Hi Folks,

I have now finally finished my studies. Well, I've written the exam and I feel it went pretty well, so I'm optimistic that I've passed. I'm also doing no extra contract work at the moment, leaving me more time to devote to other things, like my fiance and openlp.org.

And talking of openlp.org, the exciting news is that there has been some major development going on, thanks to Derek. He's had some free time recently and has been fixing some of the larger bugs. He's had a go at the PowerPoint stuff and seems to have fixed it (I know that a lot of people are going to be happy about that), and he's reworked the themes to be much more efficient and intuitive.

Now that my studies are over, I'm going to resume concentrating on the translation side of things, since that's been another much-requested feature. However we are going to release beta 4 first, to get the important fixes out there first. Then once the translation is done we're gonna release beta 5.

Beta 5 will be the last beta, and we're gonna go on to the release candidate stage after that. So please test it out and report bugs using the bug reporting forum.

On a personal note, I'm without work again. The company I'm working for is closing down their development section, and so my contract ends at the end of november. That said and done, I already have 3 interviews lined up over the next couple of days, so any prayers would be appreciated.

Well, that's all from this corner of the globe! God bless!

Hi folks!

In case some of you didn't notice, we now have a new website. We moved hosts so that we could use some extra functionality that the site sorely needed. So now you *can* have your password e-mailed to you, and we have a multilingual site all-in-one - no more separate sites for different languages.

Hope you enjoy your "website experience"!

Hi guys,

Just a quick update - I'm still around. Sort of.. Raoul is now handling the main running of openlp.org. I have got married and started a new job with an open source consultancy and things have been rather hectic. However, I do still hope that in the future I can have a hand in the direction and development of openlp.org, and wanted to thank everyone for taking us over 27000 downloads of openlp.org in our life time.

I would love to continue hearing from you on what direction you would like openlp.org to take, and what new features you would like. A Linux version is still in the pipeline, as are a number of other developments - keep your eyes peeled!

Tim

howdy folks...

i just want to apologise for the silence. i've been extremely busy, and then suddenly, after i thought, "yay! i have a nice job, a steady income!" our boss's contract was terminated, and that meant that we were out of work (we were subcontracted). so now i sit again without work, looking at the freelancing scene, wondering if i can make it... there seems to be a bit of work at the moment, but i'm not sure...

and this other freelance work that i have been doing has been keeping me up late nights and things... let me tell you, working 20 hours days is not funny :-(.

well, i hope that now with a little more time on my hands i can perhaps get some more done on openlp.org...

thanks for your patience!

hi folks...

well, for those of you who maybe actually read my blog, here is what is currently happening...

well, firstly, i'm working on a freelance basis until the end of the month. then i start this job that i was supposed to start in feb of this year. thanks to this company that stuffed me around a bit, my fincances are VERY thin. i'm barely making it financially and any prayer is very much appreciated.

secondly, i'm very busy otherwise, due to church commitments mainly, and then this freelance work (as any freelancer knows, you're *always* working - well, except for sundays). so i have't had much chance to look at openlp.org.

however, i have had a bit of a look at it, and there are a few things in the pipeline at the moment.

there's a fairly major "bug". there's a couple of SQL statements which makes large databases with many authors take *FOREVER* to load, thus making the program appear to hang when it is started. i'm trying to figure out one query that will do all the work, and quickly, but i never wrote the majority of the code in openlp.org 1.0 and on top of that i have never used sqlite before. so i'm wading through these things, but i'm getting there.

also, one of the features that has been frequently requested since the 0.9x days is multilingual support. this actually looks to be *fairly* trivial to implement, so i'm busy with that too at the moment. so hopefully i'll have beta4 out soon with multilingual support in it!

other than that, i don't have much to say...

God bless folks!

yes folks, beta3. i have wanted to release something decent for a while, but have been trying to focus on RC1. there have been a whole lot of bugs which have just shown up, and thus i decided to rather create another beta release that people could use in the mean time.

also, i've released a database importer, many thanks to Eric Searcy for putting that together!

download, have fun!

well, it seems that the sourceforge CVS is back up and running again, so i've updated the CVS repository. if you want to download the source code, feel welcome to, just contact me about the extra components you'll need in order to be able to compile it.

the name of the cvs module is "openlp-old-2".

we're still having those powerpoint problems i mentioned earlier. if you have ever dealt with delphi and the windows api, would you drop me a line please?

cheers for now...

As you might have noticed, openlp.org has stagnated again. My profuse apologies, this was due to an error with PowerPoint that I was not sure how to solve. I didn't have PowerPoint installed, so I could not figure what the problem was.

Well, this evening I eventually did install PowerPoint, and recompiled openlp.org, and it seems to have solved the problem. I also added the CCLI license number to the slides, and fixed up a bit of the positioning of the informational text at the bottom of the slides.

Unfortunately, there still seem to be a few issues with PowerPoint not displaying properly, and focussing problems. I'll be meeting with Tim on Tuesday evening to see if we can get past those last few hurdles, and then RC1 should be good to go.

On a side note, please could you keep both Tim and myself in your prayers.

• Tim is due to get married in July, he's got his studies, and then he also has work to contend with. He's gonna be taking a much lesser role in the development and administration of the project due to his commitments.

• I am between jobs at the moment, and with no fixed income and bills looming, things are not looking bright financially. I'm still suffering from the financial burdens of last year (including my car's clutch giving in which was expensive to fix), and therefore this does not bode well. I have a confirmed job, the company just is not yet ready for me (long story - mail me if you wanna know), and it's starting to get serious.

Thanks, and God bless!

Raoul.

hi folks,

FINALLY! i have managed to get rid of the last few bugs (that i know of) in openlp.org, and i'm about to release RC1 (Release Candidate 1). i'm waiting on the documentation guys to update the help file with the few changes that there are, and then i'll release the install file.

i'm looking for someone who has delphi 7.0 (not personal) and who would like to write an importer application to import songs from one openlp.org database to another. it shouldn't be too much work (probably about 5 hours max), but i don't have the time at the moment to work on it. if you'd like to help, pop me an e-mail and let me know.

well, that's all for now, thanks for your patience.

raoul.

howdy folks,

apologies to all for the silence, things have been rather hectic here in cape town, we've been having trouble with electricty, meaning that i'm 2 weeks behind at work, never mind with stuff at home. anyways, i've started grabbing an hour here and there to work on openlp.org 1.0, and i'm pleased to say that it looks like i've nearly got the CCLI Song Select licked.

so once that's done, and if there aren't any other bugs that we know of, then i'm going to release RC1. unfortunately i can't give a decent estimate of when i'm going to release it, but i'll keep you updated via my blog.

raoul...