Web control, text over video plus more - Latest v2 update

Submitted by gushie on Mon, 2010-05-03 18:23

Being a rainy public holiday here in the UK, I decided it would be a good time to update you all on v2, since we've now sailed past revision 800 and there have been a number of changes since the last update.

I've been continuing to work on Song Imports and have now added the ability to import Word/Writer and Powerpoint/Impress documents via an interface with OpenOffice.org. The import itself is fairly basic and makes some assumptions on the format of the file, but will hopefully save some typing in many cases. I've also worked on the remote interface and now made it possible to control OpenLP with a web browser. This will require the remote plugin to be enabled and then connecting to http://localhost:4316. It's very basic at the moment, and it doesn't have any inbuilt security so if your church computer is on the internet or public network then you will need to consider the risks.

Tim has been battling with text over video and has got it working on some systems, although not on all - but we're hoping to find a solution for all platforms soon. He has also given us line spacing adjustments, the ability to override the output resolution if preparing a service for a computer with a different setup, the show desktop and theme output buttons are now working, some nice drag and drop improvements and an improved Nursery Alert system.

Meanwhile Jon has been working on saving the application layout so everything looks the same as when you last ran it, a recent file list and a fair bit of cleaning up after the mess some of us other devs leave behind :)

Raoul has made some improvements to the song editor to allow author names to be typed in and auto-completed, which is easier than choosing from a big list. Finally, in development are also some internationalisation fixes, song import wizard improvements and one developer has also been experimenting with spell-check, but we'll have to wait and see if this makes it into the final version.

Alpha 2 is still a fair way off, but as you can see there are going to be a good number of improvements. If you want to see what we're hoping to achieve, then please check out our Milestone page

Comments

Submitted by Supercross on Tue, 2010-05-04 20:36

Wow this is sounding better and better all the time!  I glanced over the Milestone page and all the proposed features look great!

I can't wait to try out the next release.

 

I can forsee Openlp 2.0 being installed at a church near me!

Keep up the good work!

Submitted by googol on Wed, 2010-05-05 14:47

@Supercross:

If you cannot wait, then you can use the latest development build. If you do not know how to do, join in the IRC.

 

Cheers

Submitted by phill on Sun, 2010-05-23 19:53

Awsome :-) love the remote function. Its more responsive than I thought it might be. And its not too bad using 3G over the internet, now all i've got to do is persuade my chruch to start netcasting, then i dont even need to go to church, i can sit an home and control it all from there :-D

Submitted by phill on Sun, 2010-05-23 19:54

Oh, and i forgot to say, love the AJAXiness? of it!

Submitted by gushie on Mon, 2010-05-24 09:37

But you didn't comment on the awesome *cough* design!! ;)

Submitted by TRB143 on Mon, 2010-05-24 17:40

What design?

Submitted by phill on Tue, 2010-05-25 10:35

How can I? Its not standards complient! I dont mind injecting some CSS to spruce it up! (Thats an offer) What about images? Will they take too long to serve?

Submitted by gushie on Tue, 2010-05-25 15:25

Feel free to have a stab at it. Create your own bzr branch, you'll find the current page in openlp/plugins/remotes/html/

(http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~openlp-core/openlp/trunk/files/head:/openlp/plugins/remotes/html/)

Images should be OK as long as they aren't 3 Terabyte BMP's. The smaller the better though and not too many dependencies since it isn't a multi-threaded high powered Apache webserver.

Also Raoul was talking about replacing my raw ajax with jQuery, so feel free to do this if you want. If you do, just make sure it's a local copy of the minified version. It needs to work on a local network that isn't connected to the internet. If you need any tweaks with the data OpenLP returns, let me know and I'll see what I can do.

Oh and if it isn't usable on my phone, then it'll be rejected :)

Submitted by phill on Tue, 2010-05-25 21:00

Hmm, I've only done a very small ammount of jQuery before, and no AJAX, so no promises, I'll have a play once I've got the report for my college work finished/submitted. I'm certainly up for tarting it up abit though!

Submitted by paulyards on Mon, 2012-06-04 07:00

That's true as you said the internet web sites or public network then you will need to consider the risks.