Welcome back to another iteration of THIS WEEK AT VSBL - where we shed some light on the behind-the-scenes activities of your favorite people & operations platform.
To get started, there's something important you should know:
We currently support iOS devices on iOS 11+, but due to new improvements in our application, we will no longer support iOS versions before iOS 13 with our upcoming Shifts update. Please reference the list below and ensure your restaurant's devices are updated & ready to support the new version. As a team, we know how this may impact your business and do not take the decision lightly - but to offer you the best product possible it was a necessary change.
If your device is not listed above, it won't be supported in the update. Please make sure to check! Below I've added some help articles by Apple to assist you.
Find the Software version on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod
Find the model of your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch
Psssstt... Broadcasts have IMAGES NOW!!! WOOOOOOOO LETSSSS GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!! Maybe I'm a little too excited, but I know many restaurants have been waiting for this one. Go try it out! And check out a message from our lead developer Alex down below on the tech behind it.
We've got a new report that shows you Accountability by Employee. We're hopeful this will give you better visibility into your people.
Check out the new support screen (Top right in Menu) to schedule a consultation call with our team, view our knowledge base, or submit an idea, bug or issue. We're here to help!
Jason (CEO) and I have been hosting daily webinars helping restaurants setup their new Shifts. It's been a blast reconnecting & meeting teams from across the country to show y'all what's new and coming. As a reminder, Shifts must be configured before release. If you haven't configured your Shifts yet - or have but aren't sure you're ready - join us on a webinar! The times of webinars are:
9:30am CST Monday, Wednesday and Friday
3:00pm CST Tuesday & Thursday
Maria (Product Designer) and I have been hard at work normalizing our product designs. We're going through everything - from typography & icons to spacing and colors - to ensure the app appears consistent across different screens. This process will take us a few weeks, and then some more for the dev team to implement. This undertaking will help us scale better as a company, and provide a better user experience in our product.
More animations (on-taps!), cleaner designs, better screen scaling between devices, and less UI-related bugs! We'll have more to say about this at a later date.
Hello everyone! Welcome to this week’s developer update! This week we have a whooollleee bunch of really cool things to share with you about what the development team has been up to.
So, without any further ado, let’s get started.
This week we took a big leap forward with broadcasts. We were able to finish development on those while also pursuing some new technologies that could help us in future projects. The primary technology we grappled with was around image handling.
Images and files in general have sort of been a gigantic pain since we started this journey, but this week we made a breakthrough. We have found a new and much more reliable way to handle images and files in general. We built new services in the app to handle loading, deleting, and uploading images with much more consistency and the first place we have implemented these is in broadcasts.
We haven’t gone through and implemented this new method throughout the rest of the app because this is a test run for us to uncover any potential shortcomings, but we are confident that it will be good in the long run.
Also, I don’t want to get any hopes up, however, this opens the door to other types of files later on like PDF documents, videos, and more, so we’ll be exploring that as we go.
Breaks have always been sort of an interesting ordeal because of all the compliance laws and different ways people like to run breaks in their stores. In our shifts update, we’re going to be handling an additional edge case.
In the past we used to calculate breaks based on the full time worked. What this means is when you are scheduled to work multiple shifts in the same day, despite there being a gap in the middle, it would total those hours. In the new breaks, we do this differently.
The new system works by using what I would call “Shift Blocks”. These are blocks of consecutive hours worked throughout a day. So, if you work a few hours, have a break scheduled in, then come back later we will separate those hours into 2 blocks which will have breaks calculated separately.
Hopefully this should clear up some errors when using breaks with multiple shifts.
This week we took a look at custom Pin Numbers in the app. A huge request has been for customization of pins for a specific store, and we are now happy to deliver.
You can change pins in both the Roles and Users section and your own personal profile. Remember, your pin has to be unique to the store and doesn’t change for every store you’re in, so it is possible to have multiple pins for different stores.
The experience should resemble changing you pin on ios, so it should be fairly familiar.=
Announcements were an idea primarily spurred on by the dev team and our desire to communicate maintenance, updates, etc. on the home screen. As such, the product team delivered us a creative way to do this.
There will now show a banner on the home screen which is our way of chatting with the community. If you think that sounds awesome, it is, and we can’t wait to see how you like it.
This is totally configurable by us, so look forward to lots of fun bits and bobs coming to your homescreen soon.
The dev team also worked on quite a few bugs and enhancements throughout the app. Way more than I can list here, however, I’m sure you’ll notice them as you go through the app in our next update.
If you made it this far, congratulations, we appreciate you reading along and looking forward to seeing you again next.
See y'all next week! -Scott, Alex, Lesley & the VSBL Team