BuildBook Product Updates

New:

- Re-ordering of subtasks within Tasks, activities in Phases, budget items, and selection items! Previously, subtasks in Tasks and activities within Phases were in the order you entered them, but we heard from many of you that have lots of subtasks and activities that you need to easily move around as things change. 

Just click the three lines next to the item to rearrange.

And while we were at it, we also added the ability to rearrange your budget AND selection items! Just hover over what you’d like to drag and move. Three lines will appear to the left for you to adjust the order.

This update will give you and your team much more flexibility to customize your budget, selections, and tasks 👌👌

- Technical enhancements behind the scenes to the Chat feature to give you more visibility into when messages are delivered or if there are any connectivity issues.

In situations where you are on the go and don’t have great service, a message will appear in Chat to let you know if the app is connecting and will show you the upload status on files.

Fixes and improvements:

• Fixed a bug where in some cases, items in Up Next were showing twice
• Resolved an issue where some new budget items didn’t appear without refreshing the page
• Improved the experience for marking Selection items as complete directly from the budget so that the completed state is reflected in the Budget without needing to refresh the page
• Replaced pagination in Daily Logs with lazy load (so that as you scroll older posts will automatically appear)
• Added tooltips for scenarios in the schedule when a date is required to give an explanation as to why a date is required
• Fixed a bug that prevented some comments from saving in a Selection 
• Enhanced the appearance of URLs in Chat so that long URLs wrap to prevent anything from being pushed off of the screen
  

New:

- Cross Project Schedule View: A new “Schedule” tab in the navigation bar takes you to a calendar with all projects in one place! You can select which projects you want to appear in the calendar. 

- Enhanced permissions to Files for Limited Access users: The Files area of projects was available to both Full Access members and Limited Access members. We released an enhancement to this area of the app that allows project owners to control which files and folders Limited Access members can see. This has been a widely requested feature and we are excited to be rolling it out to everyone! 

The new feature works the same way it does for sharing files and folders to Clients. You simply click or tap the 3 dots next to the file or folder, and choose to share/hide from Limited Access.

Fixes and improvements:

• Added context about the difference between Full Access and Limited Access project roles when assigning them to either Pro Team Members or Collaborators.

• Made field labels in Budget items more consistent
• Improved custom tag creation in Tasks when clicking “Save and Add Another” 
• Fixed an issue where some images in Daily Logs were displaying wider than others
• Enhanced clearing dates in date pickers: made the “clear” button always present, adjusted how clearing a date works, and now the clear button is disabled if the dates are already cleared
• Removed the “Add Scheduling” icon if the scheduling box in a modal is already visible
• Fixed a bug where right clicking on the Schedule to delete caused a Data Synchronization Error
• Adjusted Budget items with no value to return a $0 amount in the Budget
• Fixed a saving issue for some Tasks that were marked as completed
• Resolved an error where some notification items remained unread on mobile, even after tapping the bell
  

Fixes and improvements:

• Fixed a bug where Phases and Tasks couldn’t be created on new or existing projects
• New logs that are backdated and had photos attached weren’t appearing in the correct chronological order in the Photos Only view of Daily Logs. This has been fixed.
• Gantt Chart Schedule Improvements:
• There was some inconsistency with adding and deleting a dependency using the “Begins After” dropdown where this change wasn’t saving, which is now resolved.
• Fixed an issue where Phase dates weren’t automatically updating to include a new Task date range if it falls outside of the original Phase dates when creating a new Task on the schedule via the right click menu, and then scheduling that Task within a Phase.
• Improved the date picker
• Adding a dependency from 'Ends Before' dropdown required refresh to see the line connecting the items.
  

New:

We’ve added a new Chat widget to the navigation bar to give you more visibility into unread Chat messages, across all of your projects. When you have any unread chat messages, a blue dot will appear on the Chat icon in the upper right corner. Just click the icon to see a list of projects with unread messages!

Fixes and improvements:

• The “Up Next” feed in each project has been improved to display any upcoming items for the next 14 days, starting with any items that are Overdue, so that you don’t miss a thing. 

• Email address is now optional when creating a new Lead.
• Clients were able to view the Schedule View in addition to the default Calendar View - this was fixed so that clients only have access to the Calendar View of the Schedule.
• Removed the “Add New” option in the Schedule on the Client Dashboard
  

Schedule enhancements:

• Various UI improvements to the Calendar View in the Schedule, including shading, displaying 5 weeks at a time, and the addition of the "add new" button to add a new Phase or Task to match the Gantt chart view.
• Adjusted sort order of items in the dependency dropdown to show up in the order that they appear alphanumerically

• Made dependency lag persistent: when a parent is moved forward or backward in time (or is resized longer/shorter), all dependents shift the exact same amount and the space (lag) between them is maintained. Items now allow negative lag: i.e. A child can start before the parent on the schedule. Negative lag is treated the same as positive lag - it is maintained when changing the dates of the parent item
• Phases can now be linked/dependent on each other

Fixes and Improvements

• Edits to existing fields in Selections and Budget weren’t saving when the modal was closed too quickly. We improved the experience so that users now see a spinner if data is being updated and so that they can see if the changes are saved or not before closing the modal.
• Fixed a bug in the Gantt chart where the arrow connecting dependencies wasn’t disappearing if the “ends before” field was removed from the dependency.
• Added the ability to remove the date from Change Orders and Payments in the budget - similar to Tasks, Selections, and Phases.
• Made the amount field in Budget and Selection items optional when editing an existing item.
• In the Gantt chart, if the date of an item grouped within a Phase was edited to start before the Phase start date, there was an error. This was fixed so that the parent item’s dates will shift to encompass the new item's dates.
• Fixed an issue in the Schedule where the scroll location didn’t preserve after changing a date in the supermodal.
  

