Posted on Thursday 30 July 2009
You asked, we listened, we worked our socks off. Version 1.5, our biggest update yet, has been released.
If you've already registered a copy of Light Blue, you can upgrade for free and import your data; if it's new to you, download the full version for a 30-day trial. If you like what you see, you can buy it for just £325, including VAT.
We've recorded 22 brand new bite-size video tutorials to Light Blue, all updated for version 1.5. Even if you've watched a few before, it's worth having a look again to find out more about some of the great new features.
Below is the full list of new features and bug fixes; do let us know what you think of version 1.5.
You can now publish shoot information to Google Calendar, so you can share it with other people, or sync it to a mobile device (like a BlackBerry) or even other calendars (like Outlook).
There is a new 'Purchases' section. Here you can enter information about expenditure on jobs.
Light Blue 1.5 keeps track of your inventory; this is particularly useful for insurance purposes.
A new 'Quick Reports' sub-menu has been added to the 'Selection' menu, reporting on finances and the inventory.
There is a new Calendar view to enable you to see your shoot schedule at a glance (in week- or month-to-view formats).
You can now send HTML or text-only emails, either singly or as a batch, from within Light Blue. Email templates help you store frequently used formats; mail-merge tags can be used.
You can now import orders from ProSelect.
We've removed the 'Delete found records' command from the Records menu, as it can cause unnecessary pain and suffering if you fail to read two warning messages in a row (you know who you are!).
A 'Show all to-dos' button has been added to the Summary screen.
A 'Cost' field has been added to price lists. This pulls through to quotes, which allows you to calculate your profit margin on a quote. NB The 'Cost' field is only used on quotes do show your profit margin, and is not used on the 'Purchases' screen.
Product description lines have been added to quotes.
An 'Invoice heading' field has been added to the 'Localisation' tab on the 'Settings' screen (e.g. Australia requires invoices to have 'Tax invoice' as their heading, rather than just 'Invoice').
The 'Quick Queries' menu has been split up so that similar queries are grouped together. New queries for invoices with overdue payments and the new Purchases section have been added.
The 'Import Contacts...' command has been moved to the 'Records' menu.
List views have been added for the 'Price lists' and 'Workflow' tabs of the 'Settings' section.
The daily backup routine now includes more informative warnings if a backup failed to run.
Some of our users weren't aware of the PDF User Guide that we provide, so we've added a link to it in the Help menu.
The Quickfind box has been improved to make queries faster.
There is no longer a 'Pictures' section button at the top of the screen; you can only view pictures from the shoot they have been imported into.
The 'Import pictures/Sync pictures' scripts have been made more robust.
New fields have been added to allow the default payment method for orders and purchases to be set.
New tests have been added to the installation routine to aid error trapping when installing on a Mac.
Times without a . or : character (eg '1400' rather than '14:00') are automatically converted to the correct format.
Shoot requests and schedule items were truncated if they were longer than one line.
Shoot schedule items without minutes in their times did not format properly when printing.
The Contact and Payment section list views now display the 'Company name' field if the contact doesn't have a name.
If text was entered in the '1st invoice #' field, spurious results could be produced.
Shoots which end at the same time as another starts (eg 10:00 - 11:00 and 11:00 - 12:00) no longer show as clashing.
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