2004 Technology

The technology I use really changed dramatically in 2004. Here is a round up of the major changes that I can think of and how I would evaluate them now.

MediaShout became our presentation software in 2004. I absolutely love it but can’t wait for v 3 to come out. What I really like is the ability to aggregate all sorts of different media and present it through one program. When v3 comes out I think it is supposed to work with DVD a lot better and that will make my day.

Swishmax is one of my favorite new pieces of software. If I could afford the macromedia stuff I would probably go that route instead but swishmax is so easy and does a good job creating flash files. I have found that flash files allow me to raise the creativity level far beyond what I was doing before. One of my favorites was a simple Thanksgiving announcement that looped all the information through a screen that had falling leaves floating down.

Opensong is fairly new to me but I love it. It’s open source and anything free already has a big head start in my book. I don’t use the presentation stuff but I use it for handling my guitar music. It makes it easy to create and manage lead sheets and the ability to change keys and print capo chords is just awesome. Now I just print the songs I’m going to play each week and throw them away when I’m done. Of course, there are a few quirks as with most open source stuff but I think this program ranks very high. I bet all the piano people wished they had something similar.

We also upgraded our computers and installed a wireless network. We have two 3 ghz P4s, one in my office and one in the sound booth. Needless to say we have plenty of power and speed. My old computer is in the secretary’s office. All three are networked.

On the shaky side of things we use a Terk Leapfrog to send our presentation from the presentation computer to our projector wirelessly. It solved a problem we had and for the most part works pretty well but I’d rather be hardwired.

There were also a few failures and disappointments this past year:

I pretty much stopped using a pda. I was totally dependent on one but I don’t like living my life that way. If you can call it living. My wife loves hers but I don’t use mine very much.

We also found that video editing software is still not very good. It seems like you have to use three or four programs to get everything you want. All in all any talk about video editing makes me groan. Maybe this year someone will make something good and affordable.

Of course there was also the biggest technology mess-up of the year. I downloaded a large flash file from my office computer to the presentation computer but when I was building the service in mediashout I linked to the file on my office computer instead. Wireless isn’t that perfect and it stopped and started about three times during the song that was playing on the flash. Just for information, it is never a good idea to run media through a wireless network to a presentation computer and then through a second wireless transmitter to the projector. There is just way too much that can go wrong. Someone mentioned something about Satan being the prince of the air.