ChurchAssist News

Several times a month we get requests for native Mac versions of our products. I totally understand why folks would want this - the Mac is a great platform! Unfortunately, this has never made sense for us economically. Recently, I ran across a blog post from another MicroISV that really sums up our position on this subject as well.

Laridian Electronic Publishing has developed a number of Bible products for the Palm, Pocket PC, and now the PC! I highly recommend their products.

We are pleased to announce the release of Worship Assistant 4.60. This is a minor release that is free to everyone who has purchased version 4.

Changes made in version 4.60:

• Improved Windows Vista support.
• The background bitmap for a song is now displayed in the preview window in the Presentation Control Panel.
• If a background has been assigned to the song, it is now used when previewing the presentation in Song Manager.
• Added menu item to check whether a new version of the program has been released (this check is also done automatically every three days).
• When adding a song to a running presentation, the song list now displays both the Title and Author.
• Fixed order of Keys shown in Key drop-down lists.
• Any filters set in the All Songs list in Set Manager are now saved from session to session.
• Made ‘Default Location’ button on Open Dataset window more explicit.
• Automatic backups are now stamped with the creation date instead of the software version.
• Removed ‘Minimize All’ from the Window menu and added an open windows list.

The installer can be downloaded here:

http://www.churchassist.com/download/wa460.exe

If you are running a previous version of Worship Assistant, you can simply install this version over your existing installation.

ChurchAssist Technologies is pleased to announce the release of Worship Assistant 4.51. The purpose of this release is to address several issues that were discovered recently in version 4.50:

• ‘Save Dataset As’ often aborted with error message concerning files opened by another process.
• Rebuilding data files sometimes aborted with error message concerning files opened by another process.
• Printing to PDF did not render with the correct font under certain circumstances.

(For those of you who might have missed the announcement for version 4.50, the list of changes and fixes is included at the bottom of this message.)

Version 4.5 is a free upgrade to anyone who has purchased version 4. To upgrade, simply download and run the installer from the link below. There is no need to uninstall the previous version, but we do strongly recommend you make a backup of your data before installing the new version.

Version 4.51 can be downloaded from the following location:

http://www.churchassist.com/download/wa451.exe

Version 4.50 (January 24, 2006)

Changes:

• Font and other changes to make the program more compatible with Windows Vista.
• Minor updates to user interface ‘look and feel’.
• Eliminated some flashing in the preview window on the Presentation Control Panel.
• Added item under View menu for showing and hiding the navigator bar (introduced in v4.40).

Fixed:

• Song Manager - error message when scrolling to the bottom of the ‘All Chords’ list.
• Browse windows - changes to column ordering or sizes were not persistent.
• Merge Songs - merging from the bottom list to the top list resulted in an error message.

I have posted a beta of the next minor release of Worship Assistant. The beta expires in 30 days, but I anticipate a release by the end of the week if there aren’t any major problems. Please provide any feedback or bug reports in our group at Yahoo! Groups.

Here is what is new:

• A default background bitmap can now be specified for each song.
• The Presentation Control Panel is now larger.
• A button to ‘blank’ the screen (i.e. remove the lyrics) has been added to Presentation Control Panel.
• Mail servers that require an SSL connection (e.g. GMail) can now be used to send e-mail.
• Record filtering can now be done from the manager browse windows.
• ‘Load All Records’ is now enabled by default in manager browse windows.
• A navigator bar has been added to the main window for easier navigation.

The beta can be installed over your current installation. I don’t anticipate any problems, but going back to the previous version is simple enough if necessary.

Welcome to the new ChurchAssist blog! This is something I have wanted to do for some time as a way to provide better communication with our software and web hosting customers. My hope is to use this forum to provide company news, software and hosting tips, and other information that may be of interest to you.

I also hope to engage “guest” bloggers from time to time (let me know if you are interested)!

So…stay tuned….and please feel free to comment!