I keep pushing Open Office because I like the idea of replaceing the nearly required MS office a lot, and I’ve found it pretty darned easy to use. Built in export to PDF function, and it can save in the ODF (open document format) which is poor people-friendly, and it can even save stuff in native MS formats.
But I had it crash while trying to use it in a meeting at work the other day, and today I found out that Impress (the equivalent to power point) doesn’t have the feature that puts the slide-show on a second monitor, which makes it unuseable at our church.
So, do I just go with powerpoint? In the short term of course. We must have projection for sermons slides. Long term, my options are wait for this often requested feature to be added, or finally take advantage of the fact that this is OPEN SOURCE software and learn how to compile the feature into the code on my own.
The second path is probably a bad waste of time. But I’m thinking if I always talk about wanting to support open source, part of that is contributing. Plus it would be a great way to finally get my feet wet with this kind of project, preparing me for some future ideas I have, and learn a lot about writing software in the process.
I’m wondering how many of my friends have tried to mess with compiling things like this from source, and contributing to open source projects. If you have ever done that hit me up with some feedback in the comments.
Also, the worship conference I went to was great. I got to pick this guy’s brain about running sound, and he is amazing. His name is Brian Ricke, and he has run sound for some huge bands, as well as mastered many people’s cd’s.
Well, enough craziness for now. I’m off to bed.