Software demo

The Service designer

This demonstration is taken from Visual Liturgy 4.0 for Common Worship. The Service list is one of those things that users either love or hate! In previous versions of Visual Liturgy, it has been the core tool for constructing services and particularly adapting Service templates. Some users have appreciated its tools and the flexibility it offers. Others have recoiled in horror at a tool that has been hard to work with.

New views

The first thing that existing users will notice are the new "views" set out as blue tabs at the bottom of the page. These new views (other than the Overview) present the recognisable Service list / Main display combination but allow users to have different views of the same material.

The feature extends the facilities that used to be part of the Summary Outline in old versions of Visual Liturgy and allows greater flexibility by providing a Congregation view as well as a Summary view. By using tickboxes, users can quickly create different texts for the minister, a summary that could be given to readers or the organist and a congregational version to use in service sheets.

Eliminating the right click

In previous versions, much of the functionality for the Service list was contained under a "right-click" pop-up menu. Many users had struggled with this facility in the past and so the menu hidden by the right click has been replaced with more visible alternatives.

Highlighting a text display a grey ellipsis icon . If the user clicks this icon, the right click menu appears. Experienced users will notice that the old right click menu has been considerably simplified. Since some functions are now done differently or have been made redundant, there are fewer choices than before. Meanwhile, other functions have been renamed to try and simplify their use.

Grouping items

In version 3.0 of Visual Liturgy, grouping items became possible for the first time. In version 4.0, the feature has been extended to allow greater depth. In other words, one group of items can also be collected together within a larger group of items. In addition, such groupings make it very easy for users to drag and drop whole chunks from one service to another.

New icons

The last thing to note in the updated Service list are the new icons that have been introduced. The old boxes and lightbulbs have been dropped in favour of a new, larger range of icons that are intended to provide more visual clues for users as they look down the Service list.

Perhaps the most prominent will be the "star icon" , which replaces the old lightbulb icon. Used to indicate items where other choices are available, the user can now click directly on the star icon and be taken to the Browser where the pre-selected choices will be available.

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