This release arrives with a number of bug fixes and the inclusion of the remaining Song importers.

We are very proud to announce the Second  release candidate for OpenLP 2.0, codename "Ophthalmic Obadiah".

This new release, version 1.9.11, is a preview of what the final version of OpenLP will look like. This release does not contain any major new features, and mostly consists of bug fixes and minor enhancements.

There will be no more development on features in this version, all new development will happen in the next version of OpenLP.

Minor features and enhancements in OpenLP 1.9.11

•  - New Sunday Plus , SongPro and Media Shout song importers

•  - Print Service layout improvements

•  - Undated translations inc new Slovak translation

•  - Improvments in image's to the show in services

 Major bugs fixed in OpenLP 1.9.11:

•  - Various fixes to Song importers

•  - Bug fixes for Formatting tag dialogues

After much discussion, the developers have tentatively put the final release of OpenLP 2.0 in mid-October this year. This is a very auspicious occasion, since OpenLP 2.0 has been in development since September 2008. So after 4 long hard years of work, we can think of no better way to celebrate the release of OpenLP 2.0 than to throw a big party.

Unfortunately, being much of a global affair, it will be rather difficult to get everyone from around the world to the same place to celebrate the release of OpenLP 2.0. A better solution would be for people in various areas to host regional release parties.

There are a number of OpenLP developers living in the UK, and they are quite eager to get together for a release party. I live in Cape Town, South Africa, and I'm keen to host a release party here in Cape Town too.

If you are interested in attending a release party, or hosting a release party, please post your location in an appropriate release party topic in the forums. If there isn't a release party topic, create one!

Remember that release parties do not need to involve computers at all! You can get together at a local pub or restaurant, or host a bit of a party at someone's house. The release parties don't have to happen on the day of OpenLP's release either, they can be a week or two or three later. If you have any ideas of how to celebrate OpenLP's release, feel free to post your ideas in the forums too.

Following hot on the heels of the 1.9.10 release the next version of the Android client has escaped.

This client version works best with 1.9.10 but will also work (with restricted functionality) with other versions.

The new features added since 0.4 are:

• Changes to the panels to allow them to be swiped left and right instead of only being accessed via the menu. This should improve  the usability of the application.

• Provide the ability to poll the main application for updates. This will allow two users to work together. In the settings there is a "Refresh Displays" setting which allows the refresh time to be set. The default is 5 seconds and a refresh time of 0 seconds turns this feature off.

• Following requests from a number of users it is now possible to have Server profiles for different locations. These are accessed again via the settings panel.

• To aid usability, the displayed verse is now highlighted on the live tab so it is obvious which slide is selected.

We are very proud to announce the first release candidate for OpenLP 2.0, codename "Admirable Anna". This new release, version 1.9.10, is a preview of what the final version of OpenLP will look like. This release does not contain any major new features, and mostly consists of bug fixes and minor enhancements. There will be no more development on features in this version, all new development will happen in the next version of OpenLP.

Thanks to some hard work from one of our users, Joey Sour, we now have a whole bunch more video tutorials on how to use OpenLP! If you want to watch them, check out the A/V Tools page on his church's web site, where he has uploaded them.

In addition to Joey's videos, we have a couple of tutorials we've done ourselves on our YouTube channel. You can view those, plus Joey's and other videos from the community on our channel page.

This week is only halfway through, and it has an exciting few days! First we found out that OpenLP has made it into Debian, and now I can proudly announce that OpenLP is part of Ubuntu as well (and Kubuntu, Lubuntu and Xubuntu by extension)!

OpenLP is in the "main" repository for Ubuntu 12.10, which means that when you install Ubuntu, you can immediately install OpenLP too. No more PPAs or extra repositories to enable.

We have also been able to get OpenLP "backported" into Ubuntu 12.04! This means that once you have enabled the "backports" repository (in Software Sources), you can also download and install OpenLP in Precise Pangolin.

Don't forget that you can find OpenLP in openSUSE and Fedora too.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am extremely happy to announce that as from today you can install OpenLP in Debian Linux (unstable) by simply typing in apt-get install openlp - yes, that's right, OpenLP is in the Debian repositories.

This is a really significant step for OpenLP because a number of the really popular Linux distributions are based on Debian, and thus OpenLP will filter down into distributions like Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Linux Mint in the near future. For instance, you should find OpenLP in Ubuntu 12.10 when it comes out in October this year.

Over the last few weeks, we've started collecting action shots from many of our users on our OpenLP page on Facebook. If you'd like to see your action shot in our album, please just post it to our wall, and we'll pick it up from there. If you're not yet a fan of the OpenLP page, I recommend you "Like" us now!

Hi folks,

I've just put together a very basic tutorial on how to get your first service up and running. I've embedded it below in HTML5 video. If you can't see it, you can download it and watch it in VLC using the link below, or you'll have to wait a little until I've uploaded it to our YouTube channel.

Download OpenLP Service Tutorial Video

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, you read that correctly. OpenLP 1.9.9 is the last of the beta series. From now on, OpenLP is in release candidate phase! Release candidate phase means that we will not be adding any more features and will be concentrating on fixing bugs.

We believe that all the functionality which was in version 1.2 has now been included in version 2.0, and for the next few months we will be focusing our efforts on fixing as many outstanding bugs as we can.

Features added:

• Transparent themes, for background videos (theme video backgrounds not yet possible)

• On-the-fly changing of backing tracks

• Repeating of backing track list

• Use VLC for displaying videos - not on Mac OS X yet, unfortunately. (Note: To be able to use this feature the VLC media player has to be installed on your computer.)

• Search songs by song book/number

• Configurable automatic service file names using the date

• The reference format used to look up Bible verses has been localised, and can be changed along with the interface language

• Configure the "next slide" action when at the end of the current item in the slide controller to either move to the first slide again, to the next slide of the next item, or nothing.

Of course we have also fixed over 46 bugs in this release!

The full list of changes can be seen on our launchpad page.