jdavidb in comments asks for a basic description of Songbee. I was going to reply in comments, but then I realised that for the purposes of putting documentation together it's better to have things tagged up in blog posts. So here we go.
In many churches, hymnbooks are on the out and computer projection of worship song lyrics are coming in. Some churches use Microsoft's Powerpoint to do this, but there are problems with Powerpoint. The main one is that a Powerpoint presentation is linear - you go from one slide to the next until you get to the end of the presentation.
But songs are not linear, and worship less so; you have a verse, then a chorus, then another verse, and then the worship leader might choose to go back to verse 1, or sing the chorus, or sing the bridge. If you're using Powerpoint you have to flick around between slides when something unexpected like that happens.
So there are dedicated projection tools, which allow you to say "go to next chorus", "skip to next song", "go back to previous song in playlist". Easislides is one such of these. If you've got the money, Words of Worship is "the best Christian song projection software on the market today", according to its author.
Why am I writing another one? First, because software should be free. Software to assist churches should particularly be free because to make such software non-free would be to deny my less well-off brothers and sisters something which would be of benefit to them, purely on account of their poverty - which is pretty much the opposite of everything that God stands for. I'm not saying that people who create commercial Christian software are being unethical, but...
No, OK, I am saying that.
But anyway, the second reason is that my particular situation involves the Japanese church, and displaying Japanese text has a particular challenge. Japanese has a number of set, including the Chinese kanji character set. Unfortunately, not everyone can read the kanji characters - I don't just mean missionaries who are still learning Japanese, because a lot of theological words are incomprehensible to most Japanese (yeah, I know) so they need to have the pronunciation spelled out for them. So they use another, syllabic, alphabet on top of the characters, like this:
| とう | きょう |
| 東 | 京 |
To do this kind of display obviously requires special support, (to say "oh, and these lyrics go on top of these other lyrics", which is not a normal thing to want) and Easislides and friends can't do it. But since Easislides is free but not open source (which is the other prong of the free software problem) I can't modify it to make it work. the way I want it to. So sadly we have to the Protestant thing and start a new one from scratch. This is what Songbee does.
For the technically minded, Songbee is an XUL application with an SQLite backend powered by mozStorage. It's cross-platform, it's being developed on OS X and Linux and will be deployed on Windows as well. I'll have an alpha out by December. The roadmap looks like this:
This will actually be functional, but not ideal. I'd say about 70% of this is done, the other 30% is user interface polish.
There are a couple of things I just don't know how to do. Making searching work really nicely would involve something like Lucene, and I don't know how to interface that with XUL - partially because I only learnt XUL a couple of weeks ago. Similarly, SWORD is going to be an utter nightmare to integrate with XUL, because SWORD is written in C++ and the XUL stuff is written in Javascript, and they're different languages. I don't know how to do a few cosmetic things like positioning the worship-time interface on the second external monitor, but we can live without that for now. Someone will know. :)
Above all, it's looking good, and it's nice and easy to use, it does the job, and it looks good doing it. I just need someone to lock me in a room with an endless supply of beer and O'Reilly books, and it'll be out in finite time!
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