Accordance Note Taking Discussion

[darrylmy]

1 hour ago, A. Smith said:

If it takes a .0 update to get solid performance and reliability, there is a MAJOR problem. 

 

This. Couldn't have said it better.

 

1 hour ago, A. Smith said:

BTW, I don't think this will happen.

 

I hope not.

 

4 hours ago, Nathan Parker said:

What would an ideal Accordance 15 “Snow Leopard” release look like that focuses mostly on stability and performance?

 

This seems like a knee-jerk reaction to the pre-mature release of version 14. Why create development roadmaps based upon what was already acknowledged as a mistake?

 

I would suggest that instead of posing a question to the community externally (which is not a bad thing in and of itself), but rather, discussing other more important questions internally (which I'm sure we all hope are already taking place). Such as:

 

"How can we as a company maintain the high quality resources, technical innovation, and program stability that we have been known for and our users have come to depend on?" Or, "What went wrong on the launch of 14?" "What policies need to change as a result?" "What priorities need to be re-evaluated?" "What workflows need to be tweaked?" "What additional resources/personnel do we need?" "Where were the bottlenecks and how can we address them?" Etc.

 

Although I think there is a place for community inquiries, I think questions like these that are answered internally and then communicated with the community externally will be more beneficial than the type of solicitation quoted above. Just my 2 cents.

[Gary Raynor]

This is also a matter of resources - for example take a look at the cost of an AutoCAD subscription and they have issues.

 

Accordance can probably be revamped from the ground up but at what cost? how much are us users willing to pay?

The upgrade costs are quite low which goes some distance to  justify a little bit of inconvenience at my end

[A. Smith]

1 hour ago, Gary Raynor said:

This is also a matter of resources - for example take a look at the cost of an AutoCAD subscription and they have issues.

 

Accordance can probably be revamped from the ground up but at what cost? how much are us users willing to pay?

The upgrade costs are quite low which goes some distance to  justify a little bit of inconvenience at my end

 

Yup. We get what we pay for. And, comparatively speaking, we pay very little (most of the cost is resources, of which a big chunk is the publisher). I'm honestly surprised it's a profitable business model. Remember our grandfather Gramcord . . .. 

[JonathanHuber]

9 hours ago, A. Smith said:

There is zero chance that I will pay for an update to a program I already own simply so it will run as it should have from the beginning. If it takes a .0 update to get solid performance and reliability, there is a MAJOR problem. 

 

I disagree with this. OS and hardware changes. It takes ongoing software development just to keep a program working. I'm not a programmer and know nothing about the Accordance code base, but if focusing on updating any legacy code etc positions them to more easily maintain/add features into the future, I'd say that's a good move. 

[Dr. Nathan Parker]

By the way, I agree that one shouldn’t pay for another major version upgrade to resolve bugs and overall stability. Any bugs in Accordance 14 should be resolved in Accordance 14 in the version you’ve already paid for. 

 

What I am asking is I wonder how popular a “lighter” in terms of “major features” but a more “finely tuned” upgrade would be to customers. Priorities such as doubling down on cross-platform support (ensuring Windows and Mac are pretty-much feature-paired), adding additional functionality to mobile (so one can more with Accordance on-the-go), as well as under-the-hood changes (new standards-based file formats, improved import/export, etc).

 

Examples would be how Apple released Snow Leopard after Leopard. Leopard had hundreds of new features, Snow Leopard had fewer major features but really “refined”. Microsoft did a similar path with Windows Vista (remember it?) and Windows 7. 

 

Even Logos did this somewhat in Logos 10. There wasn’t a ton of new “major features”, but Logos made some under-the-hood changes with .NET, Apple Silicon Support, mobile enhancements, etc.

[ukfraser]

Remember?, i had nightmares about vista, we bought a laptop and data projector for church and it came with vista. Every sunday i hated using it as i loaded up the service!!!!!!!!!
 

nothing like vista please! (But snow leopard was great!)
 

but yes to refining existing functionality popping the bubble that is the trend to bloat ware!

 

I would particularly like to see better integration and between the full fat and semi skinned platforms, both in terms of the way they sync, and equality in functionality, (stacks and research and analytics being prime examples for me). I was blown away by the thought and design that had gone into the interlinear on the ios, you could have given us a much more cut down version and we would have been satisfied but what you gave us was far beyond my wildest expectations and that is just an example of what your developers have achieved.

 

but you have a wide variety of users with very different requirements and expectations so good luck but possibly a little more transparency may help in clarifying the best way forward. 

