MIDAS v4.03 is coming very soon, so we thought we’d take a few moments to outline some of the new and improved features that are included this forthcoming update to our web based scheduling software.
New Addons
 API Access |  RSS Feeds |
Perhaps the most exciting new feature of MIDAS v4.03 is a new “addon” system (accessed via MIDAS Admin Options → Manage Addons), allowing you to extend the capabilities of your MIDAS through a range of optional addons.
Two brand new addons will initially be available, to coincide with the release of v4.03 – a much requested API (allowing developers to interface with MIDAS from their own software applications), and an RSS Feed addon (allowing MIDAS to automatically generate customized RSS/Atom data feeds from your bookings)
New Invoice Settings
We’ve introduced two new invoice-related settings to MIDAS for v4.03 to help you better keep track of your invoices! There’s now a setting that will prevent modification/deletion of bookings for which invoices have been created, and also a setting to prevent the deletion of invoices (once an invoice has been sent), until the invoice is paid in full.
..and that’s not it for improvements to invoicing, in v4.03, you can also now filter invoices by client too!
Show More on Booking “Blocks”
 In previous versions of MIDAS, you could specify a single booking field to be shown on booking “blocks” in the grid, and a field to show, along with the times of the booking, in a tooltip when hovering over the block |  With MIDAS v4.03, there’s now options to display two booking fields on blocks and two fields on corresponding tooltips! |
Improved “Grid Layout” Printing
In MIDAS v4.03, you can now generate even more versatile printouts of your bookings! We’ve given you the option to select, at time of printing, the booking field to be shown when printing bookings as a “grid” (previously this had been fixed to show the name of the client/organization that each booking was for)
Performance Improvements
We constantly strive to make MIDAS as fast and efficient as possible, and to that end a number of performance improvements have been made in v4.03.
Various code optimizations have been found, and in places, the number of database queries has been reduced.
If you use “Watches“, one of the biggest performance improvements you’ll notice in v4.03, is that multiple bookings will be added/modified/deleted faster!
When emails are sent from MIDAS, this can take a second or so, as MIDAS (or rather the server itself) has to establish connections to a mail server and send data. In earlier versions of MIDAS, when it came to watches, a separate email would be generated/sent for each individual booking that “triggered” the watch. So for example, if you had 3 users all “watching” a particular venue for new bookings and another user then adds a booking to that venue every day for 5 days, MIDAS would generate a total of 15 notification emails (five for each of the three users watching the particular venue). However, now, in v4.03, the same operation would only generate 3 notification emails (one for each user, each email containing a list of all five bookings). This reduction in the number of individual notification emails sent by MIDAS will result in a considerable improvement in performance and speed for customers who have “Watch” email notifications setup in their MIDAS.
Our “remotely hosted” customers should also notice a small improvement on all page load times with MIDAS v4.03, due to a new internal setting that reduces certain re-directs. This should improve page load times by a few hundred milliseconds.
New “Pastel” theme
We’ve created a new, optional, “Pastel” theme to coincide with MIDAS v4.03. The new “Pastel” theme features soft, pastel shades, and can be downloaded and installed to your MIDAS at https://mid.as/themes – in fact, the new “Pastel” theme is compatible with any version of MIDAS from v4.00 and above, and you can see it in action for yourself in our live online demo
GUI Updates
As well as a new theme, a number of small updates to the GUI (Graphical User Interface) have been made for v4.03, including:
When “jumping” to a booking from a search result, the selected booking will be indicated in the grid (its border will temporarily flash)
When “jumping” to specific bookings (i.e. via Search or a “Client’s Other Bookings” link), relevant bookings are highlighted in the grid
The animated “working” indicator is now shown in more places to indicate activity (i.e. when deleting multiple bookings)
Issues Fixed
MIDAS v4.03 includes a cumulative roll-up of fixes for all issues discovered since the initial release of v4.02