my list of things that i think would improve zionworx
1) vertical alignment
2) more font customization (especially colours, why not implement one of those colour choosers that lets you pick from all 999billion colours)
3) in the "current song" section, the current slide's text is highlighted in green, when you move over it with the red selecting text, and then off again, it goes away. this is slightly annoying. i would actually find it easier to look at, if, instead of the current slide being highlighted in green, it had a coloured rectangle around it, blue would be a nice colour for this. i just find it kind of distracting to have three different colours of text. i think a rectangle would be better, maybe it could be an option though, so everyone's happy.
4) the search feature isn't very good, in it's current state. it would be great if it had the standard type search feature, that most programs have. they normally look something like this. <br> <img src="http://portfolio.itas.ca/hartmanj/stuff/search.gif"> <br> i'm sure you know what i mean. it would be nice, also, if ctrl+f would bring that little dialogue box up. and if you were focusing (currently working inside of) in the "current song" area, if searching with that dialogue box would let you search throughout that song in specific.
5) it would be nice if, somewhere, right clicking did <b>something</b>, anything.
i'm just so used to right clicking all the time, it messes me right up when nothing happens
6) i'd like to be able to drag songs around in the "service list". instead of having to use those arrow buttons.
7) it would be <b>awesome</b> if you could click on any slide in the "current song" to select it. i'd love to be able to click on the desired slide, and then hit enter to display it. maybe if you right clicked, it could bring up a menu, with the option to "select and display".
8] it would be useful to be able to load a new song into the "current song" without it automatically displaying the first slide. sometimes you want to start on the chorus or verse 3 or something. maybe if you right clicked on a song in the "service list", there could be an option to load the song without displaying it. it could just keep whatever you already have up there, up there, until you specifically tell it to change.
9) it would be super useful to be able to edit a song on the fly. if you could have a song displaying, notice a flaw, edit it, click a button, and see the new edited version right before your eyes. i was doing the songs last sunday when i noticed that the typer of the song had made a mistake, but i couldn't fix it, and get the changes up, without reloading the song and it going back to the first slide. so i had to wait until they were going back to the first slide to load the revised version.
10) right now there is only the default style, to save your preferences for text and the background. it would be cool to be able to save styles, as files. there could be a styles folder in the program's root directory, where it stores all the user defined styles. this way you could have different preset styles for different things.
11) the ability to edit "quick notes"! please! this could be another one of those right click things
12) you know how in any M$ app, you can use the ctrl and shift keys on the keyboard to control how you're selecting things? this would be nice for selecting songs in the database and service list. so i could delete a block of songs without having to do it one at a time and take several precious minutes to do it. it would also be useful for adding numerous songs to the service list.
13) i don't like how a blank line is used as the seperator between slides. what if you want to have blank lines on a slide? i think this should be done differently. when typing in the song, there could be a certain string of characters you use to tell it to make a slide break. something like "<newslide>". there could be a nice pretty button for "next slide", that simply inputs this string of characters at the current location of the cursor.
14) if #13 is implemented, it would create another, easily resolved, problem. you wouldn't be able to tell the slides apart in the "current song" section, as blank lines wouldn't necessarily mean different slides. so a simple thin horizontal line could be used to seperate them.
15) i like the "alternative title" option. but i think it would be nice to add another feature to help find illusive songs, other than an improved "search" function. what if there were a few more categories for information for each song. when you're putting in the lyrics and title and stuff, it could have stuff like "first line of song", and "first line of chorus", and "note". this information could be displayed in one of those yellow popup box things that you often see, when you hover over an item for a given, rather small, amount of time. <br> <img src="http://portfolio.itas.ca/hartmanj/stuff/popupbox.gif"> <br> they look like that.
16) to help out #15, you could have the program intuitively figure out the first line of the song, and the first line of the chorus. if the user wanted to add a note, that would be manual, obviuoslly. but the first line of the song would be simple. and for the chorus, there could be a way to designate a specific slide, or body of text spread across multiple slides, as the chorus. then the program could just take the first line of that designated text. this could be done with some simple html mocking. like <chorus> </chorus>. i'm sure there are other uses that could take advantage of the chorus being known to the program. i noticed someone had a thread titled "jumping between verses and choruses", or something like that. so this has probably been discussed in there.
17) there are currently sliders seperating the program into 3 vertical columns. so you can resize the database, middle, and current song. adding another, horizontal, one, in between the "service list" and "display status", would be good.
ok, that's all i can think of right now
. by the length of the list, don't get me wrong, this software is great. it's unique and filling a niche. i <b>really</b> appreciate it. and it's great that it's free
. when we first got a projector i was stuck using powerpoint for a couple weeks, and it was horrendous comparitively. i was always so lost about where i was in the song. and scared to change to the next slide, not knowing what it would reveal. thanks for coming up with the idea to make this software, and going out on a limb to do it. thanks also for making it so very affordable. keep up the great work. hopefully i'll see some of my suggestions in the next version.