Edited January 5, 2023 by ukfraser

[Erhard]

4 hours ago, ukfraser said:

 

but yes to refining existing functionality popping the bubble that is the trend to bloat ware!

That would be great

[Erhard]

15 hours ago, Nathan Parker said:

By the way, I agree that one shouldn’t pay for another major version upgrade to resolve bugs and overall stability. Any bugs in Accordance 14 should be resolved in Accordance 14 in the version you’ve already paid for. 

Kind of related to this. Do the packages on the site now have V 13 or V 14? If they are still V 13, then people buying it now should not really need to pay an upgrade to V 14

[Sean Nelson]

18 minutes ago, Erhard said:

Kind of related to this. Do the packages on the site now have V 13 or V 14? If they are still V 13, then people buying it now should not really need to pay an upgrade to V 14

All the Accordance Collections currently contain version 14, with the exception of the $19.75 upgrade from the free trial which only contains version 13.

[Dr. Nathan Parker]

@Sean Nelson If you want to clean up @Lawrence’s posts, feel free to. I know I’m admin, but I’m waiting to use my new privileges after I meet with you and ensure I’m fully trained first.

[ukfraser]

4 hours ago, Sean Nelson said:

All the Accordance Collections currently contain version 14, with the exception of the $19.75 upgrade from the free trial which only contains version 13.

Sorry Sean, you have a pedant on the forum! The triple also has 13 in the modules included. 🙄

 

(As an aside its still showing as $112 despite all the items are showing in blue as owned.)

Edited January 5, 2023 by ukfraser

[Sean Nelson]

22 minutes ago, ukfraser said:

Sorry Sean, you have a pedant on the forum! The triple also has 13 in the modules included. 🙄

 

(As an aside its still showing as $112 despite all the items are showing in blue as owned.)

Thanks for pointing this out. It should be fixed now.

[guineau]

On 1/2/2023 at 11:57 AM, dandennison said:

With BibleWorks off the scene, Accordance is the tool for the job of exposing the text, especially with commands like INFER and MERGE. However, its programming model is both an asset and a liability. On the asset side, it's super fast and super small. On the liability side, using Pascal in the 2020s carries with it some interesting challenges to say the least.

 

May our favorite software continue to focus on what makes it great.

 

Dan

 

Wait - did you just say Accordance is written in Pascal? Wow, now that is a feat! As a software engineer who learned Pascal back in the 80s for college, I am impressed (and shocked that it is still around). FWIW, I really liked Pascal in its day :). Now I have so many questions - how do you even create a modern GUI in Pascal on a Mac? Certainly not in Xcode...?

[pjmedia]

Just as @A. Smith wrote: to pay for ironing out, optimizing the code and killing bugs... out of the question. Accordance 14 should have been released when it was ready and tested.

[Dr. Nathan Parker]

Good pointers, and customers should definitely not pay extra or wait for another .0 release for bug fixes. Our goal is to ensure Accordance 14, what you already paid for, is rock solid. Accordance 14 is out of the gate, and customers expect it to “just work”. It’s our goal to work hard to ensure Accordance 14 is rock solid, and you can enjoy both all the new features in it plus all of the existing features you’ve come to depend on over the years. Accordance has had a solid reputation over the years for being some of the finest Bible software on the market, and it’s our job to keep up that reputation. The biggest lesson learned is we simply do not release a new version until it’s ready. 

 

My only bringing up a “Snow Leopard” type release was in response to customers who mentioned they’d rather see fewer features and a greater focus on stability in some future releases. I’m trying to better understand what a release that would contain fewer noticeable features on the surface, but contain more optimizations under the hood, would look like. What specific changes would we need to make in such a release. Sometimes that can be a little difficult to think through from a marketing standpoint, since software marketing reps tend to want to emphasize major features in paid software upgrades.

 

Future Accordance versions will still have some major feature additions (if one is paying for an upgrade, there has to be justification for paying for the upgrade, and it has to add functionality that someone will use to improve their Bible study that the previous version didn’t have). Here is where we'd love hearing from customer feedback (I have another thread on here asking for feedback). What I want to hear from customers is what features Accordance doesn’t do now that if it did, would seriously improve your Bible study . Sermon builder seems to be a big request, and I’d like to see more cross-field searching in Tools and Research (that would move one major thing I do in the other guy’s software into Accordance). Keep giving us feedback.

 

We also need to balance adding features to desktop and mobile, as there’s more we can do on mobile, and we’re getting a lot of great feedback on that.

