Small Improvements

This week’s release of Ready Room smooths down a few rough edges with some new features, enhancements, and fixes.

New Features

Optional File Download for Inspectors.

Here at Ready Room Headquarters, we believe that configuration equals complexity, and so far have resisted the temptation of making every feature configurable. Sometimes, however, a customer request cannot be fulfilled in any other way. Such is the case for making it so that inspectors cannot download documents.

Inspection Configuration

Thus, admins will now find a new “inspection configuration” button in the upper right hand corner. Clicking this will open a window that allows you to control whether inspectors can download and view documents or just view them. Keep in mind, however, that not all file types, e.g. zip archives, are viewable.

Time Zones

We have also added a new time zone setting to every user’s profile—including inspectors. This setting is actually being released in anticipation of an upcoming feature that will require knowing a user’s time zone (that should be fun). For now, it is only used for displaying timestamps in chat and elsewhere. Nonetheless, we do encourage all of our users to set their time zone correctly. The setting can be found in each user’s profile page by clicking on their name in the upper right corner. We have defaulted all users to the “America/New_York” time zone, currently EDT (GMT-04:00). Note, this is the canonical list of time zones, if you don’t see your city, e.g. San Francisco, chose the nearest city that obeys the same time zone and daylight saving rules as you do, e.g., Los Angeles.

Enhancements

Persistent Storyboard Filters

As with inspection requests, any storyboard filters in use before visiting another page, e.g., to edit or view a storyboard, will remain in place when you return to the list screen.

PDF Cover Sheets

Cover sheets were released two weeks ago. Like other documents meant to be printed, Ready Room generated cover sheets in HTML format that could then be saved as PDF. Our customers informed us that this two-step process was inconvenient when releasing cover sheets to inspectors. Therefore, Ready Room now generates PDF cover sheets directly.

Relaxed File Upload Constraints

There have always been limits in place when uploading files. These limits were meant to minimize the chance of a failed upload. Today’s release relaxes or removes these constraints. To wit:

• The maximum size of all files queued for upload at any one time has been changed from 250MB to unlimited
• The maximum individual file size has been raised from 100MB to 250MB
• The number of files Ready Room will upload simultaneously has been changed from 4 to 5

CSV Contents

The CSV file generated for all tasks in an inspection was missing the “hard copy” field. This has been corrected.

Bug Fixes

• There was a significant regression in the performance of filters. In particular, clearing all or part of a filter could result in a multi-second delay where no other activity was possible. This has been addressed.
• An assignee’s name changes to green when they first open a task indicating that the assignee is actively working on the request. The color is changed to black again if the task is moved left by another team member. This release fixes a bug where the assignee’s name changed to black when the task was moved to the right.
• The “Formal Response” field from could not be cleared. This has been fixed.