First some background. I attend a church which, like many others, uses a projector to show the hymns or songs which are to be sung. We also project other parts of the service, some prayers and some items which require a response from the congregation.
Many churches, including ours, have followed a similar route. We start out with books. In our case, being an Anglican Church, that consists of a hymn book and a prayer book. There are also pew Bibles so that the congregation can follow along when the Bible passage is read. This, in itself, is a problem. You have three books to juggle, and for some people, especially newcomers, it is difficult to know which book you are supposed to be reading and where in that book you are up to. We still do this at our fairly traditional 8:30 am service.
One church I used to attend in Southern NSW printed the whole service each week. This solved the problem of books, but it meant a lot of printing and a lot of wasted paper. They realised that this was not a long term solution and were looking for an alternative.
After using books, the next step in the progression, for many places was an overhead projector. There was still a lot of time spent in preparing the slides, but they could be re-used. In many churches just the songs were on overhead.
But now we are in the technological age and we have PowerPoint.
I must admit, at the outset, that I hate PowerPoint with a vengeance. That’s not exactly true – it isn’t PowerPoint, per se, that I hate, it is the way it is used. Too often PowerPoint has been used as a substitute for good preparation. PowerPoint itself is pretty good, it is just used badly. I also wonder if it is always used legally, but that is another issue.
What is the problem with PowerPoint for church service presentation? First, it is slow to change slides, although I can live the speed. But there is a noticeable lag when changing from one slide to the next. Second, you are locked into the presentation that you have prepared. So often at church someone comes to me just before the service starts and says that we need to make a change. Perhaps a musician has a problem with one of the songs. Or you need to insert a couple of new slides. This can all be done, but it takes time. The final problem, which isn’t the fault of PowerPoint, is that there are so many different animation effects that can be used to move from one slide to the next. You can have fade and slide and checkerboard and up and down and left and right blinds, and all of these come in a variety of styles. Functionality is good. Flexibiity is good. But just because you can do something doesn’t mean that you should. And some PowerPoint presentations look horrible. PowerPoint used well by someone with some graphic design skills is great, usually it is just rubbish.
So what are the alternatives? There are a number. We have been trying out Zionworx and it isn’t too bad. It is also free. There are a number of commercial packages around, one of the better know ones being MediaShout. I had a look at the express version, there is also a starndard version. Express version costs $229 and the standard version costs $429. I think these are $US prices. The Standard version may do what I want, but the express version does not. Neither does Zionworx, nor a number of other packages that I tried. Most of the others cost serious dollars, Zionworx seems to be the only free version I could find.
I don’t mind paying for software. I spend a lot of money on software. But there were two problems with buying a commercial package. The first is that I don’t want it, the church does, and I think that I would have had a hard time getting them to spend around AUD$500 on presentation software. Second, I wouldn’t spend that kind of money on something that doesn’t do what I want.
What is the problem with these packages? Unlike PowerPoint they don’t give enough formatting options. For example, when we display a song we just want the words to appear in a large readable font. All the packages do this. They provide a number of formatting options, fontface, size, background colour or a background graphic, foreground colour. But the formatting applies to the whole item being displayed. We often have some responsive items. The service leader will say something and the congregation will respond. In PowerPoint we used a white foreground for the service leader’s words, and a yellow foreground for the congregation’s response. In Zionworx I cannot do this.
The reason I can’t do it is because the displayed items are held in a database in text format. The styling is applied to the whole slide, or item being presented. Keeping the data in a database is, in my mind, the right way to go. The data is pulled from the database in one go and is immediately available. The rendering on the screen is very fast. There is no discernible delay in moving from one screen to the next. But it cannot be formatted at a level of granularity that suits us.
What to do? The only thing that a programmer would do in this situation is write my own. How did this pan out? See the next post.