Sorry about the slow update, but both Darrell and I have been more than a little busy this week. But bear with me, we did get a good bit accomplished this past weekend.
Darrell hunted down and researched free templates for Open Office. He was able to gather templates for everything from label printing to business cards and presentation templates.
I went ahead and created a download page for the first version of our CD. So now you can easily download it by going to our download page and following the instructions. The first version only contains the software we are distributing. The next version should also contain documentation and tutorials.

Both of us in starting to write documentation have realized that we are nowhere near as familiar with Open Office as we should be. So Darrell and I are attempting to learn the ins and outs of Open Office a little better before we start writing tutorials and help documents.

This weekend was a good weekend for the project.

Darrell and I sat down for about two hours on Friday and hammered out the documentation needs and requirements. Now that the documentation is a little more defined, progress on writing it should go a lot faster. We also went through the software on the cd and weeded out some of the more unnecessary programs to make more room. Current size of the cd is running about 250mb. So there is plenty of room for documentation and templates.

I want to say thanks to Rachel Ochs. She sent me a whole bundle of prayer letters and missionary updates. Using those, I was able to start on a do’s and dont’s document and the first of what will be many prayer letter templates. Hopefully having a variety of simple and elegantly designed templates will make it easy for missionaries to write prayer letters. That way missionaries can concentrate on their main goals.

As for website stuff, Darrell started organizing our links page. He posted a partial list of online resources and links that should be useful to missionaries and pastors alike. The list is not at all complete, but it should grow as we both get more time to post to it. We also got a forum set up for discussions and to help out with the organization and administration of the project.

So all in all, this has been a productive weekend. A lot of good progress and a lot of work done.

Well, this weekend was a bit busy for me. So I didn’t really accomplish much on the project. But I wanted to post an update introducing the new members of the project. Andrew Flanagan and Darrell Dow have both agreed to join the project and help out with the CD.

Andrew has agreed to begin work on creating an installer for OSX. Since I’m not really a Macintosh guy, and have no real access to the hardware, I was largely ignoring mac users in this project. Andrew, seeing the need volunteered to help take up some of the slack on that front.

I work with Darrell, and we often take lunch together. Over lunch last week, I was describing the project to him, and we started brainstorming the documentation needs while we ate. So after lunch, Darrell graciously agreed to help out in the writing and design of the documentation. Darrell grew up on the mission field. So he has a lot of experience with missions and the computing needs of missionaries. So I expect his input into this project will be invaluable.

Well, I created a set of screen shots of the new installer on a screen shot page. I also spent a good bit of time figuring out how to get SVN working on my web host.

It’s all working now, and by the time I finish writing this post the current code base should be checked in. If you want to, you can check it out at: http://svn.missiondisk.com

And if you have just found this site and are wondering what the project is about, check out the about page.