chapter. Qumran is even worse with just the identifying sigla, apart from a few exceptions. In the 4Q mss, there are practically 400 of them only differentiated by the last number. It would be so much easier if an unfolding menu gave a little more of a synoptic vision of things, and could take me, first to the book, then in another unfolding menu to the chapter, then to the verse.

[Erhard]

I wonder if others could comment on which type of menu they would like best.

Personally, I prefer the BibleWorks or Olive Tree method, with e-sword close behind. I do not like the Logos "accordion" type as you always need to close it to get to the next one. I will include screenshots on this thread for those who have not seen the other options.

The Olive Tree is nice since it requires the least number of clicks to get where you are going. just select the book, it moves on the the chapter selector. Once you select the chapter it moves to the verse selector. you click on that and you are done. The BW is similar but you choose either the book, chapter or verse that you want to go to. So if you just want to get to the beginning of a book, you only need to select the book. If you want to go to a particular chapter you can select that and if you also want a specific verse you can select that one. With e-sword, the book and chapter are side by side and there are sliders to see the books that are above or below the visible ones. This works better than the arrows in Accordance. Having them as rectangles like OT and BW is nicer than the long list of e-sword, Accordance or Logos.

[mhanel]

I prefer OliveTree's style over the other two, but I'd be happy with any of them over none 🙂

 

[ukfraser]

I am very happy with how this has been implemented by accordance in the ios Version where you have two choices of list or grid. I prefer grid, but its nice having a choice. Plus you have the 'go to' option at the chapter or verse level.

 

Edit:(they dont have the colours shown in one of the screen shots above and i would be interested to see how the colours are used for the jps translation but i can include screenshots for those of you who dont have the semi skimmed version but only the full fat version running on mac or windows to see what you are missing as i think this shows what the level of thought the accordance team do put in to the options they give us!)

 

and im still enjoying using accordance on my ipad while reclining in a fantastic stressless view signature recliner. The Ideal combination!

Edited March 28, 2021 by ukfraser

[dandennison]

I must have missed this thread years ago when it began.

 

I think there's possibly two issues here. One seems to be having an easy way to drop scripture into another app. Accordance Services seems to make that work well, but I miss the UI and ease of use that ZipScript provided.

 

As for the verse chooser, Accordance's UI could benefit greatly by unifying navigation and search into one query box. At the very least, moving it from the bottom of the screen to the top would make things less confusing. This issue, by far, was the hardest thing to get used to for me in Accordance.

 

Rich: I love your triple monitor setup. Very nice.