Development Blog: April 2006

Read the thoughts and ideas of the developers and contibuters to Arctic Reservations, an online reservation management tool.

 
by Nathan Perkins

Upgrades

This weekend brought many new updates that have been in the works for the last couple weeks.

Reports are now managed according to trip river. When you create a new trip, select which river it is from our listing. When you select the river, reports associated with that specific river (ie, BLM permits or boater registration forms) will instantly be available to you. Since this is a new feature, there are only a handful of rivers, but with continued feedback from our customers this will grow as more rivers and more reports are added and maintained.

The Overview report has been upgraded to include financial information, regarding how much has been billed, payments that have been collected and other helpful tidbits. And with this new information comes a much nicer visual layout. In addition, information from the overview report now appears on individual launch detail pages. Now you can see the user days or financial information for a specific launch easily.

Labels: features

April 25, 2006 8:59AM • permalink • 0 comments

 
by Nathan Perkins

WebFest: First Place

The Arctic Reservations Software has won first place in the commercial category for this year's WebFest Competition. WebFest is a USC sponsored program that gives awards to the best projects in four different categories. This year marked the most submissions yet, so the announcement of first place comes as quite an honor. Thanks to all our great customers for your excellent feedback and suggestions!

This was back in March... I was waiting in hopes that they would update their website to show the winners for the different categories, but it does not seem like its going to happen for a while.

April 18, 2006 9:23PM • permalink • 1 comment

 
by Nathan Perkins

New Menus

The Arctic Reservations design has been upgraded with a new menu system, making navigation from tool to tool even easier (*gasp*). Now, menus use popup functionality to eliminate the need to scroll up or down in order to see the whole menu. I know that in some cases, popup menus can be a pain, but for compact navigation and for easy access to specific tasks, they seemed like the most appropriate choice. In addition, the menu floats in the left bar, so even if you scroll down, it will be in the exact sample place. This saves you the trouble of scrolling all the way back to the top of the page in order to use the menu.

This new feature has been tested in the following browsers: Internet Explorer 7, Firefox and Safari. If it worked in those three, it should work in any other browser that supports Arctic Reservations. If you run into problems or have feed back, just use the contact support link or e-mail support now.

Labels: features

April 5, 2006 7:03PM • permalink • 0 comments

 
by Zachary Collier

Some Payment Plan Fixes

Everything is coming along very well. We just ran our first trip running the reservation system and everything went fine.

We are noticing some small issues with payment plans. If a payment plan makes the final payment due within 30 days, and we are within 30 days, the system should say that full payment is due within 10 days (the amount of time for deposits). Right now if someone books a trip within 30 days, the invoice shows that the deposit is due in 10 days and the final payment is due on a day that has already past.

We'd also like to be able to modify the due date on occasion. Could we have a "custom" payment plan where we can modify the numbers on that specific invoice? Sometimes we give people special plans if they are old clients. It would be nice if these dates could be put on the invoice. This feature would be nice, but isn't necessary.

April 4, 2006 4:20PM • permalink • 1 comment