August updates

We usually send these updates directly to our users via email, but thought blogging about the updates going on over here may be interesting to a wider audience.

This past Friday, when the rest of the coffee world was (hopefully) getting some rest and relaxation, we rolled out about a month’s worth of new work to roastlog.com, in addition to building an updated version of the RoastLogger client application.  I’m happy to say that RoastLogger 0.9.5 is ready for immediate download.  This is an update for existing users with bug fixes and a couple of new features:

Windows installer: http://downloads.roastlog.com/RoastLoggerSetup-0.9.5.exe
Mac OS X dmg: http://downloads.roastlog.com/RoastLogger-0.9.5.dmg

Thanks to Sharky over at De La Paz Coffee for the bug report where RoastLogger was failing to upload roasts with funny characters in the bean name.  You can now use “El Borbólln” as a bean name without fear.

Some brief history: In the land of programming, ó, é or ç are all known as “high-bit” or “non-ascii” characters.  Believe it or not, there was one character set when computers were invented which contained the entire English alphabet, but not much more, let alone all of characters from the world’s different languages.  For U.S. programmers, in our code, it’s still very easy to ignore letters outside this original set called ASCII, so bugs like this happen.  In any case, we should be good to go!

Another requested feature which made its way into RoastLogger is the ability to customize the columns displayed in both the “Past Roasts” list and the “Roast Queue”.  Simply right-click on any header (or ctrl-click if you only have one mouse button…I’m looking at you Mac users) and toggle on/off any column.

Toggling of columns in Previous Roasts

Some other fixes and updates:

• This blog has a style, like it?
• roastlog.com
  • roastlog.com typography/CSS updates
  • “loading” graphic displayed while searching for items in your inbox
  • Confirmation dialog added when deleting items
  • Suggested minimum system requirements added to our FAQ
  • Several fixes for Internet Explorer
• RoastLogger
  • Columns can be toggled on/off
  • Application will start in the same location as when it was closed
  • Non-ASCII characters work
  • Improved validation for “start mass” in the Roast Queue
  • Menu items added in the expected/correct location on OS X
  • Added an “About” menu which displays the current version

In upcoming news, we’re busy working our inventory module….*your* inventory module, really.  The goal of this is to take all, or most, of the headache out of dealing with keeping track of your coffee inventory.  Blends, shrinkage, warehouse….bleh…offload the monotonous work to some software and get back to more fun things.  We’ve heard that most roasters struggle with this, so we’re trying to come up with a solution.

Our multi-channel Data Bridge, which is sure to be a hit, is also in development.  Bean mass, air temp, exhaust temp, maybe one more….we got you covered.  Stay tuned!