Cogitations by Brad

I’ve released ExpoSong 0.6! This release includes the following:

• Presentations can now be searched.
• Slide timers make the slides move forward automatically. (Only one time for the whole presentation for now)
• You can import and export both schedules, or the whole library.
• Changed some icons to improve UI.
• Some shortcuts have been simplified to single letters. More to come later.
• A few bugs have been fixed.

Looking forward to next release, here’s a few important things to look forward to:

• Bible verses
• Default slide order for presentations.
• Improved schedules - Planned currently is slide orders, notes, and backgrounds that will be specific to the schedule.
• And, I hope to improve the interface, with a better main screen, and improved background image handling.

Well, after over a year, I’m finally just about ready to make a release. I apologize to any who would like to use this product professionally. This release will include searching the song list, importing and exporting, slide timers, and a few other features and bugs fixed. Look for it in the next few days.

I’ve added a new feature that allows for slide timers. This will be useful for image presentations, and announcements. It’s a timer on the presentation, not the slide, so each slide will be timed the same.

One thing that is limited, is that if you switch the presentation, but not the slide, the timer stops. I don’t really know how people plan to use the program, or if they will want to switch the presentation, but I may add some sort of icon indicating that a timer is running.

I’ve also switched the shortcuts to use Control-Left, Control-Right for moving slides, or Control-Shift-Left and Control-Shift-Right to switch presentations. I figure that’s eaiser for people to remember, and I couldn’t get Control-Shift-Period/Comma to work anyways (probably have to use Greater-Than symbol, but this seemed more intuitive).

I think that covers all the necessary things to use it as a presentation program on a single computer. All other features seem like good things to have, but not necessarily must-haves.

Announcing the newest version of Exposong! It now has on-screen notification, show logo, and some major bug fixes.

I’ve removed the BETA status, because I think it’s ready for production usage in certain situations. It might be easier for those who have good experience with computers, because there’s not an actual installer, and it requires a few extra programs (See Installation). Maybe by next version I’ll have at least a Windows installer. The NSIS installer is plenty confusing, but I’ll take a shot at making it.

If you need lyrics, Christian Devotional Lyrics is a good resource.

A lot of presentation programs has animation. One good thing about animation is that the movement signals a slide change. A lot of times, I notice when I follow along with a song while someone is presenting, if my eyes move at the same time that the screen changes, then I don’t realize it’s changed, and I’m lost for a bit. Animations solves that, and as long as they’re not so crazy that they distract from the purpose of presenting content, I think animations can be good.

I think Clutter would be a good option to create animations. It has some built in stuff, and uses OpenGL to render these. I’ve just looked at some of the docs and stuff, so I don’t quite get it all yet, but the built-in animations look good, and the videos I’ve seen are impressive. I may have to take a look at some of the examples to see what exactly can be done.

One issue that I have is that there is no windows executable. I may have to create a fallback, just in case the user doesn’t have it installed, or doesn’t have 3D available (or some may not even want animation).

Clutter looks pretty exciting, and maybe it will have matured a bit by the time I get Exposong 1.0 released.

Sendmail’s security measures are getting in my way. I have a program that simply needs to restart sendmail as the apache user, and it’s even got the setuid bit set, but sendmail still won’t let me do it. When security becomes this extreme, we’ve got a problem.

New Release of Exposong. New in this release is image presentations, and information is shown on lyrics presentations.

So I’ve gotten a lot done on this website. It feels like I’m hammering nails with my head. What a tool! At least there’s a little bit of information on it out there, but google doesn’t like to actually find stuff about BASIC when I type in the word (it’s basically stuff about simplicity ).

At least I get paid hourly. If they want to make it complicated, then that just means I’ll get paid more.

I’ve been given a new job, to program a website in BASIC. I feel like I’ve gone from using a motorized screw driver back to using a manual one by hand. I don’t even know BASIC, but I’m trying to learn it. Besides that, I have to learn exactly how http works, because I’ll have to do it all manually. It will be good to learn, but it’s going to be a challenge without the shortcuts that PHP has to offer. No cookie, or session handling. The only security will have to be coded by me.

Oh well, it’s what the customer wants, and unfortunately, my boss is pretty set on doing it this way.

I’m building a website that was previously in COBOL, and even though I don’t think moving to BASIC is a very big step, the previous program only allowed Internet Explorer.

If you’ll look at the bottom, beside the preview, you can see the new background selector. You can use both images, or plain gradients.

I would dare to say that ExpoSong might even be ready for actual use. Of course, you can’t do much more than plain-text slides (lyrics too, but it’s plain-text as well), but there’s nothing wrong with an assembly without images/videos.