October 2016
We’ve made a lot of big changes to the platform over the last few months. We’ve introduced a number of new features (thanks for all your feedback and suggestions), we’ve done a lot of work streamlining performance and improving reliability and have put a lot of effort into building the platform to allow for future developments.
Our aim, as always, is to make your lives easier, provide freedom from paperwork and ensure you have control over your business in real-time. In order to do this, we need to continue to ensure our system is simple to use, responsive and reliable.
Below are some of the changes we have made. Some we hope you will have noticed, others you may not have.
Web app changes
- Job sheets have a new and improved layout.
Although our aim is to eradicate paper job sheets and emails, sometimes our users are still required to send job sheets to some of their customers by email. We have recently updated the layout of the job sheets to make them easier to print. The new job sheets now “look more professional” said Phil at RPS. Hopefully no more “The sheets are sh*!” as advised by one of our other customers’ connections.
- Auto-generation of dummy email.
Emails are unique and easy to remember. Okappy uses them to identify employees, customers & subcontractors and as a simple way to ensure system integrity. However, what if one of your customers doesn’t have an email? Now the system can generate a dummy email for you so you won’t have to worry about that anymore. Win.
- Adding jobs is now faster.
When you submit a new job, you don’t need to wait for the page to reload. Now it all happens in the background.
iPhone and iPad changes
- You can now change the order of your jobs from within the app. You can view jobs by the order they were added or by their date order. Simply go to settings by clicking on the Okappy icon or force touching the jobs option in the tab bar. Then click more and then job settings.
- We’ve radically changed the structure of the data sent to the devices. This provides a number of benefits in terms of performance and reliability. Now we can also have dynamic labels within the app that allow for a clearer understanding of each job detail.
- Better photo processing.
Previously, we tried to upload photos in the background. This caused a number of issues, especially if the app was closed before the photo had finished uploading. We now show the progress of the upload and keep within the page until the photo upload has completed. If you don’t have a mobile signal, the app will save the photo and signature and send again once a new connection has been established.
Android app
- Improved look and feel of the app’s interface
- Better handling of special characters
- Added extra fioelds tothe main job screen including job description, status and customer name
General changes
We’ve been doing a lot of work on how special characters are processed. These include & $ £ as well as sequences of characters such as %80. These cause issues as they get converted by the operating system and can create problems when uploading job sheets. Unfortunately, they are often difficult to track down, with errors typically occurring only once every 1000 jobs. (Although it could feel more if the same data was entered on multiple jobs at similar times). Capturing, managing and killing bugs has also been automated and improved.
One more thing…
Our premium customers now have the option to have enhanced company profiles. This is an ideal way to promote your business and improve the SEO ranking for your own websites. You can now add contact details, an About us section, customer testimonials, social network links and product gallery. Contact us if you would like to add more details to your company profile page – available by searching from www.okappy.com/co or by clicking on your profile when logged in.
