We currently use Pro Presenter and Mediashout in our services and I have been testing Proclaim since alpha. Proclaim has already made huge progress. It has the easiest/best songselect integration of anything that I've used. I very rarely require any advanced slide editing, but when I do I prefer to do the editing in photoshop and import it as an image. So far, Proclaim is shaping up to fit our needs nicely as a small church.
The pre-service functionality needs major changes. It is basically useless in it's current form. It needs the ability to loop, to change the timing of the slides, and to have the countdown independent of the slides (countdown should be able to span any number of slides).
The image pop-ups. Get rid of them please. You already have thumbnails, that is all that is needed. You can have a slider to customize the size of the thumbnails, but please get rid of the pop-ups. They cause the user to rely too much on mouse use. We should be able to use the software with keyboard only. It does look good, but after using it for several months I don't see how it adds to functionality one iota.
I would also like more information about the video encoding and video support. What formats are supported? What type of transcoding takes place when I upload a video (codec, bitrate, resolution, etc...) or does it maintain the original video qualities? Ultimately I would like Proclaim to include some simple options for video settings. Maybe just some generic presets like DVD, 480p, 720p.
I love the idea of signals. I have not tested them yet, but I am very excited by this feature. This is something that really sets Proclaim apart from any other presentation software. I hope you keep coming up with innovative and useful features like signals. It was genius, I hope you give that guy a raise.
I would like to see more integration with Logos. Possibly sending a personal book that the pastor has made to go along with a sermon series through the signal system of Proclaim.
Cost. Compared to the aforementioned presentation softwares, the Proclaim total cost of ownership seems to be quite a bit higher. Basing this on the typical upgrade cycle for the other software packages, Proclaim is competitive over the first 5 years. But using Proclaim over the course of 10 years, for instance, would cost almost twice as much as one of the other alternatives. This will be hard to justify, even with the additional features.
