[v6 General Discussion] EW6 Feature Request

Hi there

I've been a user of EasyWorship for many years now, though we've been stuck on version 2007 for a while. I thought it would be a good time to upgrade, so I downloaded version 6 and had a go with the trial to see what it's like.

* When I search for a song, it only shows me one slide at a time and I have to manually click through them all if I want to check I have the right version, instead of being able to see it all on one page with a little scrolling if it's a long song. Rather inconvenient when you have to check most verses of a song with multiple versions to make sure you get the right version (eg. be thou my vision - how many "thou"s or "be thous" in the version the band is using?!) Especially if the band has decided to start a song that's not on your song list, again bad if there's multiple versions of it.

* It's a nice idea to have previews of the entire currently-displayed song as individual slides. But I can only view it as full slides: I no longer can see the whole song as nice easily-readable paragraphs of text, and instead have to scroll down through how the text will appear on the projector. I know I can have "Ledger view" that shows the text but this still keeps up the slide taking up space next to it and increasing the vertical space used per song. This makes it much harder when having to jump backwards and forwards in songs if unfamilar with the song or the band decide to mess with the order mid-song and you have to scroll up and down more than necessary. It was much better with pure text and glorious colour-coded verse/chorus tags.

* As with the search, I can no longer just click on a song in the schedule and see the entire song in a nice set of paragraphs; I have to hit the small triangle to show the slides of a song, which is not ideal if you're in a hurry to find the current song the band has switched to unexpectedly. A small target is easy to miss in a rush, and potentially you might click and display the wrong item. Also the text to the side of the song slides won't show all the lines of the song (see crown him with many crowns on 16:9 display). I much preferred being able to just click on a song in the schedule and see a full preview of that song in the middle.

The search function is still entirely unforgiving of spelling mistakes. Try searching for "crowm him with many crowns" and you get nothing. (on a side note, copy doesn't work from the search box)

Tell me there's ways around my complaints! Hidden options?! With widescreen monitors there's no reason you couldn't reinstate the schedule item preview as an additional column?

[post edited for content]

The restoration of the preview window and the text-only view of the songs in the preview/live screens are a huge improvement. I will be trying it out properly on our church PC and all being good will be upgrading asap, it'll be great to be able to play videos and powerpoints through EW again!

There are one or two minor things that would make it even better. For the song selection there's usually no need to have the whole of the bottom of the page taken up, so it would be helpful if it were an option to have that just on the left as it was previously, thus giving more vertical space for preview and live (yes, I know I can drag the selection pane to the bottom...)

Perhaps when searching, the rest of the lyrics could appear to the right of the titles (ie hiding author/copyright) so you can see at a glance what the words are without having to select each song.

Looking forward to further polishing of a great resource.
Same comment here.
- "Ledger view" is useless if we can't hide the slides. If we reduce the size of the thumbnails, we lose text in the ledger view. Only few lines of text are visible. The rest is simply not there at all.
So the operator believes it's the last sentence of the slide ; and immediately swaps to the next slide. Then gets confused. Panic mode.
- So we are forced to shut off the ledger view option, and read straight from the slides to avoid doing mistakes.
- This forces us to make the slides "big enough" to be able to read the text. Not always easy to read text in thumbnails with background and colors.
- Would be a bit nicer if the live section could be set to show white text on black background, with no extra distractions.
- But that would still not solve the issue for long songs with 7+ verse + chorus, + bridges, it makes it very hard to scroll between verse and chorus back & forth.
- Ideal would be to rollback to how it was in EWS2009. Much better to drive the live output from "Text-only" view. At least allow that option...!

Operator are all complaining about that. At this point, not sure if I should downgrade to 2009, or enforce EasyWorship6 to the staff. I risk losing some volunteers if they have the impression that it's harder to operate.
Looking forward for next updates...
Thanks for your response, I'll keep an eye out for the updates!
smbamber,
Thanks for your feedback.
I think most of the problems you have encountered will be solved with the addition of the preview column. We are actually working on making that available again, so keep an eye on the regular updates we are pushing out.

I'll submit a feature request for the search function to find songs based on misspelled words.
However I found that when trying to misspell the word it would not allow me to, it had the song in front of me by the time I got to w. Please note that there are two different search modes. By title or contextual. Clicking the button on the left of the search box switches it.