As previously mentioned in this space, the primary improvement planned for the 1.7 update is a marked improvement to Lutheran Service Builder’s loading time. To illustrate what we’ve working on over the past six months or so, I’ve created a small video to showcase the dramatic increase we are seeing in alpha-testing, and we hope to be working with in beta sometime next month.

The video is a split-screen track that follows the progress of Lutheran Service Builder twice on the same machine. On the left is 1.6.7 (the most recent publicly-released update), and on the right is a very alpha version of 1.7. 1.6.7 was installed, run, and captured first. Then, we replaced the program files with the test versions for 1.7 and captured it.

There’s no editing to these clips, other than to match the beginning of Builder’s load sequence.

Note that in the time it takes to load 1.6.7, I have loaded 1.7, planned a service, selected hymns, and exported my Word document. We’re unable to embed the video in this post for technical reasons, but you can click the link below to download a small version of it. A much larger version is linked after the break.

QuickTime reduced-resolution H.264 (643K; QuickTime 7 required)

Additional version available:

QuickTime HD (720p) original H.264 (6.9MB; QuickTime 7 required)

The obvious question that will be asked at this point is “so when can I get this update?” We understand and appreciate that you’ve been dealing with sluggish loading times for a while now. However, the scope of this update is quite large and it will require a thorough testing process. We expect that this process will place the release of 1.7 sometime in the August/September timeframe.

The other question is “OK, so what caused this?”

I won’t get into a technical description of the problem, but it was caused by an incompatibility with Internet Explorer 7, which happened to be released to the public at almost exactly the same time as Lutheran Service Builder. By the time we had discovered the loading time problem, it was too late – and it has never affected all computers equally, so it was also quite difficult to diagnose.

Once we understood the nature of the problem, the fix was easy (but time-consuming) to develop and implement. I’m very happy that we will be able to bring it to you soon.