Just a few minutes ago, we decided to extend the 25% off sale to January 15. We were a little late getting Studio Manager 10 out the door, releasing it on December 22nd. A little too close to Christmas for a lot of people. When we sent out notifications, we got a lot of gone for the holidays notices. Under the circumstances, we are really happy with the response to our sale.

And, we are pretty sure more of you want to upgrade to Studio Manager 10 but need a little extra time to evaluate the demo which didn’t come out until December 23. Some of you may want to deduct this expense in 2010 rather than the less than stellar 2009. Whatever the reason, contact us by phone 415 789-5219 or email Janet to discuss your questions or place an order.

Studio Manager 10 is available for purchase today. See our in-progress Studio Manager 10 tab above for more details plus about 10 blog posts below for details about some of the new features.

We are working furiously to have the Studio Manager 10 demo ready for download some time today. Just click the demo tab for more information and a download link.

It will help us keep in touch and know what’s going on if you fill out the contact information form there. But if you are already on our mailing list and don’t want to bother, you can type x’s or dashes through the required fields and still get the free demo and/or documentation. Our favorite field for you to fill in correctly is the email address. But please, suit yourself.

We are listing our regular prices on the Pricing and Upgrades tabs above, but please apply a 25% discount to what you see for the number of users you need if you plan on purchasing by December 31st!

To purchase now, just email your card details split between 2 emails for luck along with your basic contact information. Calling too for emphasis is always good – just leave a voicemail. You can leave your card details on voice mail if you prefer. The phone is in a secure location. Leave your phone if you don’t mind in case we have a question for you. We do need your exact name on the card and expiration.

FileMaker 10 has this fabulous new user-modifiable tool bar the way other modern programs do. The only issue is that it takes up a whole bunch of height that used to be available for the database screen on smaller screens like the 13 inch Macbook, Macbook Pro and Macbook Air. We love the new tool bar but it ruins Studio Manager’s aspect ratio.

Until now. We did the large amount of work to not only widen all of Studio Manager’s entry screens, prompts and list views to make up for what got lost in height, but we re-designed everything to use the space well. Designers know how long this takes. Thank Scout for most of this re-design work. She spent many, many hours doing one screen at a time. There are over 50 screens in all. Thanks Scout!

You’ll need to click to see the above shrunken screen shot clearly. It opens in a separate window or tab so that you can switch back and forther between the screen shot and this description. If you control- or right-click, you can choose new tab or window.

When it comes time to bill a client, sometimes you need to hold some of the work until something deliverable shows up for the customer. It is a sort of value-billing. Don’t bill them until they see something good, at least don’t blow them away before they are seeing value. Something along those lines.

So, in Studio Manager 10, you can temporarily put items on hold and also designate them as unbillable before you throw the switch and have Studio Manager create a still editable bill for you from actual time and expenses. Of course time is billed at your billing rate and expenses are marked up to cover the risk you take when buying things on behalf of your client.

Notice that items with a billing status of “on hold” turn orange and “unbillable” items turn red. “Billed” items turn green and regular not-yet-billed items are black. You don’t need to fill in the billing status except when you want to designate something as “on hold” or “unbillable”. Otherwise, time and expenses start their lives with a blank billing status and that status changes to billed automatically when they are billed.

In Studio Manager 10, your employees and freelancers can be assigned to jobs so that they can track the jobs they have on their plate as well as the tasks they’ve been personally assigned. We have a nice little assignment screen shown below (click to enlarge) that makes assigning people a snap.

Now you can view who is on a job from the Jobs home screen. When people fill in timesheets, only their jobs appear as options rather than the full list of all active jobs. And when you assign people to tasks, only those assigned to the job populate the value list.

With FileMaker 10’s script triggers, we can make Studio Manager 10 more responsive. On the Contacts table view, we give you a way to filter your Contacts by company or name. In the above example, I typed “jo” into the Filter by Full Name box and instantly my list shrank to 4 people. Saves a lot of typing without ever bothering to bring up the Find dialog and submitting an official find.

Just a little thing, but we got the idea from Address Book. Why show all the address fields all the time in Contacts? In Studio Manager 10, click the summary pane and you’ll get to the edit tab in one click. This will keep idle hands and minds from inadvertently editing data and gives a cleaner look.

Now you get 4 slots for assigning employees and freelancers to tasks instead of just one. This becomes an advantage when you want someone who plays a lesser role, perhaps just oversight, to see the task in their personal task list.

We still like the idea of  designating a single person responsible for a task. You can get that effect by making the person in slot #1 the task lead when there is a hierarchy, even if only in seniority.

We are sticking with the #1 slot initials in all our reports because we think listing 4 initials in front of a task name would clutter the message. The main purpose of the 4 slots is to give each person a full list of the tasks they need to work on.

In the monthly calendar and week views of tasks, when you hover over a task you get the full names of all of the people assigned to the task. And, you can modify who is on a task at any time.

When you click on the thin bar at the left of a week in the monthly calendar view, you are shown a week view. Even though we’ve cropped this shot, you’ll get the full screen height for a total of 12 possible tasks due on any given day. We made Sunday and Saturday skinnier to give you more room for week days. Like on the month calendar view, you can hover over a task to see the details and click a task to edit it. Click to see full-sized. See Month View.

Up till now, when you clicked the link in a contact record to send an email, you got a new empty email in your default email program. That is efficient but left any mission critical information in your email system, not in your database.

Not good enough for Studio Manager 10. So, now when you click the link you get a compact email pop-up window that lets you continue to your email but, if you wish, you can select the job, insert that job ID in your email, enter the body right there. Then, when you send, you get all that data nicely tucked away in your Studio Manager database as well as an email to client or to a team member.

Each employee has a signature and preferences regarding email. You can standardize your signatures if you like.