12 Apr
2011
12 Apr
'11
4:50 a.m.
On Mon, 11 Apr 2011 01:19:21 -0700, Will Kruse wrote:
To those who have explore technological options for
organizing your
dances, what have you come up with? I'm starting to see more
laptops, PDAs, tablets, and smartphones at dances so does anyone
know how that's working? What software are you using?
I've written my own Dance Organiser program, which you can download
from http://www.colinhume.com/download.htm and try before you buy.
(It runs on Windows.) I hadn't planned to use it for calling, but my
eyes have deteriorated over the last couple of years and I can't read
the cards without glasses - and I can't watch the dancers WITH
glasses! So the program will now display the instructions for the
current dance full-screen (you can specify the text size), you can
scroll up and down using [PgUp] and [PgDn] if it's a long dance, and
you can move between dances using the left and right arrow keys.
I used it all last weekend, including a session of "Squares and
Contras without a Walkthrough" where I was jumping from one dance to
another while calling, and it works fine. It tells me how many
minutes before the next session starts, or how many minutes before the
current session finishes, which I find really useful. And it will
play recorded music. Also the lap-top is much lighter than my case of
cards, and if I'm calling abroad I would normally take my lap-top with
me anyway.
Colin Hume