Light Blue 2021.2 release notes

Welcome to your new Home screen

Light Blue’s new Home screen lets you see your business in a completely new way. You can now customise the Home screen by choosing a selection of widgets that give you unique and powerful ways of looking at your business as well as customising the look of Light Blue.

Widgets include the classic “Current Events”, “Enquiries”, and “Task Manager” widgets from previous versions of Light Blue, plus exciting new options including customisable charts, inbox, lists, stats, or embedded web pages.

Sets of widgets are grouped together as Home screen layouts and you can customise their appearance with colour themes. We’ve provided a set of example layouts and colour themes that you can choose from by clicking the options button in the top right corner of the Home screen, and you can use any of these samples as a starting point to create your own!

Other changes

• We’ve optimised the speed of lots of everyday tasks in Light Blue, especially for customers with large databases that contain hundreds of thousands of records.
• Added a way of sending Sale data to the Light Blue API.
• Added a “Pronouns” field to the Contacts section, and for staff in the Resources section of the Preferences window. As with all of Light Blue’s fields that are shown as a combobox, you can pick from the supplied list of pronouns or type new sets of pronouns if you want to add to the list.
• Added a block list for contact forms and the Light Blue API that allows you to block submissions from a list of email addresses. Please contact us if you receive messages from any email addresses that you want to block.
• Replaced all of the “Import X Template” menu commands with a single “Import Light Blue Template(s)” command, which simplifies the import menu and also makes it possible to select several Light Blue template files to import at once.
• The quick search feature now includes shoot custom fields.
• Added financial year options to our charts.
• Added “Bookings (by enquiry date)” and “Enquiries & Bookings (by enquiry date)” options to our charts.
• Added a “Bookings (by confirmed date)” option to our charts.
• The logged in user is now recorded when a record is moved to the trash, allowing businesses with multiple staff to see who trashed a particular record.
• Added an option to include a list on printed invoices of all of the resources linked to the sale’s linked shoot.
• Added an option to include the sale’s linked photographer on printed invoices.
• Added an option to turn off the “invoice date is before today” warning.
• Light Blue no longer offers to remove the online version of an invoice when you create a credit note, to allow your client to see that it’s been credited.
• Importing orders from ProSelect or Fundy now uses a separate “last used folder” preference to importing other types of data.
• Added “Go To Appointment” and “Go To Linked Records” commands to appointments’ contextual menu in our built-in calendar.
• Added a “Print” command to the Inbox and Outbox contextual menu, for use on email or incoming data items.
• Added %ShootStart%, %ShootNextAppointmentStart%, %ShootNextConfirmedAppointmentStart%, %ContactNextAppointmentStart%, %ContactNextConfirmedAppointmentStart%, %SaleNextAppointmentStart%, and %SaleNextConfirmedAppointmentStart% mail-merge tags. These tags combine the start time and date of the event, e.g. “09:00, 25/12/2021”
• Added the %ShootSchedule% and %ShootRequests% tags to the “Insert Mail-Merge Tag/Value” dialog.
• The appointment URL field is now included when publishing appointments as part of a calendar feed, or when publishing to the macOS calendar store or Google Calendar.
• Reinstated OS standard contextual menus for paragraph text fields, so you now have access to standard OS spellchecking and other features.
• In the terms & conditions that appear on our online contract signing service, we’ve changed the term “photographer” to “service provider” because our online contracts are sometimes used to agree services other than photography.
• Fixed a problem on Windows where creating an email from a template that uses mail-merge tags that can include multiple paragraphs (e.g. the %ShootSchedule% or %ShootRequests% tags) would use a double line break instead of a single line break between each line.
• Fixed a problem where using the “Insert Mail-Merge Tag/Value” or “Insert Template” buttons on an email could fail to place the insertion point immediately after the inserted HTML.
• Fixed an error that could occur when querying for contacts with linked contacts.
• Fixed a bug that could cause form contact fields to set the name field as required when you didn’t intend to.
• Fixed a bug where using the “go to linked record” command from an unsaved email didn’t automatically set the status of the email to “Draft”.
• Fixed a bug where the “go to linked records” command for an email in the Inbox could show a contact twice.
• Fixed a bug where using the “preview mail-merge tags” checkbox on a workflow email could discard unsaved changes made to the email body.