raoul's blog

They carefully crept into the stable, so as not to wake the baby, and as they entered the stable each one gasped a little. "Here he is, this child will save us!" whispered one of the herdboys at the back of the group to another. A feeling of awe and amazement came over them, and they quietly but excitedly went over to the proud father and shook his hand, and then gave the young mother a hug.

So I realise that recently we've been giving a lot of love to Mac OS X and Linux with regards to openlp.org 2.0, and so when one of our developers who uses Windows started getting openlp.org up and running on his computer, I got him to take a screenshot so that folks can see openlp.org 2.0 running on Windows as well.

Once again, click the image for a full size version.

Over the last few months about 8 people have been quietly working on a new version of openlp.org: Version 2.0. This version is being written in Python, so that it will work on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X - a feature that has been requested many times.

In addition to being cross-platform, openlp.org 2.0 has a plugin system, where people can write their own plugins if they wish. These plugins hook into openlp.org and allow plugin developers to do the same things that the core system does. In fact, the core system (Songs, Bible verses, etc) are all plugins themselves.

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.