Announcing Light Blue 3.3

Posted on Monday 7 November 2011

We've released Light Blue v3.3, with a host of new features and bug fixes. Full release notes follow...

iCloud and iCal publishing: Mac OS X 10.7.2 and iCloud split the calendars in iCal into separate events and reminders calendars. If you try to publish both your tasks and your events to the same calendar, you'll find that either the tasks or the events will not be published. We've added a new 'Reminders calendar' field to the 'Calendar' panel of the Settings screen that you can use to specify which calendar you want your tasks to be published to.

We recommend that you create separate calendars in iCal for the tasks and events that are published by Light Blue and, as always, that you dedicate them to Light Blue rather than manually adding any events or tasks in iCal.

Non-discountable quote and order lines: Quote and order lines now have a checkbox that allows them to be excluded from percentage discounts. This is useful if, for example, you want to apply a percentage discount to all of an order except for the postage.

Any quote or order lines for which the checkbox is checked will be charged at full price.

When printing a quote or invoice, any non-discounted order or quote lines will have an asterisk appended to their name and the discount description will explain that this means that they haven't been discounted.

New tax calculations: We've changed the way we calculate tax on orders and quotes; we now don't round the tax at line level. While this may not seem a big deal in many countries where the authorities don't mind which way you calculate the tax, the IRS in the USA demand that tax is calculated on the total of an invoice, not on individual lines. This change to the calculations also fixes situations in which applying a percentage discount to a taxed order line with tax inclusive could cause the gross total to be a penny out from the expected amount.

This means that we've had to remove six mail-merge tags that existed in previous versions of Light Blue 3: %orderLineNet%, %orderLineTax% and %orderLineGross%, %quoteLineNet%, %quoteLineTax% and %quoteLineGross%, as displaying them could show figures which didn't add up to the grand totals.

New mail-merge tags: We've added mail merge tags for the current user's full name, first name and email address. We've also added tags for the billing, shipping and payment contacts' first name, last name and email address.

Jumping from the Task Manager to the linked shoot or contact: Shift-clicking on a task's jump arrow in the Task Manager will take you to the relevant linked contact or shoot.

A new 'Orders for Future Shoots' Quick Query: We've added a new Quick Query, which finds all orders linked to a shoot or enquiry whose start date is after today.

Querying for shoots linked to a particular member of staff: The 'Resources' list on the Shoot detail screen is now accessible in Find mode, so you can query for all of the shoots linked to a particular member of staff.

Calendar publishing keyboard shortcuts: You can now use Ctrl-Shift-G (Cmd-Shift-G on a Mac) to publish to Google Calendar, and Cmd-Shift-I to sync with iCal.

Unconfirmed events in the built-in calendar: Enquiries are now shown in a paler shade in the built-in calendar.

New 'Revenue by Product' Quick Report: The ‘Revenue by product’ report displays products from your orders, grouped by product name, with the sum total of amounts charged for those order lines.

Addresses: Addresses which are no longer required (eg those only linked to a contact being deleted) are removed when their linked item is deleted.

Other changes

'Include Payment Terms on Invoice' can now be set for each shoot type.

Meetings in workflows weren't published to iCal if 'Publish tasks' was off. Fixed.

Contact titles would not appear on built-in quotes even when 'Include title in full names' was set to 'Yes'. Fixed.

The 'Add linked order' button on the iPad interface could show an error message. Fixed.

When performing mass mail merges, the 'Neither' option, which chooses not to open the created documents or copy them to the desktop, would open them anyway. Fixed.

In a very obscure situation, schedule templates could be added to shoots in the wrong order. Fixed.

When creating a mass email from the shoot screen, the Subject field wasn't being populated if the template didn't have a subject. It now defaults to the same as if an email was being generated to a contact linked to the shoot.

The Task Manager date headers weren't respecting the localisation setting for US users. Fixed.

Orders imported from ProSelect weren't having their tax amounts imported correctly. ProSelect’s export only exports the tax amounts for each line, and not the percentage tax rate applied. Light Blue works on tax percentages, therefore when orders are imported from ProSelect, we now apply your default tax rate to each order line. If you have changed any tax rates from your default you should update the order in Light Blue once you’ve imported the order.

Although we don't let you include line breaks when you're typing into a request for a shoot, it was possible to copy'n'paste them into the field and for that list to be truncated when you print it. We now convert any line breaks into commas when you do this.

When you're creating a web gallery, you can no longer include illegal characters in the name of the web gallery folder.

Return to the list of news articles...