Carrier Companion News

I put together a small demo of what to expect from the new Carrier Companion client. This just shows the style used for data entry.

Demo of Carrier Companion 3

We are please to announce that we are in development of Carrier Companion 3.  This new edition will be module based. The modules will allow you to customize the look and feel of Carrier Companion.

Modules

For example, some of the home page modules:

• Customer Status Tally
  Includes the tally of customers in the statuses you choose to tally. Default is Active Customers and Vacation Pack (or Hold) Customers.
• Projected weekly income
  The projected income which is the total Route Payment minus (-) Route Charges. The charges will include charged complaints, gas mileage, supplies like bag, etc…
• Latest Complaints
  The last few complaints from customers
• Reminders
  Gives friendly reminders concerning the routes. For example, print a new route guide(s) when you have extreme changes in the route.

And so on. If you have the Standard or Elite versions, you will be able to add or remove modules from a page.

Themes

Also, the new look of Carrier Companion will have themes. These themes will give Carrier Companion a unique look including a backdrop image/video and page icons. The themes can be built using a theme designer (also in the works), and will have all the data needed inside the file. Carrier Companion will include a theme browser to browse themes that user can submit to Carrier Companion.com inside the program.

Server Integrated

We are also working on the Server Edition which Carrier Companion clients can sync to. So, if a company is running the server version, when the client connects, it will download all the updates (through an encrypted gate) needed for the carrier. Some of these updates will include:

• Customer Status updates
• Reminders
  Contract renewals; Complaint Reminders; Announcements
• Notes to the carrier

Also the clients will be able to update the server’s data. For example, if the carrier changes their phone number, the client will upload that info (encrypted of coarse) to the server. The server will then give notes for the company that data was updated.
The server version will also be SQL server 2005/2008 based to provide safe, fast and secure data transfer to it’s clients.

We are happy and excited on this new adventure! This will be the greatest route management program on the face of the earth!

We wanted to ease the pain of multiple entries. So we are adding some Easter eggs to the program (no pun intended).

The above image shows a typical data entry. In the first name text box, we entered the entire name in lower case.

After you tab off the text box, the character casing is corrected. This happens with all text boxes in data entry forms. Also, the zip code, phone number, and social security number fields will auto format. they will place the dashes where they are needed after you tab off the text box. We have dome this so you don’t have to constantly hit the minus/dash(-) key. Just type and go.

Also, we have included the alt key shortcuts. By holding the Alt key, you will see underlined letters in the form:

But hitting the appropriate key, your will set the focus inside the appropriate text box.

For example:
Alt key gives you First Name:
You hit Alt-F.
The First Name Text Box will be selected.

These designs are taking a little while, but will be worth the wait when we have completed them.

Some unbelievable things just happened with Vista. I’ve had a boot sector problem which could be repaired with the Vista DVD. When I inserted the DVD, my reader just sat there, complely stuplified. I wondered what could be wrong with it. So I tried another DVD. Same thing…

So, Not only could I start Windows, I couln’t repair it! The reader, however could read CD’s, so I installed XP for the moment untill I can get another reader. Talk about bad luck!

You’re probably wondering what happening in the carrier world. Well, first off, we we’re running into problems with the themes of Carrier Companion. So, we are sorting that issue out.

We also are implementing the report module. The reports will not be a separate section as we once planed, instead it will be placed into the appropriate section. For example, Carrier reports will be in the Carrier section, Customers in the Customer section, and so on. From the reports, you will be able to choose what information will be displayed (kind of like the modern search engines with narrowing results), and you will be able to print the report from the report’s page.

We also will be finishing the templates for the route guides, and placing customer payment tracking into the next release. Due to the design of all these implementations, we had to rebuild the core or Carrier Companion. We also are updating the UI, and the threading to be more stable. We found we had way too many things happening at once and some of the modules weren’t being activated (weather being the main one). Here is a screen show of the new Carrier Companion in the works:

 
Carrier Companion Carrier’s List

This is the draft of the details for the selected carrier. The final version will have a complete drill down for the fiscal year, including mileage, tips, complaints, customers, and route health. It will also have a drop down menu where you can choose a year, or a month, or even down to the day and get drill down. And it can all be exported into an image, text file, excel, or printed out.

Finally, the release will have a small (yet complete) set of these you can choose from, the Default theme is shown here. The trial version will not have the ability to choose themes. Yes, even the globe of Carrier Companion will change with each theme. Even though it’s not necessary, we though a little eye candy wouldn’t hurt. Oh and how do you like the new user interface? We’ve added some images for a quick reference approach. Ok, back to work. We hope to have this done very very soon! The database will not be affected by this, it’s only the coding in the program itself that is being rebuilt.

Ryan S. Thiele

Sorry all,

I had to look for a new car. The last snow we had (about a month ago), left me abandoned in a snow drift. And when we tried to pull it out, it ended up bending the rear axel rendering the car absolutely useless.

I have been borrowing a car, and I’ll tell you it was a nightmare! The headlights were mounted near the center, which is good if you want to see the road, but I need to see to the side of me even more since I am in deer country. Not only that, but you could imagine me telling the owner “Sorry, but a deer tried to kiss the front end, and I wasn’t about to stop ‘em!”

So, I finally have another car (which I fell in love with when I saw it, but I wasn’t going to let the dealer know that). I can finally get more then 4-5 hours of sleep a night, and be a space case when trying to work on Carrier Companion. I’d end up wrecking it more then helping it.

So, now it’s back to work, and back to sleep full nights!

Ryan S. Thiele

We’ve caught a bug with some versions of Carrier Companion. If you have not seen any updates in the last week, then your updater may not be notifying you that a newer version is available. We have corrected the issue and placed the latest release in the downloaded setup file.

For all those that have not been notified of updates, please download the newest version here:
http://www.carriercompanion.com/download

Thank you!
Carrier Companion Support Team

Wow, WPF has made simple tasks like printing a little trickier. Mainly due to XPS formats (Microsoft’s version of PDF). This is what Vista and Windows7 uses. Now we have finally figured out some tricks to get the printout to work. We should have this out today, or maybe tomorrow!

Since we are using a the WPF section of the .NET framework, we have ran into snags with the printing. Microsoft has changed the way you design the pages for print. Gives us a few more days, and then we will have the route guide template complete. Then, we ca start with the other templates.

We also hope to incorporate custom templates.

We’ve added a new look to the shopping cart. We hope we can learn a little more PHP and create out own order section and rid the use of 3rd party components. Must be a programmer’s thing. We just like to code everything ourselves .

If you have any problems with retrieving your account info, let us know. And the theme will be deleted and the shopping cart will be placed back to it’s orginial state.