For v4.25, we’ve made a number of small but significant improvements to the user interface. These include..
New Default Font
Since MIDAS v4.20, the default font used in our software was “Geneva” on MacOS systems and “Tahoma” on Windows systems. Different platforms have different default fonts available, and we wanted MIDAS to look as similar as possible regardless of the OS being used. “Geneva” and “Tahoma” are quite similar in appearance, which is why we originally chose them.
“Geneva” Font
“Tahoma” Font
For other systems where neither of these fonts were available, MIDAS would fall back to the closest sans-serif font available.
However, from v4.25, the default font across all operating systems is instead now “Open Sans“:
“Open Sans” Font
This font comes included with MIDAS, meaning that our software should now look identical on every operating system!
Larger Font Size
Following customer feedback, we’ve also increased the font size in many areas of the software.
Previous Font Size in MIDAS v4.24
Increased Font Size in MIDAS v4.25
New Drop-Down Lists, Checkboxes and Radio Buttons
You may also note from the previous screenshot a couple of other changes. We’ve fully styled and themed drop-down (select) lists, check (tick) boxes and radio buttons in MIDAS v4.25. Previously, these input elements would be styled by the user’s own browser/operating system. This led to MIDAS looking slightly different for users on different browsers and operating systems.
System default styled Check (Tick) Boxes and Radio Buttons in v4.24
Styled Check (Tick) Boxes and Radio Buttons in v4.25
The new styled inputs for v4.25 look consistent across supported browsers and operating system. Coupled with the increased font size, these new-style inputs are now even easier to select/toggle than before.
Default Template Improvements
We’ve updated a couple of the default templates for v4.25. The “Public Booking Requests” and “Public Web Request” templates have been updated.
Previously, these template defaults made use of an HTML “table” for laying out the header. This worked fine on regular screens, but on smaller mobile devices, it could result in the header being truncated:
Public Booking Request Default Template in v4.24 on a mobile device, using a “Table” Layout. Note how the “DEMO” logo has been truncated
So to improve their appearance on smaller screens, for v4.25, we’ve dropped the use of tables in favor of a “flex” layout instead. Here’s the same screen as before, but using a “flex” layout instead. Now on smaller screens, the header components will “wrap” where necessary:
Public Booking Request Default Template in v4.25 on a mobile device, using a “Flex” Layout. Note how the header components automatically “wrap” on very small screens
We would ideally like to migrate all the default templates (email, invoice, etc) within MIDAS over to a “flex” layout model. However, older email clients don’t fully support “flex” rendering in this way. This would mean that an invoice emailed to a customer may not display correctly in their email client. We do however plan to one day update all default templates to the “flex” layout model. In the meantime, as templates within MIDAS are editable, user may choose to do this themselves!
These improved templates apply to new installations of our software. They won’t be retrospectively applied to existing MIDAS systems. However, existing customers can reset their templates to these new templates via MIDAS Admin Options → Manage MIDAS → Templates → Reset Template.
These are just a few of the new and improved features for v4.25. Keep following our blog as we unveil more on v4.25 in our next posts.
The world has been seemingly grinding to a halt over the past couple of months due to COVID-19.
As a small and agile UK business, we’ve been fortunate in that our day to day operations haven’t been adversely affected. We’re still promptly responding to pre-sales questions and providing support to customers to the same high standards as before.
But we’re aware that many of our customer’s operations have had to temporarily be put on hold. If your business is one of those affected, remember we’re here to help. Please see our blog post from March for ways we can support your business in these challenging times.
During these past few months however, development of MIDAS hasn’t stopped! In fact, it’s provided us with a unique opportunity to devote additional time to development of our software.
As you may know, MIDAS has been in active development for some 15 years now. Throughout this time, we’ve been regularly releasing significant updates at least three times a year. Each significant updates always includes new and improved features.
We’ve added dozens of new features and improvements for this next release, which we’re really excited about!
There’s so much to share, which is why over the coming posts here on our blog, we’ll be taking a closer look at what you can expect in v4.25. Here’s what we’ve announced so far:
“Perl” is the coding language we develop our web based room booking and resource scheduling software, MIDAS, in.
Most Linux and Mac OS based operating systems come with Perl pre-installed, yet, Windows operating systems do not.
We test MIDAS on a range of operating systems, servers and platforms. Our in-house development of MIDAS is primarily within a Windows-based environment. This means that we needed to install a Perl distribution on Windows.
ActivePerl
When MIDAS development started back in 2005, there was really only one mainstream solution for running Perl on Windows. This was a Perl distribution named “ActivePerl“, produced by ActiveState.
