Announcing Light Blue 1.5.1

Posted on Thursday 10 September 2009

Light Blue Software and Apple have lots in common - both are run by people who have an overwhelming passion for what they do; both produce great bits of kit, and both have a dedicated following of happy fans. For Light Blue 1.5.1 (made for Mac and PC), we've taken a leaf out of Apple's book and, instead of cramming in loads of new features, have concentrated on making things better behind the scenes, fixing things we've been wanting to attend to for a while, and generally fine-tuning the whole program based on feedback from you, our users. Have a look at the full list of release notes below to see everything that we've done.

Whether you tried out Light Blue back in the early days before we'd added all the great new stuff to it, are in the middle of a trial, or are one of the happy band who are already using Light Blue to help them work quicker, faster and more productively, we're sure that the new version will have something in it for you. Just visit the download page to get started.

Important things

  • Events were being published to Google Calendar in GMT regardless of the timezone specified in the calendar. Events are now published in the timezone of the calendar's settings. If the calendar you are publishing to was created by Light Blue 1.5, please check the timezone from within Google Calendar.
  • Login details were required on the 'Email settings' tab of the 'Summary' screen. It is now possible to use SMTP servers which do not require a login.

Other new features

  • If a linked contact did not have a name specified, the 'Contact' field in the 'Linked contacts' portal would not show any data. The 'Company' field has now been added to the data which shows.
  • You can now reorder requests on the 'Shoot - detail' screen.
  • The addresses on invoices have been repositioned slightly to fit windowed envelopes. If you have chosen a 25mm header on the 'Branding' tab of the 'Settings' screen, the address is positioned to fit into a windowed DL envelope. The large 50mm header size fits a windowed C5 envelope.
  • A 'Recent Shoots' query has been added to the 'Quick Queries' menu. This finds all confirmed shoots that have already taken place, excluding any which have been marked as 'backed up' or 'archived'.
  • The Quote tab of the 'Shoot - detail' screen now includes a Notes field that is included on the printed version of the quote. A mail merge tag, %shootquotenotes%, has been added so that you can include this field in document and email templates.
  • Picture filenames now appear in brackets after the product description on invoices. This allows longer filenames to appear.

Other bug fixes

  • Certain shoots were being incorrectly flagged as updated when publishing to Google Calendar.
  • The 'History' portal was sorting only by date. It now sorts by date and time.
  • The 'Shoot - list' view now sorts by time as well as date.
  • The 'Landline' field was not appearing on the printed version of the 'Contact - list' view.
  • Allocation-related fields have been removed from printed receipts to make them simpler.
  • The user guide has been updated to add shoot end date, start time and end time tags (which were undocumented).
  • Paragraph marks now convert properly when being mail-merged into an HTML email.
  • An odd set of circumstances could produce an order with no prices when the 'Invoice balance' button was clicked on a quote.
  • Duplicating a price list no longer sets the type of all products to 'Print'.
  • Extra checks have been added to reduce plugin registration warnings on slow-loading machines.
  • Clicking on the envelope icon to send an email in Windows Vista could cause the application to crash.
  • Long Order and Quote product lines could be truncated.
  • Lists of email recipients in an email created in Light Blue can now be separated by semicolons as well as commas.
  • Invoices would display the ID given to image files by Light Blue, rather than the image filename.
  • The telephone number fields in the 'Contact - list' and 'Payment - list' views have been made wider to accommodate numbers with spaces.
  • 'Invalid relationship' errors were being thrown when performing a Find on the 'address' or 'landline' fields in the 'Contact - list' or 'Contact - detail' views.
  • Dates were being truncated on the printed version of the shoot schedule.
  • Duplicating a Purchase record no longer duplicates the reference number or payment details.
  • Purchase lines and orders can now be un-linked from their related shoot.
  • Shoot folders can no longer be created if the shoot doesn't have a title.
  • An item is not added to the history if you try to add a missing template to it.
  • Some negative prices were formatted incorrectly.
  • The maximum number of linked contacts that are included on the shoot print out has been increased to 50.
  • The application now remembers the window position when you quit and relaunch it.

Return to the list of news articles...