This week, we rolled out an exciting set of schedule enhancements!

This release includes:

- Grouping: Now, you can group items such as Tasks, Selections, and Payments within your Phases. This makes it simple to adjust the dates of phases and still keep everything within it in sync. 

- Calendar View: We also introduced a new Calendar view to go along with the Gantt view. This is now the default view on mobile for all users (Gantt view on a phone is kinda meh, right?) and also the primary view on the Client Dashboard.

- Dependencies (beta) 🎉: We have introduced a beta version of schedule dependencies. Now, you can create dependencies between items in the schedule so that if a date changes for one item, all dependent items will also move accordingly. We are still fine-tuning this new feature, but we wanted to get it into customers’ hands now so that you can take it for a spin and share your feedback with us.

This week we did a bunch of housecleaning to make features like Budget and Selections smoother.

• "Share with Client" checkbox is now available on the “New Task” modal. Sharing a Task with the client was previously only available as an option on an existing Task.
• Resolved a bug where text that was copied and pasted into supermodals throughout the app wasn’t auto-saving.
• Fixed a bug where uploading an image to Files from mobile caused the image to be duplicated a dozen or so times and attached to various logs.
• Line breaks and formatting weren’t appearing within the text of Daily Logs - which is now fixed so that formatting is preserved.
• Fixed a bug where PDFs weren’t uploading on mobile
• Returning to the dashboard after viewing the read-only client dashboard caused some areas of the app to function as read-only, which is now resolved.

Fixed a handful of bugs related to Budget and Selections:

• There was an issue editing the name of an existing Selection Category from the Budget tab where users were taken out of the text box after a letter was typed and needed to click back into the name text box to continue typing the name.
• Selection descriptions in projects created from an existing template took multiple attempts to remove in the new project, which is now fixed.
• When creating a new project from an existing project template, unchecking Budget and checking Selections resulted in the existing Selections to not carry over due to certain aspects of these two features being tied together. Now if Selections are chosen to carry over without the existing Budget, the Selection amounts will appear in the budget.
• Editing costs on Selection Items weren’t saving correctly or weren’t saving at all, which was resolved.
• Now existing due dates in Selection Categories can be removed.
  

• Fixed some bugs in the client dashboard where the new photo viewer (carousel and pinch to zoom) weren’t showing on the Daily Logs, and the file upload button wasn’t working within Files.
• When multiple images are in a Daily Log, the images in the right column were cutting off the menu to download or delete.
• Improvements to the Activity Feed including removing the file name in photos and files, and for projects created from a template, we simplified what appears in the new project feed by removing the individual detailed entries.
• Images in "photos only" view of Daily Logs are now clickable/tappable. 
• New Daily Logs are generating the correct notifications but weren’t showing in the bell dropdown - this has been fixed.
  

New‍ 

• Mobile carousel - Improved the way users can look through multiple images in the mobile app so that you can scroll through them in one window vs. clicking in and out of each image individually.

• Added pinch and zoom to make it easier to get a closer look at pics when you need to.
  

Fixes and Improvements

• We recently launched our new native photo picker, but images uploaded to Selections were still using the old photo picker. This has been fixed.
• Fixed a bug in the iOS mobile app where the app got hung up on the “uploading” modal when trying to upload a video.
  

New‍ 

• Added the ability to completely delete a project. You can archive projects so that you could reference them later if need be, but there wasn’t previously an option to delete a project.

‍

• Created new unique default avatars. If a user hadn’t uploaded a profile pic, there was a blank portrait image. We created unique avatars with the first and last letter of the user’s name so you can see more clearly who is on each project! (the new avatars won’t appear until the user has logged into their account)
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Fixes and Improvements

• Fixed a bug in Selections that was causing a date to populate even if the date field was left blank. Now new Selection categories can be created without a date.
• Added hover tooltips to explain the icons in Tasks.

• There was a bug throughout the app where certain areas weren’t refreshing on their own when changes were made. We noticed this specifically where a refresh was required in the Up Next list when an item was deleted directly from that section, and on mobile in the Budget tab where a deleted Budget item didn’t immediately disappear. This is now fixed.
• Increased the resolution of our thumbnail images so they don’t appear as grainy.
• On Android there was a bug in Comments causing the keyboard to overlap with the message box - this is fixed in version 1.3.2.
• The User Settings option was missing for clients - now when a client is logged in and clicks their avatar there is a “Settings” link for them to add a profile pic, change their name or email, or reset their password