A lot has landed since May 9. Here’s a plain-English rundown of what’s new.

Update inside the app

You can now download and install updates directly from Church Presenter — no need to visit GitHub or the website. When a new version is available you’ll get a prompt, and the update installs itself.

Getting Started wizard

First-time setup now has a guided wizard that walks you through the essentials: VLC installation, display configuration, and anything else the app needs before you’re ready to go live. It only appears if something is missing, so existing setups aren’t affected. You can also find it under the Help menu any time.

Schedule autosave

Schedules are now automatically saved and restored. If the app closes unexpectedly — or you just forget to save — your service order will be right where you left it next time you open up.

Schedule: undo/redo and per-item notes

You can now undo and redo schedule edits, which makes rearranging a service order a lot less stressful. Each item in the schedule also has its own notes field for reminders, instructions, or anything your team needs to know about that item.

Native file dialogs

File pickers on Windows and macOS now use the native OS dialogs — the same ones you’d get in any other application. This means proper keyboard navigation, bookmarks, recent folders, and a familiar look and feel.

Presentation tab: slideshow controls

The Presentations tab now has playback controls directly in the interface, along with a loading spinner so you can see when a large file is being prepared.

Songs

  • A new favorites panel lets you pin frequently used songs for quick access.
  • Columns in the Songs tab are now reorderable — drag them to the order that suits your workflow, or hide the ones you don’t need.
  • Composer and Writer columns were added.
  • You can now delete songs from the right-click menu (with a confirmation dialog).
  • Fixed a bug where all songs in a directory showed the same play count.

Bible

  • Split browse mode lets you navigate through verses in the split panel without pushing anything live. Scroll ahead, find the right verse, then send it when you’re ready.
  • Live output now auto-pauses when you change chapter or book, so navigating doesn’t accidentally push blank or transitional content to the screen.
  • Fixed highlight bugs in split mode, including one specific to Psalms.

Q&A

  • The QR code is now fully customisable — foreground colour, background colour, and label text colour can all be set in the Q&A tab.
  • You can write a custom message into the QR code itself.
  • Pressing Escape no longer clears the Q&A display when it’s locked.
  • Localization strings for Q&A are now complete across all supported languages.

Displays and output

  • Per-screen locking — you can lock any output screen so that new content sent from the operator won’t appear on it until unlocked.
  • Lock to blank — hold a screen on a blank slide and prevent anything from appearing there.
  • Lower thirds now automatically clear from the screen once their exit animation finishes.

Settings

  • Six new themes were added, bringing the total selection up significantly. Themes are now picked via radio buttons in the menu.
  • A launch at login option was added to the System tab — Church Presenter can now start automatically when your computer does.
  • A dedicated VLC setup step walks you through installing VLC if it’s missing.
  • Settings now shows a read-only warning if the app’s data directory isn’t writable.
  • A Backgrounds button was added to the main toolbar that jumps straight to the Backgrounds tab in Settings.

Recents

A Recents row was added to the Pictures, Media, and Presentations tabs so you can jump back to recently used items. Each tab also has a clear button to reset the history.

Media

The media tab now has a stop button — it pauses playback and rewinds to the start, and is only enabled when something is loaded.

Announcements

A Specific Time timer mode was added, letting you count down to a particular clock time rather than a fixed duration.

UI and performance

  • Panels throughout the app — Canvas, Q&A, STT, Lower Thirds, Bible, Songs — now have draggable separators so you can resize them to fit your screen.
  • Panel widths are remembered separately for maximised and windowed states, so resizing the window doesn’t undo your custom layout.
  • Smooth animations were added to various transitions and the live preview indicator.
  • The Windows rendering backend was switched from Direct3D to OpenGL, fixing some visual glitches on certain hardware.
  • A macOS startup crash related to the Metal rendering backend was fixed.

Grab the latest build from the releases page or use the download buttons on the home page.

New to Church Presenter? Read why it’s free and open source, or check out what we’re working on next.