Below is a list of thoughts and things I have noticed as our church is testing Proclaim. No particular order.
Installer doesn't have an icon.
I was able to join a group just by knowing the group name. I didn't have to be aproved by the group 'owner' (if there is such a concept). This seems like a pretty big security issue to me.
When in edit mode and on-air, you have to double click on a slide to switch to it. When in "Preview" mode its a single click.
When On Air, the customize buton completely disapears. This is bad for discoverability. It would be better to show it in a disabled state so that users can be informed about _why_ they can suddenly no longer customize settings.
I like being able to use the number keys to jump around in a single song, but it seems dificult to jump to a specific position in a currently inactive song without going to the first or last slide using the arrow keys. This makes it pretty annoying to re-visit a songs chorus, for example, having moved ahead to a new song, or to start at the chorus or somewhere other than the start of the song. A "on-air" view with each song/section on one line would be a step in the right direction for this. I know I can scroll the whole slide list and find what I need that way, but it is a slow action on a laptop without a mouse (especially when the worship leader does an unscheduled jump).
While it is nice to be able to use the customize controls to edit a specific song, the discoverability on this feature is low, and I have found no way to create my own style set and easily apply set it as the default song style for all songs. This means I have to "customize" each song, which is a repetition that should be eliminated. If I am simply unable to locate this feature, then it really needs some more discoverability work. I looked all over the place.
Similarly, I cannot seem to delete or hide sections I do not wish to use (song title, for example) on the customize layout screen. I suppose this makes sense since you are using pre-defined containers and spacing, but it looks a bit odd to have overlapping boxes on the customize screen, especially if some of those boxes will never be used. A simple checkbox to hide it from view while editing would be welcome.
The scroll "wheel" on my laptop does not scroll the contents of the song, or the preview list.
The delete key does not delete the selected item in the Order of Service dialog. This is a bit odd as ctrl-z and ctrl-y do work well.
"Background" is a poor name for what that tab actually contains. Background indicates that you are selecting a simple picture/video to put behind the text, but in this case selecting a background changed not just the picture, but the font size, font, text location, text color, etc. of the text on my song. Worse, it lost my customizations. Since I cannot save my customizations, this makes playing with new backgrounds almost impossible without requiring a lot of re-work if you have already customized a slide. This section would be more accurately named "theme" or "styles". Further, Ctrl-Z did not undo my background selection as expected, but un-deleted a slide I had removed earlier.
Some explanation of what Signals are is needed. This section has no obvious indication of what a signal is, how they are used, or what benefit they can be to my church.
"New" is an odd name for what amounts for a menu entirely devoted to new presentation. I constantly end up clicking that first before going to the Add Item to actually create a new "item". I'm not sure I like the "add Item" button not linking to a drop down menu. It is incongruous with the rest of the navigation bar. New, Open, and Help all show drop down menus with appropriate items.
"Bible" as a Item name seems a bit odd. "Verse" maybe. A minor detail.
On the older laptop we are using in our current presentation system, all of the transitions are sluggish. This includes in app transitions like darkening the application when you show a menu. Other actions, such as showing a video are often slow to start. This is relatively minor. More inconvinient is the inability to adjust transition times, at least as far as I can tell. The fade transition is very nice, but is too slow for what we would want in a live situation. After further testing on a 2.4 ghz laptop with 4 gigs of ram and a ATI Mobility HD 4500 (a pretty decent laptop) some transitions remain sluggish. Opening the New menu is down right choppy.
For some reason the scroll bar on the slide list (Preview Pane) scrolls much further than is necessary, showing a lot of blank space, rather than stopping with the last slide.
I think this software shows great promise, but as it is now it requires more set-up than we would like on a weekly basis for simple things like adding a new song. The built in templates do not meet our needs (specifically in the area of songs, more generally as we like to create our own artwork and styles for sermon series) and customizing each song as it is created is annoying. Further complicating things is the knowledge that if we need to change something in the future, we cannot simple update our "master" style and have our songs all updated.
Thanks for all your hard work. I will continue testing and look forward to future updates.
