Eventric News

Master Tour build 1486 is available immediately.  This is a required upgrade for syncing.  As always, simply restart Master Tour and you will be prompted to download.  We recommend that all users upgrade at your earliest convenience.

The primary feature of build 1486 is a fix for certain dates past March 14 (US) and March 28 (UK) being off by one hour on the iPhone and iCal feeds due to DST (daylight savings time).

Due to the nature of tours, timezone handing is a critical part of Master Tour.  The typical tour is moving across timezones every day.  The crew consists of people traveling with the tour as well as staff at the home office in locations across the globe.  We have gone to extensive efforts to ensure that syncing “just works” across timezones.  DST awareness is another part of the magic that has to happen under the hood.  Dealing with dates is surprisingly complicated but our goal is to make sure you never even notice it.

We’d like to give a shout-out to Dave (w/ Hedley) and Dale (w/ Norah Jones) for helping us to nail down this DST issue.  Thanks again for the feedback, please keep it coming!

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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.

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Despite stuffing ourselves over Thanksgiving holiday the dev team still managed to get our weekly Tuesday build out the door. Build 1420 is available now. As always just restart Master Tour and you’ll be prompted to upgrade.

Venue Data Updates

One major update this week is not specifically part of the app, but rather the venue data. The next time you sync after December 2 you’ll receive a ton of fantastic venue database updates. Master Tour now includes nearly 6,000 venue records from around the world. Some of the top professionals in the industry have contributed extremely detailed venue data including facility, production and logistics information. This is also our first chance to show off Master Tour’s automatic data updating process. The new stock venue data will come through the next time you sync. In the future we’ll be updating venue, hotel and promoter data in small batches so you probably won’t even notice – you’ll just be getting a constant stream of great new data.

Speed Up Master Tour

After you sync and get the venue updates, you’ll have the perfect opportunity to try another new feature. Under the Navigate menu is a new option to “Compact Database.” You don’t need to use it that often, but after a lot of data editing it can speed up Master Tour. Without getting too technical this feature basically de-fragments your database so that your hard drive doesn’t have to work so hard. Master Tour automatically compacts your database after major updates but now you can do it manually.

And More…

Build 1420 also fixes a few stability issues that popped up last week and happen in fairly rare situations. If you’ve gotten the dreaded pinwheel lately, the latest build should take care of that.

There’s even a few secret new features in the application if you look hard enough! We’re not telling quite yet, but if you really want to know, feel free to give us a call. We’re also getting ready to tackle three major components of the software that we know you will be excited about. Stay tuned!

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We’re releasing a massive update to our Master Tour venue database in a few days and while its impressive in its breadth and depth (which I’ll discuss below), the more revealing concept is our unique process for creating and developing this data set consisting of over 6,000 venues. We have venues from over 20 countries of every type and size – sheds, arenas, clubs, theaters, and stadiums. How is it possible for us to manage this amount of information?

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Don’t forget, Master Tour has plenty of great keyboard shortcuts to use. Windows and Mac users can enjoy equally:

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