The reason we liked ActivePerl was two-fold; firstly, a completely free “Community Edition” was available. Secondly ActivePerl came with a handy tool called the “Perl Package Manager” (PPM). This made installing and updating Perl modules easy. It provided a graphical interface where modules could be quickly installed, updated, or uninstalled with just a few clicks:
ActivePerl included a number of “default” Perl modules. MIDAS requires some additional modules not included within the standard ActivePerl distribution. The PPM tool allowed easy and quick installation of any such modules as required.
Many of our “self hosted” customers intended to install our MIDAS booking software on their Windows-based server. Therefore, we would recommend ActivePerl due to its availability, regular updates, and ease of use.
Strawberry Perl
Since 2005, other Perl distributions built for Windows have come along. Perhaps the most notable of these being “Strawberry Perl“, which first appeared in 2008.
Back then we explored what Strawberry Perl had to offer when compared to ActivePerl. After evaluating Strawberry Perl, we decided ActivePerl would continue to be the Perl distribution we developed under and would recommend to our Windows-based customers.
What initially made ActivePerl better than Strawberry Perl?
When we first evaluated the newcomer Strawberry Perl in 2008 against the more established ActivePerl, differences became clear from an ease of installation and use perspective.
Firstly, Strawberry Perl didn’t include a visual “Perl Package Manager”-type tool for installing and maintaining Perl modules. Rather, Perl modules required installation via the command line. On Linux-based servers, installing modules via the command line is the norm, but many of Windows-based users were less familiar with command line use. Consequently, a graphical Windows application which allowed easy installation of Perl modules was preferable.
Another difference was that ActivePerl was established and more stable. Strawberry Perl was still the newcomer and felt a bit “rough around the edges”. Some Perl modules were also not fully supported or failed to install easily/correctly in Strawberry Perl.
As such, because we continued to only recommend ActivePerl to Windows customers, it was logical to continue to develop under ActivePerl ourselves. We would however keep an open mind and keen interest in the ongoing development of Strawberry Perl.
For the most part, our Windows-based customers continued to opt for our recommendation of ActivePerl. A few chose Strawberry Perl instead and were able to initially do so successfully.
Are we POSIXtive?(!)
However, around June 2010, Strawberry Perl suddenly removed a key component from their distribution which MIDAS relied on; the ability to natively work with and set Timezones. This resulted in those running MIDAS under Strawberry Perl seeing “POSIX::tzset not implemented on this architecture” errors. We had no idea why Strawberry Perl removed this functionality, or whether it was just an unintentional bug/glitch in their software. The reason for the removal of this functionality wasn’t forthcoming, or even acknowledged, by the Strawberry Perl team. This led us to initially suspect that perhaps it may have just been a bug.
This wasn’t a major problem for us, as we’d never officially recommended or supported MIDAS running under Strawberry Perl. It was of course though an inconvenience for the handful of customers who had been running under Strawberry Perl.
As a fix wasn’t forthcoming from Strawberry Perl, the solution for affected customers was either to install an older version of Strawberry Perl, or switch to ActivePerl.
By late 2010, it became clear that the developers of Strawberry Perl weren’t going to address/fix this issue. So we re-engineered our MIDAS software to work around this issue. Our next release in January 2011 once again ran under Strawberry Perl without issue.
What we learnt from all this was that Strawberry Perl still felt in its infancy and in a state of flux. We still didn’t consider it “stable” enough for use in production server environments.
We continued to recommend ActivePerl for all our Windows-based customers.
ActivePerl was in continual development, with regular releases which reasonably closely tracked the latest versions of Perl available for Linux-based servers.
Something changed…
In late 2016, we felt things began to shift and change with ActivePerl.
We began to notice that the latest versions of Perl modules stopped being offered via ActivePerl’s Perl Package Manager (PPM). Initially, this wasn’t a great cause for concern. MIDAS didn’t require the very latest version of any Perl module.
The released of ActivePerl 5.26 saw things further decline…
As you may be aware, MIDAS uses MySQL as its database. Perl therefore has to be able to connect to a MySQL database in order for MIDAS to function. The critical Perl module for doing this (DBD::MySQL) wasn’t made available for ActivePerl 5.26 via the Perl Package Manager.
This meant that MIDAS wouldn’t run for customers under ActivePerl 5.26. Customers would instead have to install the previous ActivePerl 5.24 build, which was still available for download from ActiveState.
Now, in the past following a new release of ActivePerl, it could take several weeks for Perl module updates to become available though the PPM.
