Planning Center News

  • By ministrycentered

Planning Center Music Stand Annotations & Tweet Your #WorshipSet

To Order the X-Clip for the iPad, Click Here!

Wow! This summer has been busy. We have been going full speed (in between vacations) on a lot of new features that you are going to see us start rolling out pretty quickly over the next coming months. The first one, which so many people have been waiting for, is Planning Center Music Stand Annotations!

Music Stand Annotations On The Web

Our goal with annotations was to make it so that annotations added on the web show up on the iPad, and annotations created on the iPad show up on the web. This was a pretty difficult task but we are very happy with the outcome. With annotations you get the following tools:

  • Pen
  • Highlighter
  • Text Tool
  • Rectangular Eraser


To access the annotations, click the pen and paper icon in the lower right corner, as shown here. The toolbar will come up for you on the left, allowing you to select which kind of edits you would like to make.

You can also view other people’s annotations by hitting the configure (gear) button. We are really excited about this feature. Please check it out and let us know how it works for you and shoot any feedback to support@ministrycentered.com!

Note: Until we release the iPad Music Stand update, annotations will only show up on the web.

Browser Support

Because of the complexity of manipulating images on the web we did a lot of research to determine the best method of doing this. We decided to use the new HTML5 tag CANVAS, though this decision does come with a drawback: IE6-8. Internet Explorer 6, 7 & 8 do not have any support for the canvas tag. The good news is IE9, which is due out soon, is compatible with this tag and we are already testing Music Stand Annotations on this browser and will support it once it is released. If you or your volunteer is not using a browser we support, we will give them a nice message letting them know how to upgrade to a supported browser. The browsers we officially support for Music Stand are Chrome, Safari, FireFox & Internet Explorer 9.

Music Stand Annotations On The iPad

Jason, our newest addition to the Ministry Centered Technologies team, has been working hard on getting Annotations into the Music Stand iPad app and we are ready for BETA testers. If you are interested in beta testing the iPad app with annotations support please fill out this form.

iPad Clip

The iPad Clip is on its way, the steel mold has been created, and we are working with the manufacturing plant to ensure the best finish on the clip. We expect to place the order for our first batch this week and it takes about three weeks to make them. We will be accepting pre-orders next week for an introductory price of $29 per clip. We still don’t have any concrete information on a bluetooth footpedal, but we will update you as soon as we do. For more information on ordering, click here.

Tweet your #WorshipSet

Want to easily let your followers or church members know your song list for this last weekend? Easy, just click the “Tweet Your #WorshipSet” link and we will automatically create a nice tweet for you with all that information. And if you have Public Access enabled, we will add a shortened link to your public page to the end of the Tweet.

Note: We beta tested this as #SundaySetList, but found people have a lot of mid-week services. :)

The Future

This last week we had the whole Ministry Centered Technologies Team in our new offices (double the space of our old offices) to talk about the present & future of PCO. We printed out every single page & dialog and we went through them all with a red pen, marking anything that might not be 100% clear or look as beautiful as we want. We also talked about some exciting new features. You will be seeing the changes from this meeting over the next several months.

In Him,

Jeff Berg
Owner/Developer
Ministry Centered Technologies

32 comments

Sean McDermott #permalink

What level of access sees the Tweet your set button? Admins/Editors? Viewers?

    ministrycentered #permalink

    @Sean: Editors & Admins can see the “Tweet Your #WorshipSet” link.

John Fiorello #permalink

Thanks PCO, you guys are great!

JF

Lindsay Ward #permalink

I’m looking forward to the next updates – I hope they include some of the “basics” like being able to sort song lists by all of the columns and being able to add plan items (like sermon details) in matrix view.

    ministrycentered #permalink

    We are working on doing a complete overhaul of the Matrix, your suggestions are already on the list. :)

Aaron Wade #permalink

I have public access enabled but my tweets don’t get urls. Is there another step I missed?

    ministrycentered #permalink

    @aaron: Try it now. We were excluding it because the tweet was too long, but now we include it no matter what and you can shorten down the tweet manually. We are looking into figuring out how to shorten the song names if the tweet is too long.

Keith Barger #permalink

You guys are awesome! Delivering on promises is HUGE! Thanks so much, and keep up the great work!

Dan #permalink

It would be amazing if you could export the song list to MediaShout, ProPresenter etc and it would put songs in the script using their CCLI numbers… I suppose that would depend on those companies enabling it. Either way, it would save a lot of work.

    katiewillard #permalink

    @Dan Yeah that would probably mean an integration with our program and theirs. Thanks for the feedback on this! We definitely do keep things like this on our radar.

Matt Hoage #permalink

You all do excellent work! Do you guys do 20% time at your organization? You are always coming out with great new features!

Unfortunately, I don’t use Twitter. I just never got into it. I’m not sure why. I even try to avoid Facebook, but it seems inevitable in our culture. There are many in our church that uses Facebook, and it would be great to post the set list on my Facebook page. Is there a way to do that? I guess now after spending ten minutes trying to write this comment professionally, I realize that I could just take the public link and share that on Facebook!

