My Church Gig

This week I want to mention the beauty of Adobe AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) and Flex.  I started wading in it a couple of years ago and now I’m all deep-sea on it.  I used to be a Flash and Actionscript hater but that was before AIR, Flex, and Actionscript 3.  It’s legit.

AIR offers common folk like you and me the ability to create desktop applications that run on Mac, PC, and Linux.  If you’ve ever thought to yourself, “All I need is a simple app that will just do [something only you would need]” and you can wrap your head around Actionscript (which is somewhat like Javascript) and a little MXML then you can create your own solutions.

After the jump: how we solved our switcher limitations and alphanumeric pager problem including pics and a download.

The Parent Pager Problem

We signed on with Fellowship One a few years ago.  It handles many things churches need handling for and one of those is children’s check-in.  It issues a 3-character code for each child with both numbers and letters.  At the time we just used our presentation software to throw up the number over the side screens.  The problem came when we started capturing video Saturday nights for our Brentwood campus Sunday morning.  Our switcher isn’t fancy enough to key the parent pager code without it going to “tape” so Livermore’s Saturday night parents were being paged again a whole town, sunset and sunrise away.

We had to get the parent pager off of the screens until we could budget in a better switcher but the only alphanumeric paging systems we could find were those lame LED scrolling marquees.  I read a reply in a blog post that one church posts the child’s F1 code and the parents’ last name and lets it scroll till the child was attended to.  I can’t think of anything more tacky.  Wait, let me think…  Nope.  There is none more tacky.

A Temporary Solution

My first AIR app was a simple parent paging app. See the bottom of this post for a download.  I installed it on a retired computer (any old computer will do), bought a couple monitors (I think they’re 22″ but they might be 24″), hung them with my buddy Laurence (who did all the work), bought VGA cable and a VGA splitter from Cable Wholesale a nearby supply house (100′ of SVGA with ends for 40 bucks), and wired it up.

The app runs in dual monitor mode.  The computer lives in the video booth and someone from Children’s Ministry comes up to enter the codes in a list.  The app displays them on the secondary monitor (split to each side of the stage) one at a time until the list expires.  We set the display time to 25 seconds.  You can enter any length of text and it will scale to fit the screen.

Here are some pics with just the work lights on.  They are clearly visible from the very back of the room; about 100 feet away.  The picture below was taken at 60 feet.  During service they attract just enough attention but not too much.

This is a temporary solution because the parent pager is now only visible in the auditorium. We plan to run lines to other rooms but really, an upgraded switcher would be better than tunneling a bunch of cable throughout the building and splintering a bunch of VGA sends off one computer for a system that we’ll not use once a new switcher is in place.  If a new switcher doesn’t make it through the budget hoop this year then we’ll be running cable.

Download

Here’s the download: ParentPager.air.zip

Added 3/3/2010: Here are the Flex project files for the next version I was working on.  Lots of buttons that don’t work but the project is super simple enough and the main hurdles (like detecting and pushing to a secondary display) have been cleared already.  ParentPager.src.zip

It’s not pretty but it works.  Use it.  De-compile it and use the code if you want to. It’s free.  It’s yours.  You assume all risks – don’t come after me if you think it breaks your computer.  :)   It works fine for us.

One warning: it’s got a random bug and it does crash once every couple months.  I just haven’t had time to work on it and it’s not that high on my list.  Just force-quit the app and restart it.  If there’s any interest in this I might start working on a new version.

You’ll need to install AIR before you install this.  Visit www.adobe.com and click on the Get Adobe AIR button.  You’ll also need dual monitors on your computer to see it work.

And by the way, I’ve discovered that Flex programmers are somewhat in demand.  It’s not a bad way to supplement the church gig income.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 5th, 2009 at 9:21 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.