[Asaph-developers] Re: [Asaph-users] How to generate presentation for group worship?

[Sandra C. <sc...@sp...>]

I played with openLP a little last night.  I run Windows 2000 in a
vmware window on my Fedora machine.  I don't know if running vmware
hindered the program any, but (like David) I couldn't see full
functionality - my guess is that it's still a pretty early version.  My
thoughts:

negative: Doesn't appear to support chords - the guitar players at my
church are pretty excited about Asaph's chord support.

positive: quick search for lyrics or author - "hmm, I don't remember the
title of the song, but I know it has 'Hallelujah what a saviour' in it -
Oh look - that's 'Man of Sorrows'.  negative: the search doesn't ignore
punctuation, so I actually had to search for "hallelujah! what a
saviour"

positive: very easy to create presentations from the song db - when the
program starts up, you see a list of songs available.  Click on a song
to select it, then hit a button to add it to the current presentation. 
This is exactly what I need for our song leader.  She's the one that
creates our song presentations for the song service, and she *really*
wants something just that easy.  She hates having to use Powerpoint
(actually, now openoffice presentations) to create the song list.

positive: Easy to add background picture and change fonts (and color of
fonts) in a song (though it looks like it currently enforces the same
color and backgrounds for all songs - a negative in my opinion).

Interesting features:  it looks like the author is planning to allow you
to put other things into the presentation - such as any Bible verse,
powerpoint presentation, or video.  Cool idea.

Non-existant feature: A feature we really want is during the display of
the presentation, if the song leader decides on a song in the middle of
the service, have some way to throw in another song quickly.

David - as to your comments - I guess I'm of Daniel's opinion currently
- I would also like to focus on the base Asaph application.  In the
future it may be very nice to be able to import/export between the
applications.  Asaph has some really cool features (like the optional
chord display) that would probably be difficult to add to OpenLP, or
implement in a standalone presentation program.

Just my $.02 worth.

-- 
Sandra Capri <sc...@sp...>