We hope you’ve had a wonderful break over the Christmas and New Year period 🙂
Many of our team also disconnected for a well-earned rest, with Appenate returning to full personnel by 15 January.
Over the festive period, our remaining team members used the quiet period to build some new updates that we’re rolling out during January.
It’s exciting to be just 2 days into a new year and already have new features to share!
Tasking Improvements
The Task Calendar has received a number of upgrades including the ability to add new Tasks, as well as drag and resize Tasks right on the Calendar page.
We’ve also added colour coding of Tasks by status and will be adding the ability to colour code by assigned user soon. General usability has been improved, with more details on Task item popups and cleaner navigation to/from Task details back into the calendar.
You may notice that Tasks now also have explicit time zones defined on them, which addresses issues when scheduling Tasks for company users that are spread across multiple locations or countries. The explicit time zone extends to the Calendar and Tasks listing pages, allowing you to view all Tasks displayed in your preferred target location time.
Recurring Tasks have also been heavily reworked, with background processing code improved to better address scenarios we have seen during live customer use. In particular, you can now edit individual Recurring Task occurrences (this used to be locked down), and the system more clearly outlines how changes to a Recurring Task will affect edited occurrences. Several problems with duplication of Recurring Tasks have also been addressed, and our developers are working on a few more minor bug fixes in this area.
Android Is Going Material
All customer Android apps will soon be upgraded to a newer Android compatibility baseline, which includes visual updates to the more recent “Material Design” Android style for some app elements. Date and time pickers, drop downs and dialogs will look a little different, but should still be familiar to users given that these are used across much of Android already.
These upgrades are needed in order to continue to be compliant with Google requirements, as well as to ensure maximum compatibility with major manufacturers and popular device models. This update will also specifically address app issues with the built-in spell checking on several Samsung devices.
Look for this Android app update to roll out in the coming weeks.
We plan to continue these visual updates during 2018, bringing our apps more fully into the Android material design style.
Other Enhancements
We’re also shipping the following general platform enhancements:
- FTP Connectors now support SFTP (SSH over FTP)
To date, the platform only permitted FTP transfers over the FTPS (FTP over SSL) protocol. We now (finally!) support SFTP, which means that pretty much any FTP server should be connectable to Appenate.
- Filters are now “remembered” across the platform backend
A long time request from customers has been the ability of the backend website to remember filter settings on the various listing pages – e.g. the Screens listing.
This has finally been addressed, with most page filters now being stored locally on your browser and recalled when you visit the same page.
Enjoy this small convenience improvement!
- A bunch of small bug fixes
As long as there is software, there will be bugs – and we’ve been stomping on these over the holidays to ensure the platform continues to be as stable and reliable as we can make it.
We hope this small platform update proves useful to you in the months to come.
As you can tell, we have a lot of work and exciting updates planned for this year and we’re hitting the ground running!
For more on what to expect, watch this space for a 2018 roadmap update which we’re aiming to reveal in late January 🙂