Despite a raucous holiday break the dev team managed to send out a couple of cool features for this Tuesday’s build of Master Tour. Available immediately is build 1483. This is a required upgrade in order to sync. We try not to do this to you very often, but on occasion we have to make changes to the server infrastructure that require a client upgrade in order to keep everything in sync.
One new feature is that the schedule and printed reports will show more detail for travel items. As an example, connecting flight information will appear for a flight instead of simply the origin and final destination. Not all reports show this level of detail because in many cases there is simply not enough space, however we’ve built the code so that we can show as much information as possible in any given amount of space.
Another simple but useful feature is a field for Country on your Dashboard. This probably seems like a no-brainer, but the fields in the Day have evolved over time based on user feedback.
To give you a little insight into the data organization of Master Tour, all location entities in the database have a country field. The Day is a little different because it’s not really a location – it represents the calendar date and is a container for all of your activities on that date. Initially the Day just had a title that would show up on reports. Location information was stored in the Venues, Hotels, Contacts, etc. However the Day itself sometimes has a general location that doesn’t match with the Venue or Hotel. A good example is a band playing “Tweeter Center” which is technically in Tinley Park, IL. However everybody considers that to be a Chicago gig. So, Chicago is what should show up on the tour books, and Tinley Park only needs to show up for driving directions. For this reason, the Day has a location that is different from the “official” location of the Venue. In a nutshell, the Day record has evolved to hold more location data.
You may not have touched, or even noticed this functionality before because Master Tour intelligently populates the Day location fields for you. Whenever you add a Venue, the Day is automatically populated for you using the Venue’s address. However you can override them by simply clicking on the text in your Dashboard. The Day location is what appears on printed dailys and tour books, and is also used for other purposes as well – for example weather data is pulled using the zip code entered for the day.
We’re gearing up for a major upgrade of the software this spring, so the builds will be mostly bug fixes and minor tweaks for a few months. But don’t take that as a sign that we’re slowing. We’re working harder than ever and cranking out some awesome new features! Please be sure to let us know if you have an idea for Master Tour.
