SING AND READ 1.6.6

This upgrade consists of a new singandread.exe and replacements for the two information files, ReadMe.rtf and Advanced.rtf.  All of these are important!  When you run the sarupdate1.6.6.exe file, these three upgrades will be installed for you.

In case you are concerned, versions 1.6.4 and 1.6.5 of Sing And Read were not published.  So you should expect to be upgrading from version 1.6.3.
 
The main improvements made to Sing And Read are:
 
-	Colours for song fonts will now be used in the preview windows and in the “Type in a song” utility window.  Previously these fonts were always black, which was OK unless you had chosen a light font on a black background for your display.  The preview and song entry windows then showed black text on a black background, which was not much use!  Incidentally, please study the Utilities available from the Main Menu.  “Coloured fonts” are just one of the extra facilities available there!

-	Unexpected Songs selected during a meeting will automatically be added to the end of the list of “Today’s Songs”.  If you select and display an unexpected song, then move on and display something else, but then need to return to the same song, this change enables a quicker return, without having to select it again from your whole collection of songs.  This is useful in the standard version of Sing And Read, since you can jump to any song using the Function key for its position in the sequence in the list.  But it is even more useful in the Dual Monitor version, where the list of “Today’s Songs” is continuously displayed on the “controls” monitor, and you can jump to a song just by double clicking on the list.

-	More flexibility in providing default display settings for the Online Bible, which has recently changed the location of its “Desktop” data files, to match the way that the latest versions of Microsoft Windows™ store personal files for every user.  Sing And Read always tries to provide you with a set of default display settings, called an Online Bible Desktop.  If Sing And Read cannot find an appropriate location for this file in your Windows configuration then it will ask you to set up your Online Bible Desktop yourself, using whatever font size and colours you feel appropriate.  Of course, whether or not Sing And Read is able to install a default Online Bible Desktop for you, you can always change the settings to suit yourself!  If you do this, please save the resulting settings in the Online Bible as a Desktop named “church”, and these will then be used by Sing And Read in future.
Warning!
Users of MS Windows XP™ who keep their Task Bar displayed all the time at the bottom of their screen, which is the default setting, will need to change this setting, otherwise it will continue to appear during use of Sing And Read.  To change the setting, right click on a blank space in the Task Bar, left click on Properties, then unselect the “Keep the Task Bar on top of other windows” option, by left clicking on its tick box so that it becomes empty.

I f you have problems with any of the above, please feel free to contact me at:
peter@melted.com

I hope that you find this useful!  Please let me know of any other improvements that you would like.  I shall shortly be upgrading the Dual Monitor version with these and other requested improvements.  Incidentally, it has recently become easier to use Dual Monitors, with the arrival of cheap “TV out” graphic cards, which allow your main monitor to have a different display to your TV.  The “TV” can be a data/video projector.  TV quality is quite OK for Sing And Read, which displays text rather than graphics.

Peter Morgan
Author of Sing And Read