Too many issues
I hope this does not sound like a rant or me trying to tell you how to make your software.
I have had too many issues with Proclaim to continue using it. I have been using it since it first launched and found it the best of both worlds. It wasn't too complicated for new people to use and it had some really great features. I loved being able to sync in the cloud if I was traveling. Our previous pastor was able to put all of his content in with no issues and really liked not having to use powerpoint. However, the software has become more and more irritating to operate. Thank you for what you did for our church, but this is good bye.
Josh Haller
Comments
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Hello Josh,
Of course this is disappointing to hear but I appreciate you taking the time to let us know. If you can spare a moment could you share the top few reasons you found the application problematic to use? Hopefully we can use your input to serve others better, and maybe even win you back some day [:)]
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We also are jumping off this sinking ship. Proclaim continues to crash for us every Sunday for the last three weeks. I would estimate our % of Sundays with no issues to be way less than 50%. It seems that the updates cannot stay ahead of Windows updates, Java, or something. We ran it last night (Saturday 9/6) and it seemed fine. Came in this morning and the only change was the addition of a Youtube video, and it locked up our system, and would not run. While I will admit, we have had some internet connectivity issues also, Proclaim should be able to stand on its own, regardless of internet connection. We will be reverting back to a simpler, if not as elegant, solution.
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Thank you for your response. I really, really liked Proclaim when we first started using it. Got the beta, really liked the simple program that looked really great. It was the best of both worlds: simple but really well designed that it looked great.
However, these issues drove me to no longer use Proclaim:
1. Around 4-5 months ago the software started to lag on a regular basis. It'd take 2-3 minutes to open, there would be lag if we tried to scroll down the menu to switch songs or to other items in our service. The slide to slide transitions were better but were having a bit of lag. This seemed to coincide with Proclaim taking more of a cloud approach where the software worked better when we were online than if I was editing offline and then syncing to the cloud.
2. The updates. I understand updating content or bugs, but the updates became such a hinderance to working. We have a volunteer making the presentations in her spare time & then we have a computer that we sync to the Saturday before out service. However, if one of us missed an update we couldn't sync. Sometimes the updates would take too long, they'd crash Proclaim or we'd skip them because of the frequency of them that it got really irritating to try and keep up to date. I pretty much had to have a policy of "if Proclaim won't work unless we update, we update. If it still works, don't bother updating cause its such a pain." As Proclaim became more and more complex in its updates, the updates caused the software to lag more and more. There were changes to the tool bar & how to edit songs, etc that made little sense. There was one update that I really liked where if we changed the background to a song it no longer defaulted the text to a default style that we never used. Then an update 2 or 3 back took that that away and back to the irritating process of needing to format each song if we ever change the background.
3. There seemed to be a "warm up" phase for Proclaim over the past few months. It would routinely crash & lag for the first 20 minutes of worship practice. Luckily at that point we're just following the worship team along to see how they'll do the song, but it causes unnecessary stress to the volunteers when the software crashes 2-3 times before the service. This would happen on both Mac & PC. There was a point where every time I tried to change the background that the software would crash.
4. This all came to a head last Sunday (August 31st) where the software would not go on air. We'd click the "on air" button and it'd lag for 3-5 minutes and just not launch. We restarted the computer, we called volunteers to bring a laptop to try. Nothing. Would not launch. We ended up copying the songs out of Proclaim into Powerpoint and using Powerpoint. Cause Proclaim was able to open and "work" it just wouldn't go on air.
There have been other irritating things and glitches but those are more just operational or can be dismissed as software hiccups. The other things though... too many things to deal with to have Proclaim as a realistic option.
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