Monthly Update – July and August 2017

Sometimes I feel we'll never be able to catch-up with all the updates. So again, apologies for the delay, here's what we have been doing during summer (besides drinking margarita cocktails or beer, and eating a lot of BBQ). 

Remember when... well, you probably don't but if you watched this long and boring video you might have seen, that in the beginning, our "language picker" looked like this in the past: 

And I hated it, so I changed it to something else. Now it's time for you to tell me which one is better. That one above.

Or this one below: ​​​​​

It's the one with buttons, right? Thought so.

Cool. Let's move on.

Among other revolutionary changes and/or ideas: we changed the header to better reflect your current position within the software (this might still change a little bit), and hey, finally got that "done" ticker to work like it is supposed to. You know, remove the task from the EZ-List once it is ticked. 

Now, you might not think it is too important - especially since the software was not yet in usage, but we realized: there was a huge need for some quick menu system. Of course, later we will create a fancier version, where you can customize is yourself, but for now, there's a little plus button for... lo and behold... adding new things:

Your eagle-eye sight will probably notice that not everything I mentioned in the list is actually on the picture, but trust me, the stuff is added (actually from those ancient times of before month and a half, we have yet another thing there, internally called "Stupid reporting" - more on that later)

Not all of these are used 15,000 times a day, but at least the one for Project I do find pretty much useful. Of course, in miniTPMS not everything is a project, so we needed a quick way to add a component too, which can be done of course: from the project page... but even better, from the EZ-list. Which is much cooler. 

And so, just to set things straight, more smaller and smaller things were done during this time: 

- deleted unnecessary static text from the Software because who needs it, right?
- removed the possibility to duplicate client name (hopefully it works) 
- removed address as required when you are entering new vendor (you will enter it when you want to)
- Component volume pages finally got a Source Language indicator (just so you know, that kind of stuff is not obvious that it is needed)
- Vendor list was changed to show their languages, specializations, software and the fact if they are freelancers or a part of a Vendor Company

Then there was the epiphany of the following task:

What if we wanted to have a very fast way to create a Component within a project, for 6 languages, all of which share the same amount of work. Not sure if you feel me, so here's an example: 

Your favourite PM Anita Acme that works for ACME of course, sends you a Translation project from English to Italian, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Tagalog, Zulu and Japanese. She loves your company, and wants you to work with all these languages. All these languages have 1,000 untranslated words, and 888.60 weighted words for administration.

Often, the "very useful and utterly expensive" translation management software will force you to enter all these "jobs" separately. But in our case, we're cooler than that.

In miniTPMS you just pick the languages, and when you are entering the first numbers for the first language pairs, and tick on the "copy values to all target languages". See the two buttons in the lower left corner on the following picture:

Tick them nice little buttons, and by the miracle of copying, you will get the exact same data (wordcounts, start date, due date, etc) for all 8 that is eight languages. Read:

Whether you are creating a project for ONE language or for five or eight or seventeen, the amount of time you spend is virtually the same.

That's already a huge timesaver if you ask me. Now, okay, you can say: "what if all the languages have different wordcounts"? Well, ok. You can still copy the dates. That's also 16 less clicks than compared with the systems where you need to enter all this manually. 

But even a bigger invention, one of the best since slight bread, was the introduction of HOME button (see picture, second button from the left, the one near "Menu") 

This button leads immediately to, well, "dashboard" but it's actually the EZ-List for now. Because knowing what to deal with immediately this is more important than fancy charts of how much your company made in the last quarter. 

Who needs dashboard filled with tons of data? Well I do, so we will be working on that too... actually, I dream of the way for the dashboard to be pretty much customisable. That's going to rock like the roll. 

More stuff:
- created the currency page (will be very important later)
- start date is always auto-populated with "current date and time" (you can of course change it manually)
- workflow tasks can be rearranged when creating workflows
- workflow got an "invoice task" trigger which will be used later for Finance module
- we continued mocking up the Finance module (which is a huge one - maybe you remember some part of it from the old post on finances for translation agencies - which was changed in the meantime of course - and it is going to take some time to finish... )
- changed the look of Client PM list to show: name, email, phone, business name and status (active or inactive --> determins if the PM can be chosen from a list when creating new project, or component)

... much more stuff that I don't want to bore you to death with. 

Aaaaand. Scene!

So basically that is it, but of course, it wouldn't be the same without good old bugs. So among 10,000 that we fixed there was the one about duplicated-deleted-component that we squashed, and then another one on workflows, and proably 9,888 more that I don't want to bother you with. 

That was the summer for MiniTPMS the awesome tool for running and administering your translation agency, and, as always, we still have our Early Adopters Club open for you... if you are interested in it, check it our here with all them pricing and a sad story of an over-worked person.

And if you want more of this, then read all our documentation on progress here.