NoColorWheel Yesterday I was talking with a friend of mine, and he was contrasting his experience of using Accordance with various other programs. He observed that with these other programs, he will perform an action and then experience a second or two lag before anything happens. He then contrasted that with Accordance by saying, “In Accordance, everything is instantaneous.” He speculated that he might not mind the lag in these other programs so much if he hadn’t already experienced the responsiveness of Accordance, but he was spoiled by the ability to get the information he wanted without delays. I then joked with him that perhaps our new marketing slogan should be “Bible Software for Impatient People.”

I remember the days when our lead programmer (then our only programmer) was first developing the Accordance Bible Atlas. Getting a late-nineties Mac to process all that map and altitude data to produce 3D maps was a remarkable feat of engineering. Even more remarkable was the fact that these images could be manipulated in real time, without any significant lag.

A 3D Map of the Battle of Gibeon

These days, computers are orders of magnitude faster, yet the responsiveness Accordance conitnues to show is the exception rather than the rule. I’m not sure why that is, but I suspect that many software developers no longer see it as important to optimize their software because newer hardware will eventually alleviate the lag. This is a far cry from the days when Steve Jobs challenged Larry Kenyon to shave ten seconds off the boot time of the original Mac by showing that those wasted seconds multiplied by millions of days and users amounted to lifetimes of needless waiting.

Here at Accordance, we have no patience for spinning color wheels and needless delays. It can be hard enough to focus on studying the Bible without such interruptions, so we’re determined to eliminate them as far as possible. If you’re an “impatient person” who could go the rest of your life without seeing another color wheel, you know the value of that kind of responsiveness.