What changed, and when.

The hymns come with their music. 610 hymns of the Seventh-day Adventist Hymnal now come with an instrumental recording, every stanza already timed to it. Switch the instrumental on in Settings › Content and they download in the background — 2.8 GB, once — with any hymn you open fetched first. After that they play with no internet connection, and a broadcast that is live keeps the connection to itself while they come down.

Nothing to set up, and nothing to teach. There is no folder to choose and no file to name. Each recording arrives knowing where its stanzas begin, so the introduction plays under the title slide and the words follow the music to the last verse. The hymns without a synced recording say so in the Hymnal panel, and are driven by hand as before. A church that pointed Lumina at its own folder now uses the recordings that come with it.

Corrections are still yours. Earlier, Later and Starts now adjust a hymn for your room and are remembered for it; Put the timing back returns it to the marks it came with.

Preparing the next hymn no longer muddles the strip. Open the next hymn while this one is being sung and the strip says which hymn is playing and lets you stop it, rather than describing one hymn’s recording against the other’s verses.

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The countdown can look the way your room needs. A countdown to the start of the service over the break screen wants to be big; a sermon timer wants to be small and nearly out of the way. The digits and the name over them now each have their own size, transparency and typeface, and the box behind them can be made see-through or taken away entirely. The Timer panel shows a preview over a sample slide as you set it, and the look is remembered from one Sabbath to the next.

It can ring when it ends. At zero the timer can play a chime, a church bell, beeps or a gong — with the logo, with a blank screen, or on its own. Choosing a sound plays it once, so nobody finds out what it sounds like in front of the congregation, and it comes out of the same speaker as the music bed.

Counting down to a time needs no Start button. The mode is now called Ends at a time: pick when it ends and it is counting straight away. It no longer shows a red 0:00 on the wall before a time has been picked. And a countdown that was changed while it ran — a minute added, a name typed — used to reach its logo or blank screen late; it now arrives exactly at zero.

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The congregation can see when to come in. A church with a pianist watches them lift their hands. A church with a recording watches a title slide, and it looks exactly the same whether the singing starts in half a minute or on the next beat — so the room comes in ragged, or waits, and the first line is lost. A rule now fills under the title as the introduction plays and completes as the singing starts.

The same mark they will follow under the words. It is the rule that paces every sung line, drawn under the title instead, so the introduction teaches the verse and a congregation learns one thing rather than two. It reads from the back of a hall without being read, which is what a number cannot do — and it answers the question for the whole introduction rather than only its last three seconds. A church that would rather be told outright can have the closing seconds counted as well.

Nothing is drawn where the timing is not known, and that is deliberate. A recording nobody has taught puts the first stanza at the top of the file, so a rule filling towards that would empty as the music started and tell the room to sing over the introduction. A congregation told once to sing too early will not trust the mark again, so where there is nothing to say the title slide is exactly the title slide.

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The words follow the music, all the way through. Point Lumina at a folder of recordings and 610 hymns now arrive knowing where every stanza begins — 2,564 moments in all, not one mark each. The introduction plays under the title slide, the first line appears exactly as the singing starts, and each verse follows on its own beat rather than being spread evenly from the top. Nothing needs teaching, and nothing needs a stopwatch.

Read off the videos, not guessed from the sound. Where a stanza begins is a fact about a recording, and the publishers of these sets put it on screen: the moment the words change is the moment that stanza starts. Working it out from the audio instead had been wrong by 21 seconds in the middle of the range and by two minutes at the edge of it, so every one of those numbers has been thrown away. Where the picture could not answer plainly — a video that puts a verse and its refrain on one slide, most often — nothing is claimed at all, and the hymn waits for one press as before.

An introduction is the verse and its refrain. Telling Lumina in one press that a recording opens with the tune played through once was working that out as one stanza’s worth of playing. A hymn whose second stanza is its refrain is sung verse-then-refrain, so the tune played once is both — and the answer came back short by the whole refrain, on 188 of the 695 hymns in the book. The same press also measured against the whole file rather than where the music stops, sharing dead air at the end into the introduction.

Still no recordings, and still none can be: the hymn texts are old enough to belong to everybody, but a recorded performance of one is somebody’s work. What ships is 66 KB of numbers describing files Lumina does not include. And a hymn anybody has taught keeps what it was taught — a measurement that arrived in an installer never argues with the person standing in the room.

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The instrumental is off now unless a church asks for it, twice. It shipped in 2.7.0 switched on for everybody, and it should not have. No recordings are included and none can be — the hymn texts are public domain, a recorded performance of one is somebody’s work — so for a church with a pianist it was a strip of controls for files they do not have, sitting above the words every Sabbath. Off, it is not hidden but absent: the Hymnal panel is exactly the panel it was.

