Bible and worship presentation for macOS.
Native SwiftUI. No Electron, no subscription, no cloud account.
Put scripture, lyrics, images, video and PDF slides on a projector, and control how all of it looks from one place.
- Read and project any Bible. 70 translations available as a free download, in 17 languages — or bring your own from OSIS, Zefania, MySword, USFM and Unbound.
- Sing from a real song library. Multiple versions per song, inline chords, live transpose, bilingual lines, and imports from OpenSong, OpenLyrics, ChordPro, plain text and PowerPoint.
- Design the look once. A theme covers every presenter at once — Bible, Songs, Slides, Media — and travels between machines as a single file.
- Nothing freezes. Importing seventy Bibles or deleting them runs in the background with a progress bar you can cancel, while you keep working.
Download the latest .dmg from Releases, drag it to Applications, and open it. The app updates itself from then on.
Then get the content:
| Bible Library | 70 translations, 17 languages, 1.7M verses |
| Themes | 21 themes — photo, motion and plain-colour backgrounds |
Unzip, then Import → choose the folder. Subfolders are scanned, and nothing is added until you confirm.
Every box on screen is yours to place, style and stack. Boxes are fixed — text flows inside them, so a long verse never shoves your reference off the slide.
What you can put in a box, and how it can look
Sources — a box can show the live lyric or verse, the title, the reference, the translation name, the section label, a slide counter (2 / 7), a clock, a date, or static text you type once (church name, CCLI number, "Amin.").
Styling — font, size up to 200pt, weight, colour, alignment, vertical alignment, opacity, line spacing, letter spacing, UPPERCASE/lowercase, padding, shadow colour and radius, and auto-fit. Set it globally, or override it per box.
Scope — show a box on every slide, only the first, or only the last. Songs add chorus and verses as scopes, so a song title on slide one and "Amin." on the last is two clicks.
Media boxes — images, animated GIFs or looping video as overlays, with opacity, corner radius, edge feather and fit/fill.
Chords — a song-only box that renders chords above the lyrics, each aligned over its syllable, with typography independent of the lyric text. Transpose and capo are live and display-only: your saved chords are never touched.
Transitions — three phases (in, between slides, out), 14 effects, per-phase durations, per-box overrides with stagger.
Undo and redo cover every layout change, grouped per gesture.
Per-presenter profiles
Bible, Songs, Custom Slides and Media each keep their own boxes, styles, backgrounds and transitions. The output always renders the profile belonging to whatever is live, so switching from a verse to a song restyles the screen without you touching anything.
Copy a layout from one presenter to another with one click when you want them to match.
One screen for everything. Drop a file, a folder, a folder of folders, or a mix of types — it tells you what it found before it imports anything, and lists what it skipped with the reason.
Every format it reads
| Formats | |
|---|---|
| Bible | TopPresenter Bible (.tpbible) · OSIS XML · Zefania XML · MySword SQLite · USFM (file or folder) · Unbound Bible |
| Songs | TopPresenter Song (.tpsong, .tpsongcollection) · OpenSong XML · OpenLyrics XML · ChordPro (.cho, .crd, .chordpro) · Plain text · PowerPoint (.pptx, .ppt) |
| Media | Images (jpg, png, gif, heic, tiff, bmp, webp, svg) · Audio (mp3, wav, aac, m4a, flac, ogg, aiff) · Video (mp4, mov, mkv, webm, m4v) · PDF |
| Documents | Themes (.tptheme) · Sessions (.tpschedule) · Slides (.tpslides) |
Everything TopPresenter writes, it can read back without losing a field — including the parts most formats drop: red-letter words of Christ, section headings, footnotes, cross-references, Strong's numbers, poetry indentation, song versions, chord positions and bilingual lines.
Duplicates, and what happens on a second import
Importing the same file twice is a no-op. Every kind of content is matched on identity and on a fingerprint of its contents, because "you already have this exact file" and "you have something else with the same name" deserve different answers.
- Identical → skipped silently, and counted in the summary.
- Same name, different content → it asks, and tells you how they differ ("same abbreviation, 31,102 vs 31,086 verses").
- Bibles can be merged, which fills in only the chapters you are missing.
- Songs can be added as a new version of the song you already have.
- Duplicates inside one drop are caught too: two copies of the same file under different names, and only the first is ticked.
Why it no longer freezes
Importing and deleting run on a background actor with their own database context, and report into a strip at the bottom of the window with elapsed time, an estimate, and a Stop button. You can close the import sheet and keep working; the job carries on.
Bulk deletes run as SQL rather than by loading every row into memory first — measured on a real Bible, that is 7.97s → 0.17s per module.
The output window is transparent and borderless, opens on whichever screen you choose, and shows nothing at all when idle — no logo, no placeholder, no chrome.
Controls and shortcuts
| Key | |
|---|---|
Return |
Show / hide |
← → |
Previous / next verse or slide |
Escape |
Clear the output |
⌘B |
Black screen |
⌘F |
Freeze |
⌘⎋ |
Panic — drop the output off the screen immediately |
⌘K |
Quick search across Bible, songs and slides |
⌘T |
New tab |
⌘1–⌘5 |
Bible · Songs · Media · Schedule · Custom Slides |
⌘Y |
Presentation history |
⌘+click |
Select multiple verses |
| double-click | Present immediately |
Single display? The output hides itself whenever it would cover your own screen, and comes back on Show.
