TW GOOD on laptops and GREAT with touch-screen enabled Win10

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l_d_allan
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TW GOOD on laptops and GREAT with touch-screen enabled Win10

Post by l_d_allan »

Costas and others involved in TW,

My experience is that the very fast, native compiled TW works well on Windows 8.1 devices that typically don't have touch-screens, but do have a keyboard.

Example: Asus entry level Win 8.1 laptop with wimpy Atom cpu, minimal memory, and as few as possible other resources. We got the Asus at a Black Friday special several years ago at $99 USD. TW works well.

Note that the Asus could be upgraded to Win-10, but some device driver changes detracted from smooth Internet access. It has no touch-screen, so the upgrade to Win-10 wasn't really worth doing. TW kept working fine after the upgrade however.

I am confident that most other Bible software would be almost hopelessly sluggish on such a low-resource laptop. Slow to launch, painful to do advanced searches, have to close other apps, stall out when memory limited exceeded, etc. Off hand, I can only think of one other Bible freeware that is faster and less demanding on resources, but it is too simple to offer anything close to what TW offers.

Some months back, I got a close-out special on the least expensive, most entry level HP Split X2 laptop with native Win-10 and touchscreen ... about $220 after MIR. Keyboard is detachable, which makes it a somewhat large tablet. TW is a dream to run on the HP Split. Other than having small icons and widgets (configurable?), Touch works well on the Split in detached Tablet mode. Touchpad on keyboard works ok with very small icons, but the keyboard needs to stay attached (1st world problem?).

I use TW on the Split typically twice or mores times a week, including:
  • Sunday worship during the sermon (try to be an Berean)
  • Adult Sunday school after worship (prep for lesson and be a Berean as the non-teacher during discussion)
  • Sunday evening service
  • Wed eve adult Bible study
Continuing and sorry if tl;dr ...

If I know the passage of the sermon (maybe) or Bible study (usually), I will try to remember to prep for the lesson:
  • Get the primary verse pre-loaded in the much simpler and somewhat faster Bible freeware.
  • Get the primary verse pre-loaded into TW, with Layout specific to the Bible translation used by the teacher (such as NASB, ESV, NIV, etc), and also related verses
  • For example, tomorrow's lesson is 'Church Discipline' with Matthew 18:15-20, and related verses of 2nd Cor 5:20 and 1 Cor 3:9
  • I've defined a Layout of 3 panes, with left side for the primary verse, and two panes on the right side for the related verses. (see screen shot below)
  • I've also got a separate user-defined Layout for Comparing the same passage from several different translations, such as the AMP, ESV, KJV, NASB, NKJV, etc. If I could read Greek, I might have that included in the Compare (see screen shot below)
  • I've also got a Layout that has the NASB with Strong's / Mickelson? Numbers set up.
  • It's is easier and faster to set up TW this way with the keyboard attached ... partly because I'm still inexperienced and ignorant about using a touch-screen.
  • At the sermon or class, I'll detach the keyboard, and be in mostly Read mode. I haven't figured out the best way to use the on-screen Keyboard, but I can slowly accomplish what I need to accomplish.
  • Also have to remember to charge the HP Split before heading to church. (Why do I know that? ... mea culpa). The Split probably isn't as power efficient as alternatives from Apple and Android.
Also, the church has a "hot spot", so I can use the Internet to search for related verses. TW is The Best if you KNOW a word or two, but less so if you vaguely remember concepts that apply. For example:
bible paul fellow workers in the field
might return lots of hits, but 1 Cor 3.9 would probably be near the top, along with the very related 2nd Cor 6:1. TW would get Zero matches, and that is NOT a criticism of TW ... I find that TW plus Google is extremely powerful, the Split allows that away from home.

Or if the class is fuzzy on who was the Roman emperor during the time of Paul's death, I can efficiently look that up via Google:
bible roman empirer during time of Paul's death
Even with intentional mis-spelling of 'empirer', the 3rd Google match has the answer IN THE MATCH ... without me having to go to the link. Once you get experience with it, you can also do such searches with the Cortana assistant (not suitable to speak in class, of course).

TW showing 3 related verses

TW showing comparison of six different translations

TW showing Strongs Numbers

I still haven't tackled using "embedded notes", but my impression is that could be extraordinarily powerful for lesson prep (teacher and student) and followup.