Logos 5 Discounts, Free Upgrade and Cheap Upgrade – UPDATED

Posted by Kevin Purcell on Feb 4, 2013 in Digital Bible Study | 0 comments

Logos 5 is here! That’s nothing new but the upgrade process comes with quite a sticker shock. Today is the last day to get some discounts on the base packages, but users can also move up to Logos 5 with three other less expensive options available either now or very soon.

UPDATE: We can now download the free limited Logos 5 engine for free without paying for a crossgrade or upgrade.

Two Less Expensive Upgrade Paths for Logos 5

Logos offers what they call the Logos 5 Core Datasets for $79.95 or about $21/month for a few months. This set includes the following:

• Bible Facts: Events
• Passage Guide: Events
• Bible Word Study: Phrases
• Topic Guide
• Visual Filter: Reported Speech
• Timeline
• Phrase Concordance
• Preaching Themes
• Thematic Outlines

See the “What’s New in Logos Bible Software 5 video below:

Logos 5 Minimal Crossgrade

With the Minimal Crossgrade, the buyer gets more for about twice the price. It costs $159.95 or $21/month. They call it the “bare-bones crossgrade to Logos 5″. This gives the user all the new stuff added for Logos 5. See the above video for details about these new features.

The list above comes with this upgrade. They also add the following:

• Clause Search
• Bible Word Study: Senses
• Bible Sense Lexicon
• Exegetical Guide: Syntactic Force
• Clauses Dataset: LGNTISBL Edition and LHB Edition
• Ancient Texts and Morphologies from the Lexham Hebrew and Greek tools
• Lexham LXX
• Faithlife Study Bible Notes
• Lexham Bible Dictionary
• New Topical Textbook
• Animals Mentioned in Bible
• Complete Book of When and Where: In the Bible and Throughout History
• Plants of the Bible
• Connect the Testaments devotional
• Faithlife maps, photos and media
• Lexham Interlinears
• Bible Illustrations

There’s a lot there for just $160.

Free Basic Engine Upgrade

We expect that very soon can now download the free limited engine of version five of Logos with a basic Logos 5 engine upgrade that doesn’t include many of the above features and content. You’ll have to gamble that you won’t want the new features and only the engine because their discounts will end before the free upgrade shows up on their website. When it shows up they will likely post links to their Support page.

Accordance for iPad or iPhone Update in CCMag Article

Posted by Kevin Purcell on Jan 29, 2013 in Apps, Christian Computing Magazine, Digital Bible Study | 0 comments

This month I discuss the Accordance Bible app for iPad and iPhone in my monthly column for Christian Computing Magazine. Go check it out for free at the magazine website or view just the article in PDF here.

To get the app check out their site and find the link to the app store.

In the article I discuss some of the new features and what they did right and what they could improve in this update.

Apple TV on Wi-Fi No Longer Reliable for Churches – UPDATE

Posted by Kevin Purcell on Jan 23, 2013 in Featured, Ministry, Technology | 0 comments

UPDATE: See my post at GottaBeMobile to understand how this might be a problem fixed.

For over a year we’ve tried to use the Apple TV over Wi-Fi as a presentation tool at the church where I’m a pastor, but this month we’ve given up because the device just doesn’t give us a reliable option anymore.

We connect the Apple TV to a projector in a our fellowship hall, the site of our Wednesday night Bible study and other meetings. The Apple TV connects via Wi-Fi to our network and we stream video and display presentations from an iPad or iPhone using AirPlay. For those who don’t know, AirPlay wirelessly displays content from an iOS device like the iPad, iPod Touch or iPhone to an Apple TV.

At first this solution worked great. I really like using wireless to connect a laptop or my iPad and iPhone to a projector via the Apple TV. It definitely beats hooking up to the VGA port and our stereo system. Tethering to the projector and sound via wires limits where I can stand. With the iPad and AirPlay over Apple TV I was able to stand closer to the attendees. I put the iPad or iPhone on a lectern, tapped the Home button twice and swiped right to show the AirPlay screen mirroring feature. The setup worked great for about a year and I relied on it weekly.

Unfortunately, with iOS 5 and later the Wi-Fi on the Apple TV no longer connects reliably enough. A bunch of Apple customers took to the Apple support communities to describe similar situations in a 58 page tread with hundreds of users suffering unreliable connections.

When I connect to the Apple TV using AirPlay everything seems to work fine at first. Then after a few minutes there’s usually a drop blanking the screen. This usually happens during higher bandwidth functions like streaming video. It’s also happened when display slides in a presentation using Keynote.