Tabs, history and search
Tabs (⌘T) — each tab holds its own module, Bible translation and selection, and is titled by what it contains (Bible - (RO) EDC100 - Ioan 3:16). One output, driven by whichever tab presses Show.
History (⌘Y) — a record of everything the congregation actually saw: which songs, which passages, how many times, in which service. Verses are only logged after a few seconds on screen, so scrubbing does not pollute it. Kept in its own database, with its own CSV and JSON export.
Quick search (⌘K) — Bible, songs and slides at once. Type John 3:16 or Gen 1:1-3 to jump straight to a passage. Everything is indexed in Spotlight too.
Sections split into slides automatically, and the preview on the right is your actual theme — what you see is what the projector gets.
Versions, chords and the editor
A song is a group of renditions, not a single text. Each version carries its own title, authors, language, key, capo, tempo, copyright, CCLI number, songbook, style, themes and notes — inheriting the original's values until you decide otherwise.
The editor is two panes: section cards you can reorder, duplicate and mark ×N, and a live preview rendered with your actual theme that follows whichever section you click. There is a Verified flag for songs you have checked, a filter for it, and a change log per song.
Slides split at whatever line count you set, with repeat markers (/: :/, ‖: :‖, (×2), bis) drawn the way the theme says.
The browser handles a real library — list or grid, indexed search, sort by title, artist, songbook, language or recency, and filters for collection, language, media and verified-only.
Getting songs in
Point it at a folder of thousands of files and it will work through them with progress and duplicate handling. Four userscripts are included for building a library from the web:
| Script | Site |
|---|---|
eBiblia-Scraper.user.js |
ebiblia.ro — exports whole Bible translations |
melodia-scraper.user.js |
melodia.ro |
cantaricrestine-scraper.user.js |
cantaricrestine.ro |
worshiptogether-scraper.user.js |
worshiptogether.com (EN / ES / PT) |
They run in Tampermonkey or Violentmonkey on Chrome, Firefox and Safari, and export straight into TopPresenter's own formats.
Respect each translation's and each song's copyright — export for personal and congregational use.
Media, PDF, schedules and slides
Media is referenced where it lives, never copied into a library folder, so nothing is duplicated on disk. Grid with thumbnails, type filter, audio player with speed and seek, video looping, and Reveal in Finder.
PDF is presented a page at a time. The arrows beside Present turn pages on the live output instead of skipping to the next file. Export slides from Keynote or PowerPoint as PDF to show them here.
Schedules hold a service running order you can go live from. Custom slides are free text, with tokens that can pull in live or even remote content — a dead network can never fail a presentation, only fall back to the last good value.
Languages, files and updates
Contributions welcome — see below.
1346 translatable strings. Regenerated on every commit — do not edit by hand.
| Language | Progress | Done | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🇬🇧 | English (en) |
████████████████████████ 100% |
✅ |
| 🇷🇴 | Română (ro) |
████████████████████████ 100% |
✅ |
| 🇪🇸 | Español (es) |
████████████████████████ 100% |
✅ |
| 🇫🇷 | Français (fr) |
████████████████████████ 100% |
✅ |
| 🇩🇪 | Deutsch (de) |
████████████████████████ 100% |
✅ |
| 🇷🇺 | Русский (ru) |
████████████████████████ 100% |
✅ |
Six document types are registered with macOS, each with its own Finder icon and openable by double-click: .tpbible .tpsong .tpsongcollection .tpslides .tpschedule .tptheme. They are all JSON underneath, so you can read, diff and edit them with ordinary tools.
The app updates itself, with an opt-in beta channel.
Roadmap
- Stage display — next slide, clock, speaker notes
- Remote control from a phone or tablet
- Interlinear and Strong's in the Bible reader (the data is already stored)
- NDI / Syphon output for video mixers
- Cloud sync for themes and libraries
Building from source
git clone https://github.com/RobyRew/TopPresenter.git
cd TopPresenter
open TopPresenter.xcodeprojSelect the TopPresenter scheme and run (⌘R). Requires macOS 15.7+ and Xcode 16.3+.
xcodebuild -scheme TopPresenter -destination 'platform=macOS' test -only-testing:TopPresenterTestsDesign decisions and the rules that are easy to break live in AGENTS.md.
Translating
Strings live in TopPresenter/Localizable.xcstrings, editable in Xcode's String Catalog editor. English is the base language: a key with no English entry falls through to the raw key text for everyone, so fill that in first.
python3 scripts/i18n_coverage.py # regenerate the coverage table
python3 scripts/i18n_coverage.py --check # fails if the table is staleProject layout
TopPresenter/
├── Core/ PresentationManager (state, profiles, themes, transitions),
│ commands, search, Spotlight, updates
├── Models/ BibleModule, Song, MediaItem, Schedule, LiveContent
├── Services/
│ ├── Import/ the format catalog, scanner, duplicate resolver, coordinator,
│ │ and one importer per format
│ ├── Export/ the native formats and their naming
│ ├── Library/ background delete, export and progress
│ ├── Media/ import, presenting, PDF rendering
│ └── Sessions/ service schedules
├── Views/
│ ├── Main/ window, sidebar, preview panels, tabs, import sheet
│ ├── Presentation/ output window, theme editor, text and media boxes
│ └── … one folder per module
└── scripts/ theme pack builder, background generator, i18n coverage