We didn’t have a February release due to vacations and other commitments, but our March release is a banger. Let’s dive right in.
Performance
Back in April of last year, we made a significant Ready Room release which, while not obvious, had performance improvements at its core. Even then, the plan was to follow up that release with additional backend changes focused on resource utilization.
Today’s release takes advantage of improvements in our underlying technology stack to dramatically decrease Ready Room’s memory usage. In addition, Ready Room engineers implemented several optimizations to limit how much information is retrieved from the database and, consequently, how much data is transferred to the client. Altogether, these changes should vastly improve Ready Room’s performance and stability, although you may not notice because Ready Room was already stupid fast.
Versioning
We’re not aware of this actually happening, but it’s not hard to imagine a user accidentally erasing a day’s worth of scribe notes or a month’s worth of storyboard development. It’s so easy to imagine, in fact, that we made the effort to guard against it.
The most recent release of Ready Room introduces versioning for scribe notes and storyboards. Now we take periodic snapshots of these documents as they change. Should a scribe fat-finger some text out of existence or simply want to return to a prior state, they can click the new “History” button, scroll through the last ten versions, and restore the one they like.
Note, snapshots are taken approximately every five minutes after a user starts (and continues) typing. For existing scribe notes and storyboards, you won’t see a second version until you make at least two changes five minutes apart.
Scribe on the Run
A customer reminded us that not all inspectors are happy to sit around conference rooms all day. Some may get up to give themselves a tour of the facilities—regardless of how difficult this makes life for the scribe.
Rather than have the scribe try and type while carrying a laptop or tablet around, the current release enables the full management of scribe notes from Ready Room’s mobile UI. Scribes can now create, edit, view, and delete scribe notes from their phones. They can take over as scribe, restore deleted notes, and even use the new versioning feature described above. It’s the scribe’s responsibility to not walk into walls, however.
Inspection Configuration
Recent changes to Ready Room enable administrators to customize columns, create and edit roles, and otherwise configure an inspection. But if they wanted to use the same settings in a new inspection, they were forced to duplicate everything manually. Not any more.
Now, when creating a new inspection, administrators can simply select an existing inspection to use as a starting point. All of that inspection’s settings will be used to initialize the new inspection; roles, columns, and settings (but not requests, of course). We’ve also taken this opportunity to relax which fields are mandatory when creating an inspection, now you need only give an inspection a name.
Bugs
We fix bugs as we encounter them and push those fixes to production as soon as possible. While there are no bug fixes in this release, there have been several since our last release in January. You can find them listed on our public changelog.