Two gates, because they are two different questions. Settings asks whether your church accompanies hymns from recordings, and holds the folder and the levels; it changes about once. The Hymnal panel’s own switch asks whether you are using them today — the pianist is ill, or is back — and it sits on the page the operator is already looking at. Both must be on before a note can play, from the booth or from a phone.

The phone remote stayed frozen when you came back to it. Locked, pocketed or switched away from, the page had its connection cut and never noticed: it sat showing the stanza that was up when you left, which looks exactly like a wall that has not moved. It rebuilds the connection now at every moment it can know it was away — the restore, the unlock, the walk back into wifi — and a watchdog covers the one it cannot, a socket that died quietly under a page that stayed visible. The keep-alive is a named event rather than a comment, because a comment is delivered to no handler: the page could not tell a quiet service from a dead connection.

The remote also gains the hymn’s accompaniment: one switch, on the tray with the film and the music, for the person standing where the singing is.

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A church with no pianist still has to sing. The answer has always been a recording, and the cost has always been the same: somebody in the booth now has an impossible second job — advancing the words in time with a track they cannot see the shape of, from behind the congregation, while the congregation drifts because nothing in front of them says where the line is.

The instrumental is one switch. Point Lumina at a folder of recordings and every hymn gains it. On means the recording drives the screen; off means you do. There is deliberately no play, no pause and no scrub, because each of those is a way for the music and the words to end up out of step — and not being out of step is the whole feature. It is off by default, for every hymn, always.

It learns, once. Nothing can know how long a recording’s introduction is: it is a fact about a file, and no two collections agree. So it is the one thing Lumina refuses to guess. The first time you use a recording it holds the title slide, plays the introduction and waits — press Next verse the moment the singing starts. That single press teaches it, every other stanza follows from it by syllable weight, and it never asks again. Later corrections are remembered too, so a hymn driven by hand once drives itself afterwards.

And it leads the congregation. The line being sung is marked on the screen with a rule underneath that fills as it is sung, and the other lines stand very slightly back. Not a colour change and not a bouncing ball: the words have to stay equally readable while it happens, because a third of the room is reading ahead and a third is behind. The same mark appears on the platform monitor and in the operator’s own stanza sheet.

Moving the words yourself always wins. Skip ahead and the recording stops advancing them until the music catches up — which is exactly right for a recording that plays three verses of a five-verse hymn. Go back, and it hands you the wheel and says so.

No local audio or video could play at all. A registration fault in the protocol that serves local files meant Chromium refused every audio and video file over it, in every format, with nothing logged anywhere — while an image over the same address loaded perfectly, which is why it survived so long. The music bed, the films in the Video panel and motion backgrounds have all been silent since the toolchain upgrade in 1.7.0. All three work again.

Also: Bible abbreviations resolve, so Jas, Ps and II Cor find their books; the platform’s asks are an inbox you can reply to rather than a toast that expired unseen; every PowerPoint preview shows the real slide instead of a black rectangle; and a phone whose code ended is told that, rather than to check its digits.

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A morning of faults found from the operator’s chair, all of them the same shape: a control that looks alive and does nothing.

“Open a deck” on the home screen could not be clicked at all. The tile’s picture is a button that switches off whenever the tile cannot be taken — which is exactly when the tile draws its way out of being empty — and a switched-off button swallows every click inside it. It hovered and highlighted like any other button, which is why it survived every look.

Next and Previous died whenever a panel was holding a different hymn or passage from the one on the wall. Stepping was done by asking that panel, and the panel rightly stays out of the way while it is preparing something else — so nobody answered, and Next did nothing while the wall sat on stanza one of five. A step nobody claims now goes to the same router the phone’s NEXT has always used, which reads the wall rather than any panel.

Opening a deck no longer takes the screen. It used to go to the wall the moment PowerPoint answered, so choosing a deck before a service put it in front of the congregation. Start projection is the button that takes the wall, and now the only one. Editing a deck is also faster: the app was asking PowerPoint fifty questions a second, on the same thread that draws your keystrokes.

The window fits the screen it opens on. It was a fixed size on every machine, which ran under the taskbar on a smaller booth laptop; text size and spacing gained a Fit to screen setting, used by default. The rail’s pictures fold away with a chevron, Up next starts folded, and Prev/Next moved up under the wall they move.

“On air” only ever meant that we were sending. It never asked YouTube, so a broadcast scheduled for a later hour showed every local number as perfect while the channel showed nothing. The rail now says plainly when the two disagree — and ending the broadcast asks first, because there is no undo. Every warning that offers to take you to a setting lands on that setting, rather than the top of the menu.

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Two things were being drawn on top of things they were meant to be behind, and both were the kind of fault that survives a careful look because every measurement of it comes back correct.

On a phone, the strip of tabs along the bottom was painted across the sheets it opens. The tray is deliberately allowed to stop short of the strip, so the next tray is one tap away rather than two — but every other sheet is meant to cover the whole page, and the strip sat over all four of them. The search card lost its last result and the row it was sitting on. It read as two separate bugs: with no keyboard the card looked cut off near the bottom of the glass, and with one open the strip came to rest along the top of the keys, where a sliced card is indistinguishable from a card hidden behind the keyboard.