[c. stirling bartholomew]

On 1/2/2023 at 12:27 AM, A. Smith said:

I am working with primary texts 98% of the time. This is where accordance shines

 

Yes, and you don't need "the latest version" to work with primary texts.

[Kurt O]

I waited to upgrade (by accident this time) and when I installed about 10 days after release I had minimal issues.  I typically wait on updates for MacOS up to two weeks so they can get some bugs out.  I will do this next time on purpose when Accordance goes to 15.  I will continue to say it, Accordance is my favorite program to I use on my computer and for ministry.

[robrecht]

On 1/2/2023 at 7:15 AM, Lawrence said:

I thought they'd be able to stabilise A.14 by Christmas, and to their credit, they've managed to plug several of the glaring holes.

But the matrix of complex issues makes it hard to get on top of things quickly. Given time, I'm sure they can. But I think we're looking at maybe 3 months, not next week.

 

We're well past the 3-month mark.

 

On 1/3/2023 at 9:51 PM, JonathanHuber said:

Remember when Silas mentioned changing some file formats to make the program less susceptible to file corruption? 

 

I would like to hear more about this. Is there something in the works that might keep workspaces from becoming corrupt?

[Dr. Nathan Parker]

We’re doing long-term evaluations of the various file formats in Accordance to see where we can improve reliability on certain user files. We don’t have any specific announcements at the moment, but we are looking into it. I’ll add it to the list to ensure Workspaces is one we can look into.

[Diatheke76]

On 1/4/2023 at 1:07 AM, A. Smith said:

 

There is zero chance that I will pay for an update to a program I already own simply so it will run as it should have from the beginning. If it takes a .0 update to get solid performance and reliability, there is a MAJOR problem. 

 

BTW, I don't think this will happen. But since you asked the question. 

Yeah, that sounded bad.  “Pay for something we already bought so it’ll work like it was supposed to work to begin with.”  I don’t know why they made the conscious decision to release something that wasn’t working.  They even took preorders to give it time to make sure it was working properly before they released it.  Something is not right with the company for some reason.  Which is understandable since a lot of businesses are struggling.  My prayers are with them.

[Dr. Nathan Parker]

The issue was we released Accordance 14 at SBL (since we wanted to time the release with a major scholarly conference, a major part of our customer base), and, coupled with some last-minute programming changes, we released it then realized there were some major launch day issues with it. The biggest lesson we learned is we can always continue to announce and demo a beta of it at SBL, but not release it until we’ve done additional “battle testing” first.

[Daniel L]

On 1/5/2023 at 8:49 PM, guineau said:

Wait - did you just say Accordance is written in Pascal? Wow, now that is a feat!

Wow, just wow. Well, that could explain why Accordance's development team is so understaffed. You're not going to find "Pascal" on many programmers' resumes! 

Asked on Quora nine years ago: Is Pascal an obsolete language?

In 2014, Pascal makes this list: 5 Programming Languages Marked for Death

 

You'd have a ton of developers to help you develop in Python or C Sharp. A re-write could be a new birth with much faster improvements.

[Dr. Nathan Parker]

We’re looking at some future potential code changes, but nothing specific to announce at the moment.

[A. Smith]

9 hours ago, Diatheke76 said:

Yeah, that sounded bad.  “Pay for something we already bought so it’ll work like it was supposed to work to begin with.”  I don’t know why they made the conscious decision to release something that wasn’t working.  They even took preorders to give it time to make sure it was working properly before they released it.  Something is not right with the company for some reason.  Which is understandable since a lot of businesses are struggling.  My prayers are with them.

 

The sad story of v14's early release has been told and retold on this forum, if you haven't seen it yet. 

[Lawrence]

7 hours ago, Daniel L said:

Wow, just wow. Well, that could explain why Accordance's development team is so understaffed. You're not going to find "Pascal" on many programmers' resumes! 

Asked on Quora nine years ago: Is Pascal an obsolete language?

In 2014, Pascal makes this list: 5 Programming Languages Marked for Death

 

You'd have a ton of developers to help you develop in Python or C Sharp. A re-write could be a new birth with much faster improvements.

 

I was trained on Pascal, then moved on to C, C++, Java, etc.

But have you wondered why COBOL programs were still so widespread at Y2K when the language should have been phased out way before?

Porting to a new platform is sometimes needed to move ahead. Apple did it, and so did Microsoft. They're a lot better for it than if they'd tried to hang on to their old platforms. But it's not an easy decision to make.