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Windowing and Searching


Jon Falkenstein

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This is my first post, I'll have to say. I am a student in ministry, and use Accordance a ton, particularly for its original language features. However, there are some things that I would seriously pay money to have fixed... it would save me a lot of time, and make my experience all that much more enjoyable.

 

There are two things, really:

 

1. Windowing.

 

Right now, the windowing features of accordance are clumsy. Sorry to offend, but I don't always like to use tabs. Tabs are great to have something in background to work with. However, I personally like to have a window for my greek, a separate but linked window for user notes, edit user note window, and then some others as well. Currently, to set up the windows as I'd prefer takes a few minutes because I have to resize things exactly, and then when I want to get to another window not currently visible, I have to sort through a bunch.

 

My suggestion here is twofold: First, I would like to see "window layers." I use certain groups of windows together. I would like to be able, then, to deal with groups of windows rather than singular ones. Thus, just as accordance allows different windows to be linked, I would love to have them "locked" in essence. Thus, I would be able to bring a whole layer to the front all at once. Secondly, I would like to see better resizing tools. Currently, accordance can "tile" windows, which I really like. However, if there are too many windows, it won't do it. If it could tile into layers, this would fix the problem. But also, resizing windows manually is something of a pain. It would be great to have a "snap to grid" feature, that could make sure windows line up right, and possibly for multiple windows to be resized at once, thus moving a single border to make one window larger and another smaller.

 

2. Searching

 

I have a ton of texts, tools, and otherwise. When I do a search, it only will search if Accordance is the active application... and it won't let me do anything else in accordance while its searching. As much as I can't really stand much of how Logos (don't kill me for mentioning the cursed word) functions, the one feature that I have really grown to love is the fact that it can do all kinds of searches in the background of all possibly pertinent things while other work is being done, and then can be used as a reference to find all sorts of connections I wouldn't have otherwise found. I understand that it likely takes a pretty sophisticated algorithm to accomplish this, but I would love to see Accordance at least get halfway there. Again, this is something that I definitely would pay money to see, because it would make my life so much simpler.

 

Sorry for the book here. I'm really passionate about this! lol.

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I am not sure we can do your suggestions any time soon. Have you tried saving session with your different window arrangements? I know you cannot bring such a session to the front at once, but you can open it at once and restore the window sizes and arrangements. That should help you somewhat. Others on the forum may have other suggestions.

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Using Leopard Spaces should help. You can have mulitple window setups on each screen and switch between them.

 

Re searching in the background. It is actually possible to launch more than one copy of an application, although Mac doesn't make it easy. You can delve on the command line into the .app package for the real executable, or I think QuickSilver has some feature to do it. I guess you could launch a second Accordance just for doing background searches, but I haven't tried it.

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I have a ton of texts, tools, and otherwise. When I do a search, it only will search if Accordance is the active application... and it won't let me do anything else in accordance while its searching.

I'm having a hard time remembering any search in Accordance that lasted long enough to formulate another search. Maybe it's a logos thing. ;)

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I'm having a hard time remembering any search in Accordance that lasted long enough to formulate another search. Maybe it's a logos thing. ;)

 

 

Yeah, this is definitely my experience. The search is over in a second.

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Yeah, this is definitely my experience. The search is over in a second.

 

That depends on the size of your library. For me, a search all tools will take up to 30 or more seconds to complete. I realize that waiting 30 seconds or a minute for a search to finish is nothing compared to how long it would take to manually do the search without Accordance, but I agree with Jon about background searching. That being said, it is rare when I actually need to search my entire library for something. I think creating groups of tools and groups of texts works better for searching multiple resources (like all journals, all Bible dictionaries/encyclopedias, &c.). Those searches take a few seconds, and usually by the time I got to something else, they'd be done. In conclusion, I think having the Search All run in the background would be a nice feature, but it's not a killer feature that should be implemented at the expense of other great features that might be coming down the pike.

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