At the booth, the bar along the bottom of Home — the one that says where the service has got to — had no gap above it. The tile grid scrolls, and its scrolling edge had been pulled four pixels past the top of the bar, so the bottom row was sheared off flush against it. Every number was right; it was wrong only once there were more tiles than fit on the screen, which is every real booth and no screenshot.

The website now has two short films on its front page — the booth and the phones in under two minutes, and a walk through all fourteen panels. Both were recorded off the running application rather than storyboarded, so the phone in the first one is really paired and really moving the wall.

Every release, with its full notes →

The booth could not see the phones anybody was actually holding. A phone that types a code at the door is a session, and the Remotes panel drew its rows from the church’s saved device list — which a session is never in. So the pause, the message and the hang-up that belonged to a connected phone were never drawn, and a message sent from anywhere else was refused in silence and reported as delivered. Messages now reach the phone in somebody’s hand, and the booth is told when one does not.

You can also type the message rather than only picking one. Five presets are right for the moment they were built for — a five-minute warning, one tap, nothing to type — and no use at all to an operator with something specific to say.

A mark drawn on the congregation’s screen from a phone now takes itself off after three seconds. A phone pointing at the wall is a laser pointer, not a whiteboard: the mark belongs to the sentence being said, and before this the only ways one came off were the phone’s own Clear button and the slide changing — so in practice it stayed for the whole hymn. Each mark is timed from when it landed, so pointing at something for ten seconds does not leave the first stroke up for thirteen.

The desk decides all of it. One switch turns drawing off for everybody and takes what is already on the wall with it; the hold is 3, 5 or 10 seconds, or Stay; and there is a button that wipes the screen now, on the drop-down that is already open when somebody notices a scribble they did not put there. Clear overlays takes marks with it too, which it did not before — a panic control that leaves the thing that prompted it on the wall is one an operator stops trusting.

What a phone may do is now a set of switches rather than a role, changeable while somebody is holding it. He may look a verse up but not blank the screen is a decision made at 10:58 by whoever is watching; the answer to it used to be to hang the phone up and hand out the other code. The phone reloads itself so the buttons it shows are always the ones it may press, and nobody types anything again.

Pairing says what it has actually been for a while: one address, two codes, one QR that never changes. The panel was still showing a code and a picture per device — five codes for a church that has two, and five QR images that were all the same image. Print the picture once and leave it by the phones.

On a phone, the search bars sat behind the keyboard, and stayed hidden behind the footer after it closed. Two separate faults: a sheet pinned to a viewport that iOS does not shrink when the keys come up, and a page scrolled by the browser to reveal a field it could not scroll back. Both fixed — the search now sits directly on top of the keyboard.

The booth’s private notes no longer appear on the remote. They were a mirror of the Notes panel, which meant a phone handed to a visiting preacher could carry a page of whatever the operator had typed for themselves.

And the off-screen renderer that draws the wall for a phone now renders at the size it sends rather than at 1920×1080 — two million pixels composited so that half a million could go out, on the machine already running the service.

Every release, with its full notes →

A phone remote could name what was on the screen — hymn 300, verse two — and never show it. The pointing pad was a blank box you aimed at by guessing, and whoever held the phone kept glancing up at the projector to work out where they were. It now carries a picture of the wall: the words in the layout the congregation is reading, and a finger drawn across it lands where the finger expects.

The two remotes are named for who is holding one rather than for how much was taken away from it. A guest remote is for the platform — the person speaking moves their own slides, looks a passage up, and cannot blank the sanctuary from a pocket. An admin remote is the booth away from the desk. Churches that paired a pastor’s phone before this update keep it: the old names are carried over on first run.

Codes can now end with the service, and the app prints a card with the address and a QR to leave where the phones are. A phone arriving with a code that has since expired is told so plainly — being advised to check four digits that are perfectly correct is the one unhelpful thing a door can say.

Who is holding a phone right now is one click from the safety bar: pause a remote, put a message on it, or hang it up. That question gets asked far more often than “set a remote up”, and it was the one that made you open a panel over whatever you were doing.

Two things the booth had been living with. Density and text size now save properly — a machine set to Compact used to come back Comfortable after every restart and stay that way until somebody opened Settings. And a warning now takes you to the control it is about and rings it, rather than opening Settings at whichever of its eight tabs you happened to use last.

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Never mid-service. An update that arrives while you are running a service waits. It installs when you quit the app.

Your work is kept. Services, songs, settings and media choices survive an update. Take a backup from Settings → Maintenance before a major version anyway.

Not on a Friday. If you have the choice, let an update install after a service rather than before one. Nobody wants to meet a new layout at 9:25 on Sabbath morning.