Posted on Tuesday 8 June 2010
Light Blue 2.2 sounds like it's a minor update from Light Blue 2.1, but we've actually made a huge number of improvements. Here's an exhaustive list, starting off with some of the biggies.
If you use Light Blue to manage your image files, you'll love this one. If you've chosen to manage your image files somehow else, you might change your mind.
As well as the previous options of either leaving your filenames as they were, or applying a simple serial number to them, Light Blue 2.2 includes a new option that we're calling "Continuous processed filenames". What this does is create separate serial number series for the processed and unprocessed files you import into a shoot. All images that have a processed version get one continuous series of filenames without any gapLs, while any unprocessed images that don't have a processed version get another series of filenames. Now there won't be any gaps in the filenames in the galleries you send to your clients that tempt them to ask "can we see the pictures you left out between those two?".
The really clever bit? As with the other file renaming options in Light Blue, the unprocessed versions of your processed files get the same filename as the processed version. So, if you ever need to go back to the RAW version of a processed file, you don't have to laboriously search for it.
We've made a new video tutorial to show how this can be used.
Contact records are now automatically linked to any other contacts with whom they either share an address or shoot. Once you've added the first contact to a shoot, clicking the + button to add another contact will show a list of all of these related contacts instead of a blank search screen. (Of course, from there, you can still search for other contacts within Light Blue, or add a new contact.)
So, for example, you book a portrait session for the Jones family. Each member of the Jones family is linked to this shoot as a separate contact (which lets you do useful things like record their birthdays). They come back for another session, so you create a new shoot record and link the first member of the Jones family to it. To add the others, just hit the + button and they'll be listed.
You can also select multiple contacts from this list when you're linking contacts to a shoot - just click on each contact you want to add and then use the 'Link selected' button to add them all in one go.
A 'Related contacts' tab has been added to the 'Contact - detail' screen so that you can see which contacts are related to each contact.
The 'Company' field on the Contact screen has been moved into the address block. After all, contacts can be linked to more than one company, just as they can be linked to more than one address. Whenever a company name is needed anywhere in Light Blue, it will use the company from the contact's primary address.
When setting up Light Blue for the first time, we've made it easier to customise it for your country by offering defaults for the countries in which we're most popular.
When you've picked "Letter" as your paper size on the 'Localisation' panel of the 'Settings' screen, addresses are formatted to have city, state and zip code all on the same line, which keeps the US Postal Service happy.
The 'Location' field on the shoot screen was never intended to store full addresses - it's there as a summary of where the shoot is taking place (e.g. "King's College, Cambridge") and full addresses are linked to the shoot schedule. We've tried to make this more obvious in v2.2 by relabelling the field and removing the Google Maps search button next to it.
More contact details added to the Payment screen
Instead of simply linking a contact to the Payment screen, you can now type into the payment contact details just as you already could on the Order and Purchase screens.
If you've entered an ad-hoc contact on the Order, Payment or Purchase screens, you can use the new 'Save Contact' button to create a new Contact record using these details.
Hold down the Alt key when you click the button to open a document that you've added to a shoot or contact's history and you'll be presented with a dialog that you can use to edit the date and description used for that document.
Staff initials and the shoot type code are now being shown on events.
If the email is sent to all of the contacts linked to a shoot, it's only linked to the first of these contacts.
"Vendor" has been added to the list of default roles that you can pick from when linking a contact to a shoot.
The outstanding amount owed by a contact or for a shoot is now shown on both the Contact and Shoot screens. If any of this outstanding amount is overdue, the figure is shown in red. We've also added 'jump' buttons so you can quickly see which orders they relate to.
An address can now be linked to meetings created on either the Contact or Shoot screens.
This makes it more obvious which shoots in the 'Current shoots & meetings' list have already happened.
Added new tags for %shootenquirysource% and %shootenquiryreferredby%, as well as a set of tags for the new payment contact details.
The %shootquotebookingfee% tag now uses the value entered on the Shoot screen, rather than the gross amount.
We've added sample HTML email templates for creating quotes, invoices and receipts.
Custom field labels are now a lighter shade of grey if labels for them have not been set up on the 'Custom fields' panel of the 'General' tab of the 'Settings' screen.
A button has been added to automatically set the 'Maiden Name' field on the Contact screen. In order to use this, the contact has to have been linked to a shoot as a bride - Light Blue finds that shoot's groom, changes the bride's surname to his, and copies her original surname into the 'Maiden name' field.
Unit prices are now being included on the built-in invoice layouts.
You can now have different invoice number prefixes (and series!) for each shoot type.
Meetings linked to a contact now include that contact's details when they are published to iCal or Google Calendar.
It's now simpler to use Find Mode to search for confirmed shoots - the "confirmed" option can be used to find "confirmed", "backed up" or "archived" shoots.
These will now work if you've set your date format to mm/dd/yyyy.
Emails created from the Shoot screen now have their subject line set to the title and date of the shoot by default. You can of course edit this subject line.
When creating an email from the Shoot screen, if you've highlighted a contact then that contact's details will be used rather than the primary contact.
An email created in Light Blue that has attachments will have its attachments deleted when you apply a different email template to it.
The drop-down menu attached to the 'Product type' field on the 'Price list' screen now updates itself like the other drop-down menus in Light Blue.
The Google Maps buttons throughout Light Blue now search on the full address, rather than just the postcode or ZIP code.
We've made it more obvious how to switch off sales tax / VAT on the 'Invoicing' panel of the 'Settings' screen once it's switched on.
When you use the 'Extract pictures' button on the Order screen to extract copies of the picture files you've linked to an order, you're offered the choice of selecting a folder to save them into as well as saving them to the default folder on your desktop.
Stats junkies who don't like doing division in their heads will like the averages we've added to these reports.
Treat this button with respect. We make you confirm that you really want to do this twice but it can't be undone if you ignore our warnings.
You no longer get an error message or empty tasks created when you sync with iCal but don't have any tasks set up in Light Blue.
The wedding anniversary queries in the 'Quick Queries' menu now only apply to shoot types called either "Weddings" or "Wedding". No more pre-wedding shoots will turn up when you run this query!
The A5 label and DL envelope layouts now let you print longer lines in your addresses.
Shoot dates would turn orange or red if they clashed with either an unconfirmed or confirmed shoot. Now, they also turn red if they clash with a meeting. Additionally, meetings turn red if they clash with a confirmed shoot, or orange if they clash with an unconfirmed shoot.
Quotes now deduct any negative lines before applying a percentage discount, just like orders already did.
The 'Address type' drop-down menu now updates itself like the other drop-down menus in Light Blue.
Price lists now sort consistently throughout the system.
Some of our Windows-based users were being shown the "you haven't registered Light Blue" screen when they had indeed registered their copy. This won't happen any more.
This makes it a bit easier to read through long to-do lists.
Multi-day bookings with start and end times were having an extra day added to them when they were published to iCal. Fixed.
The 'Year' field on the 'Staff' screen now displays correctly.
Light Blue now defaults to showing either the list view or detail view after you use Find Mode - the detail view is used if your query found just one record, otherwise the list view is used.
In some really odd circumstances, meetings could stay in the 'Current shoots & meetings' list on the 'Summary' screen after the day for which they were scheduled. Fixed.
When you link an address to a contact, meeting or shoot schedule step, a more useful list of existing addresses is automatically shown than in v2.1.
Shoots with a status of "Archived" can now have web galleries created for them.
The 'Type' field and any linked addresses are now included when you duplicate a contact.
Well, we think so, anyway. We've made them a touch darker so you can see them more easily.
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