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I’ve come up with a little bit of the basics for the presenter program. I think it would be more useful to the world if the program was just for generic slides, kind of like a simplified PowerPoint™ (Update: This is not a PowerPoint clone; basic slides are for simple presentations and will not attempt to replace full fledged presentation software, but to simplify updating and managing multiple presentations, such as lyrics). It could then have a plugin for displaying lyrics, and possibly even sheet music. The sheet music will take a lot of time, because creating a program that’s easy to put sheet music into is a lot harder than writing it down, and even reading it (If I remember correctly, less than 10% of the church of Christ can read sheet music, and I’m sure those outside is an even smaller number).
Just starting this program has presented a challenge to me. It’s a challenge to write a Graphical User Interface, and with all the power that GTK provides, it’s technical and difficult to use.
I’d like for the program to be open-source and free for everyone, but I may have music packs, background packs, and some other useful tools available for a fee. I think a useful idea would be to allow the program to work into an online service that uses songs and such directly off of a database on the internet, and charge a monthly fee. They’ll have to pay for the fee to use the songs anyways if they don’t have a CCLI, and that only covers so much anyways. Of course, I’ll have to turn around and pay somebody to use the lyrics and music for the songs.
One thing that has been frustrating is searching for help on certain areas. It seems like when I search Google for something specific about GTK, it comes up with source code or API, and no good tutorials or explanations as to how to use it. Oh well.
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