Light Blue 8.2

We’ve just released Light Blue 8.2, which builds on the success of Light Blue 8 by adding new features, improving existing features, and squashing bugs.

Light Blue 8.2 is a free update for all of our subscribers. You can install the update by using the “Check For Updates” command in Light Blue (which is in the Light Blue menu on macOS, or in the Help menu on Windows) or by downloading the installer from your Light Blue account.

macOS Catalina compatibility

This update adds compatibility with macOS Catalina, which is expected to be released in October 2019. Please make sure that you install this update if you’re going to upgrade your Mac to macOS Catalina.

Online contract, forms, and online invoice translations

All of the text in our online contracts, forms, and online invoices can now be translated so that they can be presented in any language! We’ve provided French and German translations as part of Light Blue 8.2, but please get in touch if you’d like to find out more about adding other languages.

Home screen and activity improvements

• Shoots displayed on the Home screen now include their location summary, so you can see where you’re going at a glance.
• The task manager now includes totals next to its group headings.
• The quick query totals for each of Light Blue’s main sections are displayed more quickly when you have large quantities of data.
• Added a preference for displaying the time and date of all items in the Activity panel instead of just the date.

Email and text message improvements

• We’ve made it much simpler to include images in your emails and email templates. When you’re adding an image to an email, we can now host that image for you to save you from needing to host the image yourself.
• Improved the performance of our HTML editor when working with large quantities of text.
• The “Insert Link” button in our HTML editor now allows you to add links to images as well as text.
• Removed the ability to add multiple levels of indentation to ordered and unordered lists in emails, because they’re not a standard HTML feature and some email clients (especially Gmail) don’t display them properly.
• When you’re replying to emails where the email address is of the form “Someone’s name <someone@example.com>”, we now strip the name part out automatically. We can also handle email addresses of the form “Someone’s name [mailto:someone@example.com]”
• Added support for GroupHead: prefixes for contact mail-merge tags in workflow emails and text messages.
• Fixed a problem where a manually created text message could be displayed with the wrong time until it’s sent.
• Fixed a bug where the “Insert Link” button in our HTML editor could remove the first letter of the text you’re adding a link to.

Other client portal improvements

• We’ve changed all references to “public forms” to “contact forms” because that’s what most photographers use them for!
• When you receive a new lead from a contact form, we include the name of the lead in the subject line if you have a “main contact” control in your form.
• The receipt email for online invoices now has more sensible headings when the invoice had previously been partially paid.
• Worked around a problem where Gmail could fail to display the button text in our client portal emails in the correct colour.

Other improvements and bug fixes

• When importing a price list from a CSV file, we now automatically handle currency symbols and preserve the order of the items in your price list.
• You can now save and reload import orders when doing a “shoots and contacts” data import.
• When you use the “Mark Founds Shoots As Completed” housekeeping command, you now have an option to change the status of enquiries as well as confirmed shoots.
• The “Add contact” dialog now allows you to set the label for any new addresses that you’re adding.
• The “Save New Product” button in the sale item editing dialog now allows you to save items with a negative or zero price, as well as items with a positive price.
• Our Australian English localisation now refers to “State” instead of “County”.
• The “Update Linked Contact’s Address” command now explains why you can’t update the linked contact’s address when there are no changes to save.
• Fixed a crash that could occur on macOS when creating a reply to an email containing emoji.
• Fixed a bug that could prevent the Contacts, Calendars, or Reminders permission dialogs from being displayed on macOS Mojave or newer.
• Fixed a problem where the records list contextual menu in the Preferences window would never enable any of its items and the “Move Record to Trash” menu item was also disabled.
• Fixed the title of the calendar note dialog on Windows.
• Fixed a bug where background threads the load the contents of the Inbox and Outbox could persist after they’ve finished their job.
• Fixed a problem where the “Skip This Version” button in the Windows version of our autoupdater wouldn’t remember that you’ve skipped that version when you quit and relaunch Light Blue.
• In the background activity window, if you’re doing a large sync and a temporary error turns the sync status text red, it’s now changed back to black as soon as the error is cleared.