I recently completely re-installed Kubuntu on my computer, so that I could install the 64-bit version, and make use of my 64-bit processor. With the new version of Kubuntu came KDE 4, the Linux desktop environment that makes use of Qt4, the same User Interface toolkit we're using for openlp.org 2.0.

As those who read this blog regularly will know, I've been looking for folks to help me out with developing openlp.org. A lot of folks have come forward and offered a range of different ways to help, including actual application development, but no one has Delphi 7, and therefore no one can help me with the development of openlp.org 1.2.

A couple of us have started working on the forms in openlp.org, recreating the 1.0 forms in Qt Designer, the interface designer for the cross-platform Qt UI framework. I decided to take a couple of screenshots so that folks can get a taste of where we're going...

Over the last few months there have been a number of bug reports for version 1.0.1. So I'm going to be spending the next week or so tracking down the bugs and fixing them, and then releasing openlp.org 1.0.2. If you have found any bugs, please read up on how to submit a bug, and then check and add your bug to the 1.0.1 bug report thread in the forums.

One of my pet peeves is those OpenOffice.org Impress or Microsoft PowerPoint presentations that folks do in churches. I've seen too many half-hearted efforts in the 28 years I've been in church.

This evening in church we had another presentation, and it got me to thinking about how to write an effective presentation. So this evening I wrote up a guide to effective church presentations and posted it to my personal blog. I hope this helps other folks who want to make their presentations effective.

I seem to have found myself the only one left on the openlp.org "team." All the folks who have been involved in openlp.org have had to bow out due to external commitments. In plain english (and through no fault of their own) they are too busy to help out.

So, I'm left asking for assistance again. If you're interested in helping out with openlp.org (not just development - things like support, etc), I'd really appreciate your help. You don't need to be a rocket scientist or a rock star, you just need a couple of free hours every week to lend a hand.

As many folks know, the CCLI SongSelect importer in openlp.org has been disabled due to problems with the service. What many people don't know is that all the applications out there that interface with SongSelect are actually pretending to be web browsers, and are painstakingly pulling the information out of the SongSelect web pages.

The conflict merge went well last week, and I have a working copy of openlp.org again. I've started the code cleanup, renaming various components in the code, formatting the code to follow a certain standard (rather than 3 different ones), and rearranging a few things as well in the process. The goal behind the code cleanup is to make it easier and faster to work on openlp.org, and to make openlp.org more efficient.

This evening I merged the bugfixes from openlp.org 1.0.1 into the main code. My next move will be to clean up the conflicts that arose in the merge (the version control software can't always do a perfect merge, so it lets me "resolve" some of those "conflicts"). Once I've done that, I'll be continuing with the code cleanup that is necessary to implement some of the more advanced things.

After a pretty dismal and disappointing poll vote on pressing and mailing a CD, I've decided to stick with what the "masses" want, and not produce the CD. That said and done, I had already created the ISO (image) and one or two folks suggested putting the image file up so that folks can download it and burn it to CD.

So here it is. It includes some other open source and free software as well, so download and enjoy.

You can download it from the download page, as usual.