Reflections and Projections

Ladies and gents, I present BETA4!

Hi all!

Yes, I have just released openlp.org beta4. This beta includes things like improved useability, working PowerPoint integeration and a revamped theme system. Please report bugs in the bug reporting forum.

new job, new beta

howdy folks!

yes, you heard correct, there's a new beta coming up in the next couple of days. derek has been working hard the last couple of weeks (more like 2 months i think) and has fixed the powerpoint issue it seems. he's also made some improvements to the interface, and even reworked the themes slightly. many thanks to him for his dedication and hard work!

in other news, i have yet another new job. this one looks much more permanent that the last lot. i at least have an initial year long contract. i also have a decent salary that will cover my expenses nicely. my expenses are also about to decrease, since i'm taking the train to work, and it's FAR cheaper than the petrol for the car. i'm praying that things are looking up.

well, that's all from my side for now.

God bless!

openlp.org about to beta again... and other stories

Hi Folks,

Apologies for the silence, things have been busy.

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!

new site!

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"!

I'm still here!

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

apologies for the silence...many things on the go

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!

a few things i'm working on...

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!

openlp.org 1.0 beta3 released

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!

CVS updated

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...

RC1 progress

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.