Connecting over Ethernet will prove costly to us at this time. We tried adding a Wi-Fi extender from Netgear between our wireless router and the Apple TV. The extender normally works well. We’ve also tried tweaking settings in our router and even removing security features.

For entertainment purposes at home, the Apple TV version 2 and newer became a must have iPad and iPhone accessory that only costs $99. We still believe that for home entertainment, it’s a great tool. Users can stream video from Apple iTunes, their iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch and now Mac. Users can enjoy video from third-party services like Netflix, MLB and more. We love using it for an entertainment device and wish they would expand their offerings.

Entertainment users won’t put up with a lot of dropped connections, but the occasional hiccup for a device like this doesn’t make me want to throw it out yet. However, churches need a solid and reliable solution that always works. The Apple TV doesn’t give us that.

Imagine standing in front of dozens of people. They came to watch a video that I promoted for weeks. As the presenter, I didn’t plan for a backup presentation because the video, would last the entire hour. After about 15 minutes it dropped a connection. After reconnecting and starting again, it dropped after another 20 minutes. Nearly every time we’ve planned to use the Apple TV for videos and presentations it dropped the connection. Until something changes, I will longer rely on the Apple TV at church. I can no longer recommend it until Apple fixes this issue.

If you don’t mind the occasional hiccup at home and have a wired connection, the it works great. If you can connect the Apple TV to the church’s network via Ethernet, then it works great. But don’t rely on it using Wi-Fi at this time.

Logos 5 Review in Christian Computing Magazine

Posted by Kevin Purcell on Dec 20, 2012 in Bible Software, Christian Computing Magazine, Digital Bible Study, Writing | 0 comments

My review of the latest update to Logos 5 came out in Christian Computing Magazine this week. You can read it in PDF format and consider signing up for a free subscription to get my monthly columns.

Next months should cover how to set up a live stream of your worship service using free services and a camera you may already own.

Just a quick quote from the Logos 5 review:

Logos surprised users by dropping version five November 1st. So what’s new in Logos 5. First, a solid edition that hasn’t crashed in the weeks I’ve used it. Also, much better performance gets exhibited in things like the notes editor. There’s no lag. What else is new?

We get a cleaner and more useful user interface. The Logos home page that showed up in version 4 now shows more on a single page. They moved the prayer lists, reading plans and library discovery tool from the top to the left. They also still offer a Home, Library and Search button.

Logos 5 Sermon Starter Guide

Posted by Kevin Purcell on Nov 13, 2012 in Bible Software, Digital Bible Study, Preaching, Software | 0 comments

The Sermon Starter Guide sits atop my list of favorite new features in Logos 5. Think of it as the Passage Guide but for preachers. The Sermon Starter Guide helps preachers combine middle steps study and sermon prep into one easy report. I say middle steps because preachers should never use this guide early in the study process. More on that later.

For people who haven’t used Logos before, think of the guides as a digital research assistant. I tell the guide to go look in my library for content related to a passage or a topic. For example, I preached this past week on 2 Timothy 1:8. I did a search on the passage and on the topics of fear, witness, evangelism and power.

Using the Sermon Starter Guide

Find the Sermon Starter Guide under the Guides menu.

Now uses the Sermon Starter Guide to do one of two kinds of supported searches – passage and topic searches. While entering a passage might help if the preacher doesn’t understand his passage yet, I think the best start comes from entering the passage’s primary topic. Preachers should wait to do this until after they’ve studied the passage using the word study tools and the Exegetical Guide in Logos. Once that’s done, then do a topic or passage search using the Sermon Starter Guide.

For example, I ran a report on 2 Tim. 1:8 below.

The list of included data in a default Sermon Starter Guide shows the following:

• Theme – shows themes from the chosen passage
• Thematic Outline – an outline of topics related to the above themes with example texts, great for surveying what the Bible says about the topics in a chosen passage
• Collections – searches the passage or topic in a predefined collection of works
• Media Resources – visual resources related to the passage or topic
• Commentaries – commentary entries about the passage
• Outlines – outlines from books related to the passage like commentary outlines or Bible handbooks
• Parallel Passages – cross references of the passage or topic
• Topics – topcis related to the passage with references
• Illustrations – sermon illustrations from illustration books
• GraceMedia.com – media from the site useful only to those who subscribe
• SermonAudio.com – audio sermons about this passage
• Sermons.Logos.com – same as previous but text-based from Logos’ sermons database
• SermonCentral.com – same as previous but from this site

Customizing Sermon Starter Guide

This guide works great, but not all of these entries work for everyone. That’s why I love that I can create a different set of default data sets using the Add button to include more along with the default. Also an X button shows up at the end of the list items to delete that particular guide data set. Click on the Sermon Guide menu in the upper left corner of the guide window and choose to Edit the content to make your own guide for future use.

