The most requested feature recently has been the ability to see more bookings on the calendar. So, we’re excited to announce a massive upgrade to the bookings section which means you can now zoom out for a bigger picture overview. Just use the magnifying glass icons at the top to zoom in and out.
This was no ordinary re-design – the user interface has been completely re-engineered from scratch by our rockstar developers using Backbone.js. This has also resulted in a huge increase in speed and allowed us to eliminate many of the page refreshes that used to slow things down. From now on, once the calendar is loaded, adding and editing bookings happens without any page refreshes at all.
Decluttering
Resource Guru has always had a nice clean interface but we’re constantly looking for ways to declutter and simplify. So, we decided to make some other changes at the same time.
One of the biggest changes is that we no longer have multiple booking labels for repeating bookings. Instead, we now use one label that sticks to the left hand side of the screen when you scroll. Pretty neat hey? Believe me, this was not easy to achieve and took lots of head scratching to get it right. You sometimes see this type of thing with vertical scrolling – but not on a calendar that scrolls horizontally. We believe this particular technique may be a first for the web as we haven’t seen it anywhere else!
We also put a container around bookings that repeat daily to make it easier to see when they’re connected. Another little tweak was made to the layout in the resources column allowing us to reduce the row heights when there are no bookings – maximizing screen real estate is what we always strive for. Without making things feel cramped that is!
Even filters got a bit of a makeover. We turned multiple fields into one simple field that has the same functionality as before but in a much more compact design.
“Resource Guru simplifies the way we work and gives us a holistic view of what’s happening.”
Booking tweaks
We removed the “Repeat” tick box when you make a new booking and replaced it with a start and end date. We think this makes a bit more sense and hope you do too.
Lastly, we re-designed the way bookings appear when you click on them and we now display the total hours booked – split into confirmed time and waiting list time (if there is any).
The zoomed out view and speed improvement are the most significant changes but we hope everything we’ve done helps to improve your overall experience with Resource Guru. I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again – we’re far from finished with Resource Guru and we’re working tirelessly to ensure it just keeps getting better and better.
