Carrier Companion News

After some (ok a lot) of trial and error, we finally came up with a route entry/edit design that is functional. Here is a sneak peak:

 
Carrier Companion Route Section

Here you will have a list of routes and have the option to edit, add, or remove them.

Carrier Companion Route Editor With Graph Information

With the route editor you can enter you information.

Here you can see the graph. It tallies the information for the last 7 days and displays them here for a quick reference. We may also place this on the home page. The graph will tally the Mileage, Time, and Customers you have for a particular route. The home page will have all the information for all your routes. Including drill downs and print options.

Most if not all the tallies are done in the background. This way you can fill in the fields as the graph tallies, and not have to wait for the control to have all it’s data. This is more or less the foundation of the new Carrier Companion. We want a program that will do the math in the background so you don’t have to wait to do you work.

NOTE: you can fill in the zip code and the City/State will be filled in for you. We thought you may like that feature. We also added a feature that fills in the City, State, and Zip Code fields with the most commonly used City, State, or Zip Code. This feature will also be added to the Customer Entry Section.

Carrier Companion Route Mileage Editor

Here is the information I placed for the graph to tally.

As we started to build the route section we wanted to keep the user interface simple. And not cluttered. Here you can see the interface is clean and easy to use. Most of the hyperlinks, or buttons have access key. You will be able to see these key by pressing the alt key. After that the Hyperlink will have a letter underlined. Then all you do is press that underlined letter.

Example: Routes
To access the routes, you simple press alt+R.

Home Page

We have the final home page design.  Through many decisions, we have decided to eliminate the Welcome Page, and have it start on the Home Page. The news and posts will be listed there. Here’s the final layout:

We are still deciding on whether to not to make it customizable. The weather strip still exists between the ‘To do’ list and the News.

The options will be global. This means the program options will take place through out the entire program. The original interface was file based where if you open a CCDF file the interface will transform into what that user wanted. But, since this for Vista and beyond, we made the program user based. This means that it will be customizable for each user of windows, and not each user of the program.

Other Plans

Menu:
The program will still run similar to it’s predecessor (Carrier Companion 1). When you click a menu button (e.g. Carriers), the carrier list will show up with a sub menu where you can edit, add, and remove carriers.

Reports:
The reports section will now be included. The reports will be able to print virtually the entire database if you so choose. You can also group and sort the print out as well as preview it.

Charts:
This release will also include charts where you can see the progress (or regress) of your routes, profits, customers satisfactions, etc…

There are many things we are working on at the moment, but soon it will be in the beta stage where we can let our users give it a test run, and some feedback.