From now on, run this edited version instead of the default version to get a sermon guide that helps you.

Good Exegesis by Doing Sermon Starter Guide Last

Before leaving this topic, let me suggest that you not jump on this Sermon Starter Guide at the beginning of your sermon prep. Do the basic exegesis of a passage by studying the words using an Inductive approach and then do word studies. The Exegetical Guide helps in this second step. Then stop and think about the ideas included in the passage and run your sermon guides on those topics first and then on the passage last. This workflow will help you become more biblical and not as tied to third-party tools.

To summarize, here’s how I’d use Logos in my sermon prep in order of steps from first to last.

1. Find a passage using search tools – search topics first or just enter passage if you already know the reference of a passage you want to preach
2. Delineate the passage by reading it repeatedly using the Passage Analysis Tool and the Pericope Set to show the first and last verse in passage sections according to editors of the various Bible translations
3. Use the Text Comparison Tool to read the text over and over in different versions and consult the Passage Analysis Tool again to compare translations
4. Do language study – some will translate from Greek or Hebrew while others will run Bible Word Studies on important words in the passage and/or using the Exegetical Guide and looking up words in dictionaries using the Power Lookup Tool
5. Keep notes along the way using a note attached to a reference, not a translation
6. Using the Sentence Diagram tool under Documents, create a structural diagram of the passage.
7. Determine the topic or theme of the passage (I’m a Big Idea preacher from the Haddon Robinson school so I like to come up withe the Big Idea at this point)
8. Search for these topics or themes using the Sermon Starter Guide reaching as much as needed in the various resources returned
9. Collect media resources for presentation
10. Come up with the outline of the text and translate that into an interesting contemporary preaching outline
11. Use info from the Sermon Starter Guide where it fits by doing the four kinds of sermon development (explain ideas, illustrate them, prove them and apply them)
12. Put it all together and then look over it to determine if the sermon points to the glory of God or instead pushes us to “do better” and fix it if it fits in the latter

I hope this helps you see where the Sermon Starter Guide fits in the sermon prep process.

President’s Reelection Encourages Me

Posted by Kevin Purcell on Nov 8, 2012 in Editorial, Featured | 0 comments

The President won reelection pretty easily from the perspective of the uninformed and those who only listen to the easily accessed media outlets. In truth, his campaign worked really hard for five years to bring about this win. He built a ground game starting in 2007 before the first election. Unlike most candidates who take a break after their first election as president, I’m told he kept his operation in place and kept organizing communities. Big surprise for a man whose primary job before his first election was one of community organizer for political groups in Chicago. He’s obviously very good at his job and he turned out his constituency while conservatives, especially evangelical Christians, stayed home in huge numbers.

I disagree with a lot of what the President promotes.

• He sees government as the primary tool for helping those with great need financially and otherwise while I believe private groups utilizing their good will do a better job of this with government safety nets for those in extreme need
• He sees homosexuals as an oppressed minority group, whereas I see them differently since stats show they usually are better educated and have higher income than the average public
• He sees American military might as a necessary evil at best and one of our greatest weakness at worst while I see it as our greatest strength and a tool for immense good since we brought peace to the world during the Cold War keeping people free from communism and serve as the only defense against Muslim extremists who want Sharia law to rule the world subjugating women and anyone who’s not an extremist Muslim
• He sees taxes as a good tool to bring fairness to the world since people with too much money don’t deserve what they have since they needed help while I see taxes as a necessary evil that should only support the bare minimum of a strong defense, protecting interstate commerce and providing for those in point number one above.

I could go on.

He won reelection by out hustling the Republicans and stirring his base to go vote while appealing to moderates by promising not to raise income taxes for a year after his election. That’s right! A year, since he said he wouldn’t raise them on those below $250,000 next year. He didn’t say he would never do it.

So, how can someone who so fundamentally disagrees with the President be encouraged?

The policies of the administration will prove to fail and when its obvious, people will seek help from somewhere. If conservatives can learn from the President’s reelection campaign, then we can start working to both get our base out and vote during  the 2014 election and start educating America that big government liberalism failed. Sadly, this will require some pain before it gets there. I don’t like that. I hate to see anyone suffer, but if that’s the only way for people to seek help, then so be it.