Thanks for helping me solve my own problem! You all help us do that weekly using Planning Center!

    katiewillard #permalink

    Thanks Matt! We don’t necessarily stick to the 20% time model here. Glad you’re enjoying the new features!!

    dhock #permalink

    Matt,

    If you want to post setlists to Facebook, you can do as follows:
    1) Setup a Twitter account. If you dont want anyone to know or follow your tweets make the twitter account name obscure, etc.
    2) Have Facebook (via Facebook app) automatically update from your tweets (instructions @ http://www.twistimage.com/blog/archives/twitter-will-update-your-facebook-status—heres-how/)

    Doing this, PCO will update Twitter, which will update Facebook. Might sound like a round about way, but once setup, should have little issues.

Chris #permalink

Just wanted to say thanks for all the work and investment you guys (and gals) keep putting into this project. I know that I appreciate very much the passion you have to continue providing this service and building it up. Thanks and keep up the great work.

Rowan Hilsden #permalink

Excellent work guys!!!
Integration between planning center and CCB (Church Community Builder) would be so helpful!
I think there would be MANY here in Australia who would jump onboard if these two web apps could at least talk. Ie custom properties for each person shared between both apps.
Keep up the excellent work!

    katiewillard #permalink

    @Rowan Thanks for the feedback on that!

    Jeremy Anderson #permalink

    I agree! We use CCB and this would be a huge feature!!

Paul #permalink

I was checking out the music stand annotations and I was unable to make multiple highlights. Is there a trick that I am missing?

Thanks,
Paul

    katiewillard #permalink

    I’d be happy to help you with this…you should be able to make multiple highlights. Feel free to email us with more details: support@ministrycentered.com.

Guy Thornton #permalink

Awesome work guys!!!

Was wondering however if there is a way to import CCLI’s Lead Sheets into music stand? We currently only see the chord charts we create in PCO. Sometimes it would be nice to see note sheets when playing songs

Thanks for all that you are doing
Blessings
Guy

    katiewillard #permalink

    @Guy Music Stand will automatically pull up any PDF’s you have attached to songs that are scheduled within your plan. So if you would like lead sheets from CCLI to be included in Music Stand, you would need to take them from your site or the computer where they are, then put them into PCO. There isn’t a way to have them automatically imported in any way. Hope this helps!

Tom Burks #permalink

Wow! Love the annotations. That’s pretty much all we needed to start purchasing the hardware to use music stand in services. Does your long term plan include a link between Music Stand and PCO Live? (while in Music Stand, it would be great to have an icon at the bottom to switch to Live, and a similar button in Live to switch back).

    katiewillard #permalink

    @Tom This is an idea that we have certainly tossed around- not sure exactly when or if it would be something we implement. Glad to hear you’re enjoying the annotations!

Brad #permalink

When and where do I make my clip pre-order? I need one ASAP! Thanks for all your hard work.

    katiewillard #permalink

    We’re actually working on pre-ordering info today and are hoping to get this rolled out very soon. We’ll update everyone when pre-ordering is available. Thanks so much for your interest! We’re working on it as hard and fast as we can, there are just several things that are out of our control.

Brenda Heard #permalink

I would be happy if the newer versions allowed the ability to change the wording of the email message that gets sent on a default basis. The wording right now is good, but rather cold, and not at all like I would like it to sound. Thanks!

    katiewillard #permalink

    Thanks for the thoughts Brenda! That’s actually on our to-do list.

Erik Tornquist #permalink

Have you guys thought about the possibility of having the users scheduled plans (date & times) on their PCO calender connect or somehow share information with their personal calender (outlook, etc..)? This would be especially useful with the ipod/iphone/ipad PCO & calender app.

    katiewillard #permalink

    We do have this as a feature already! Under My Calendar you can click to sync with Outlook 2007 or iCal or you can link with Google Calendar as well. That will sync any of the user’s dates/times they’ve been scheduled for. Hope this helps!

    dhock #permalink

    Katie,

    I have used this iCal integration with Outlook (both 2003 and 2007) for sometime and it works great!

Pre-Ordering for iPad Clip Now Available! « Ministry Centered Technologies #permalink

[...] Our last blog post was concerning our latest release: annotations for Music Stand! We are very excited about this new feature! To read more, click here. [...]

Tim Ritter #permalink

I agree – this has been floating around at the CCB development site on and off for 3 years now. Is there some reason that the requests of the users of both sites keep getting shoved out of the development pipeline? PCO is awesome, but not being able to integrate it with other volunteer teams and church data creates some lousy workarounds and poor options. We are trying to manage a few other volunteer teams on PCO, and the options on CCB to migrate over just aren’t up to snuff with what is on PCO – without some type of integration. Can enough of us ask PLEASE????