Quelea

Often when you want an item in your service to display, such as a powerpoint presentation, you may want to run a CD at the same time. With the next version of Quelea however, you won't have to manage a CD player, you can attach a digital track to any item in your schedule to play when it's being displayed to the congregation.

Simply right click a schedule item and click "add audio", then select the file you want to play. You can of course clear it in the same fashion!

A couple of weeks or so ago, there was an email to the discuss list enquiring about the state of video backgrounds in Quelea. It's always been at the back of my mind as a wish list feature, so I bumped it as a priority to look at for the next major version. See, this is the effect you can have if you post what features you'd like to see! ;)

I've always wanted to implement video backgrounds, but the technical complexity and issues to work around have always put me off from implementing it thus far. However, after a couple more people have asked about it, I've decided the next major release is probably the time, providing we don't run into any unforseen difficulties.

I've started to do some work and a few hurdles have been solved, but there's still quite a lot to do. But all going well, the next version of Quelea should support nice looking video backgrounds. Swish!

Quelea has had powerpoint support of sorts for a while now, but that's had two main disadvantages:

• It's only supported PPT, not PPTX
• It's only displayed a static image of each slide

The advantage with how we've done it up until now is that it doesn't require any other software to be installed, indeed it relies on 100% Java libraries that should work on any system. That's good, and it's functionality we want to retain - but sometimes things call for a bit more.

After fixing a couple more minor bugs we found in testing, 0.5.1 has now been officially released. Enjoy, and as always if you have any feedback just let us know!