The President provided a model for getting elected even when your views don’t match the majority of the country. Most people want smaller government despite what the liberals and even the moderate media keeps saying. The President didn’t win because of the welfare state. He won because he outworked Republicans in getting out his vote. So, if we can learn how he did it and match it, we win. On an even playing field conservatism always trumps liberalism in America. If Mitt Romney was really a conservative and got out those 3 Million conservative Christians, he wins. He failed because he didn’t work as hard and wasn’t espousing his sincere beliefs – moderate to liberal social views and moderate to conservative fiscal policy. People didn’t trust him because he didn’t really believe what he was saying.

Third, I’m encouraged because some really conservative people are waiting in the wings to take on the liberal establishment in both parties next time around. The 2014 election will also bring more of them into office because the out-year election always provides gains for the out party. I predict the Senate will turn Republican and the Congress will see a larger control by Republicans and most of those will come from true believer conservatives.

For the next few weeks, don’t let the liberal media convince you that moderation is the key to winning for Republicans. Why would anyone elect a Republican liberal when they can get a real liberal from the Democrats? We need candidates that are true believers and they will win. Why do I say that? Because it was the only way Republicans have succeeded in the past 32 years.

• Ronald Reagan – true believer and won by landslides in both elections due to his strength of character and skill as a communicator telling America why happy conservatism really works.
• George H. W. Bush – he wasn’t a true believer, but he enjoyed the pixy dust from the Reagan years. On his own, after raising taxes, he failed to win reelection.
• Bob Dole was a moderate and lost
• George W. Bush wasn’t as conservative as Ronald Reagan but was closer than any other candidate since Reagan and he won barely in 2000 and handily in 2004.
• John McCain sounded like a conservative but was more moderate than he sounded and only seemed conservative compared to the President
• Mitt Romney governed as a moderate in Massachusetts and we were all told that’s only because of the Democrats in his state, but he still did it and failed to convince the real conservatives in his party that the real Romney was the guy running this year not the one who governed. That’s because we’re smart and look at your actions which drown out your words when they contradict.

Last, God is still on the throne even if Satan himself takes over the USA. And no, President Obama is not Satan!

Logos 5 Bible Facts Tool, Timeline and Sense Lexicon

Posted by Kevin Purcell on Nov 6, 2012 in Bible Software, Digital Bible Study, Video | 0 comments

Logos 5 launched with some exciting new tools and a few updated old ones. I want to share three of them with you.

Bible Facts Tool

Logos reworked some of their tools used to learn about people, places and things with the new Bible Facts Tools. It focuses on giving users some visually rich information about these things as we study our Bibles. Added to them we get events too. The tool pulls its information from many places, like Bible dictionaries, atlases and collections of visual tools.

Here’s how the tool works. Logos describes this as running a “Biblical background check.” I like that. I can just open it from the Tools menu in Logos 5 or as I’m studying a passage I can select a person, place, thing or event and right-click. The menu will often show me those things. Select Jesus and find the Person entry in the right side of the popup menu. Select it and see a ton of content.

The visual tools present tell us about the person with things like family trees or relationship graphs. Places show maps and pictures of the places. Events show up on a Bible Timeline (see below). And students can take these visual tools out to presentation software, like PowerPoint.

Along with the visual tools that the Bible Facts window shows, you get reference tools like searches in the Bible and Hebrew or Greek words translated as your word.

See this demo video below:

Bible Timeline

As I showed in the video above, Logos 5 comes with a new Bible Timeline that shows off the timeline of both Biblical and historical events on a horizontal timeline.

 The tool lets users filter based on event, date and it lets users customize the look.

Biblical Sense Lexicon

The Bible Sense Lexicon offers students a quick way to search the Semantic Domains in Bible study to learn the “sense” of a Biblical word. It helps users find words related to your word by meaning. Here’s a brief video demo of the tool. http://youtu.be/Sk-57aGnm8I The quickest way to get at it, as shown above, is through the Reverse Interlinear tool. Open a Bible with a Reverse Interlinear like the ESV and make sure the Bible Sense line shows at the bottom of the interlinear information at the bottom of the Bible window. If not, right-click on the list to the left and check the Bible Sense line, which is at the bottom. Now, highlight a word with a Bible Sense Lexicon entry. Not all words in the Bible show up in the lexicon. My example came from 2 Timothy 1:7, and I looked up the word “testimony”. Click on the link in the Bible Sense line of the Reverse Interlinear to open the lexicon. It shows a few things.

In the image above, notice the dictionary entry followed by two hyperlinks. These will open a Bible Word Study of each word. Below that we see a graph showing where this word shows up in the Bible. Along the right we see how the word relates to other words in that Semantic Domain. Click each of the words to open the Lexicon to that tool.