So we waited… and waited.. yet still no DBD::MySQL module appeared for ActivePerl 5.26. ActivePerl 5.26 became useless for any application like MIDAS which need to connect to a MySQL database!
In our view, ActivePerl declined from there; in order to download ActivePerl an account was now required on their website. Additionally, they discontinued Perl Package Manager. Instead users had to “custom build” their own ActivePerl package in the cloud with the modules they needed, or use a command line tool to add in modules.
ActivePerl’s development started to lag behind Perl itself. For example, at time of writing, the latest official version of Perl available is 5.30.2. The latest version of Strawberry Perl available is also 5.30.2. However, the latest version of ActivePerl available today is 5.28.1 – nearly 2 years behind where Perl is currently at!
Doubts began to arise over ActiveState’s commitment to continuing to continue to provide Perl and a free “community edition”. Their focus seems to have shifted more towards monetization and on their Python language products instead (as evident from the majority of their recent posts on Twitter)
Why we moved to Strawberry Perl?
These developments were a worrying trend for us. This is why last year we began equally promoting and recommending Strawberry Perl alongside ActivePerl on our server requirements page. We also provided a helpful step-by-step guide for installing Strawberry Perl, to complement our previous guide for installing ActivePerl.
Strawberry Perl has certainly come a long way since its first release. It’s now very stable, is passionately developed, and closely tracks the official version of Perl with frequent releases. Best of all, it remains completely free!
Many previous ActivePerl users around the world have already made the switch over to Strawberry Perl. At the start of 2020, we also moved all our development from using ActivePerl’s distribution or Perl to Strawberry Perl.
Should I choose ActivePerl or Strawberry Perl?
If you’re considering a self-hosted edition of MIDAS (remember that we also offer a cloud-hosted edition too!) for installation on a Windows-based server, whilst we still presently support both ActivePerl and Strawberry Perl on our website we would strongly recommend you choose Strawberry Perl.
If you must use ActivePerl, then we’d suggest getting your hands on 5.24, although this is now four years old, and we’re big advocates for keeping server software up to date. So going forward Strawberry Perl would be our preferred option on Windows.
UPDATE: September 2021
Since we originally published this article in April 2020, we’ve since revisited ActivePerl.
We’re all experiencing unprecedented times with the global Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Firstly, if you’re an existing customer whose business is currently affected by the situation, we want to reassure you that we’re here to help! For more information, please see our recent blog post: 3 ways we’re supporting customer’s businesses affected by Coronavirus.
Now, here at MIDAS as we are a small and agile online business, and as such our operations haven’t been significantly affected at this time. For all intents and purposes, it’s “business as usual” here at MIDAS. Our sales team is still available online (via email or Live Chat) to answer any pre-sales questions you may have. Our support team is still providing prompt assistance to customer’s support queries (you can view our latest response times on our dedicated Service Status site).
As such, we’ve decided to press ahead with the release of our next update to MIDAS, v4.24, which is available now.
New: Optional “Reviews” addon – automatically collect feedback, ratings, and reviews from your customers
Improved: List of organizations in drop-down on Invoicing screen now limited to organizations with invoices
Improved: BCC to me option when emailing an invoice/receipt now remembers user’s previous setting
Improved: Individual client statistics now include count and sum of outstanding invoices and client’s current credit
Improved: When assigning the “Can Process Booking Requests” permission, MIDAS will indicate if the user isn’t currently a manager of any venues
Fixed: Cumulative roll-up of various fixes for issues discovered since v4.23
How To Get MIDAS v4.24…
New To MIDAS?
We are committed to fair and accessible pricing for all organizations regardless of size. We’re totally upfront and transparent about our pricing structure, and you can purchase MIDAS v4.24 securely through our website and be up and running in no time!
“Self Hosted” Customers:
Self-Hosted customers with ongoing Annual Support Subscriptions will be able to update to v4.24 in the coming weeks. It only takes a couple of clicks – simply log in to your MIDAS system and go to MIDAS Admin Options → Manage MIDAS → Update.
If no update is available, please check back again in a few days time, as we are staggering updates for self-hosted customers over the next few weeks.
“Cloud Hosted” Customers:
Cloud-Hosted customers don’t need to do anything! – All our active Cloud-Hosted MIDAS customers have now been automatically updated to this latest version of MIDAS
Thank you for your continued support of our software during this unprecedented period of global uncertainty. Please remember if you’re an existing customer affected by the current situation, that we’re here to support you!
You can also ask questions and discuss the new features of v4.25 over on Reddit.
