Decisions For Heroes Blog

DUBLIN, IRELAND - Release #364 (8th December 2009) has lots and lots of updates we’ve been working hard away on. If anything doesn’t work on your system, drop a note in the ‘improve it’ section.

New Flash Charts

All the charts on the site are now powered by Open Flash Chart 2. This update allows us to begin to move over to SSL security for your data as we’re generating them on our server - not on Google’s. All charts now have roll-over legends too.

Menu Tidy Up

We’ve begun to consolidate menus into simpler to understand layouts. Part of this was to merge [Comms] in under members as [Messages]. [Analytics] [Maps] is now under [Analytics] [Charts] -> ‘Heatmaps’. [Analytics] [Casualties] is now under [Activities] [Incidents] -> ‘All Casualties’. [Activities] [Agenda] is now under [Activities] [Calendar] -> ‘Agenda’. More menu changes will happen in the near future, it’s part of the plan to make the site more intuative as we add new features. Our mantra is “if you can’t control this site with an iPod dial, we’re too complicated”. We’re trying!

PDF Printing/Exports

We have a swish new printing option that allows you to create PDF reports from your data. This is ultra cool. Print calendars, phone lists (note: you only see the personal details shared with you), pocket mobile number guides, the whiteboard, etc. You can print off individual exercise/incident/event reports too. If you want a custom form replicated for your organisation, email me (robin at bytesurgery dot com).

Team Monthly and Annual Reports

A new menu option in [Analytics] is [Reports]. In here you’ll find the annual and monthly reports we’ve written for your team. We trend all your data to give you a nice report you can print out and hang on your base wall. We’re all about getting your data out of D4H again but with some magic value added.

More Numbers for Admins

Previously, we kept all personal charts ‘relative’. We never told you the exact number of activities someone had been on when comparing them to one another - we felt it might drive too much inter-team competition. Well, we’re sticking with that ethos for ‘Members’ but still giving all the information to ‘Member+’, ‘Editors’, and ‘Owner’ levels. Those guys now see the numbers too - enjoy the data!

Right Click Calendar

Jump into [Activities] [Calendar] and you can now right-click the blank area beneath a day number to quick-add an activity, or off-call period, to that date!

Forward & Back Calendar

Sick of picking dates from drop down fields? So were we! You can now jump forward or back a day, month or year in the calendar views.

Hidden Feature

If all has gone to plan, we’ll announce this killer feature this week. It’s already there - the question is, can you find it!? Hint - you’ll need small fingers.

Others

Whiteboard now has no end time, just a date. It ends at 23:59 in your timezone on the day you choose.

Export sidebars are neater, you should only see the export types you’re permissioned to.

We’ve added an enhancement to the calendar on request of a team. When you select a start date for an activity, the end date will automatically jump to that page of the calendar! We’ve also made it impossible to select a end date ahead of the start date.

-Robin.

Today we deployed calendar pop-up’s site-wide. This is the most requested feature so-far, and makes a huge difference to data input. Just click the calendar button to pop-up a calendar. You can then click the month name to open the navigator, this will allow fast selecting of any month and year.

To make time entry easier, we’ve added an auto-complete clock. Once you start typing, we’ll start trying to guess what time you’re entering. You can then select from the list or keep typing yourself.

There’s no better way to understand a product than use it yourself. The entering of invalid times used to be possible - no longer!

In other news, we hit a good milestone today as we managed to send and receive the first realtime SMS messages from the application to Irish handsets.

-Robin.

(Interested in how? We are using YUI… if you wanted to try it yourself.)