Following up on our investigation of Google Chrome a few days ago, it turns out that another beta release of IE8 has also recently become available. We haven’t seen any of our users playing with it, but decided to give it a whirl just because. Our bottom line recommendation: don’t bother. Here are some peculiarities that you might experience within our database portal.

• There is a serious spacing weirdness throughout almost all pages, including things like the five-pixel border of our main page displays as 20 pixels wide in IE8.
• Many DHTML features take ridiculously long to paint and refresh: it’s even worse than IE6, if that’s possible. To illustrate by example: when loading a fairly complex DHTML page in IE8, I got tired of waiting for the screen to refresh. I opened Chrome, went to Revolution Online, logged in, switched to the other tab, selected the command I wanted, accessed the screen, and started typing — all before the IE8 screen’s hourglass had finished whirling and the screen was refreshed.
• It does some really weird things when you’re typing in a large textbox (like the one I’m typing this note into, which is similar to those throughout most of our app). While you type, it flashes the scrollbar as though it’s recalculating the height of the world, and if you get to a point where you are typing into the area below the initial scroll-line, it pops the text you are typing in and out of the visible area of the screen twice for each keystroke. Quite annoying, IMO.
• It’s interesting to play with, and certainly compatible with our app as far as we can tell from a half-hour of banging on it… but frankly there’s nothing really compelling in there. We think if you try it at this early beta stage you’ll end up seriously annoyed with it and wish you hadn’t.
• Oh, and it crashed while we were typing this note. We’re not sure if that’s because it could tell what we were saying, but be warned.

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February 2nd Followup on IE 8 — Wanted to mention that IE8 is now in official production status, and all of the issues described in this note seem to have been resolved.

The initial beta release of Google Chrome came out September 2nd. We’ve seen a number of Revolution® Online users playing with it, and wanted to let people know about a few small issues with the way it interacts with our database portal.

• Chrome doesn’t seem to render the “promotion tree” very well for donors with a combination of over 1,000 campaigns, promotions, and source types.
• The initial screen sizes of some popup windows (such as DONOR VIEW) are slightly too small.
• We noticed some intermittent screen paint problems in the right margin on page resize.
• For computers with multiple monitors, popups always appear on monitor 1, rather than the screen with the base window.
• They seem to be behind the curve with respect to add-on development, so if you’re addicted to things like CoolIris (formerly known as PicLens) you’ll probably want to stick with FF for now.

However, we are happy to report that if you can live with these limitations, Google Chrome is the fastest browser we’ve ever seen.

ALSO NOTE: Chrome doesn’t have its own menu, so the E-GIF work-arounds to prevent shortcut collisions are not needed. This means that our application shortcuts can be invoked without using the SHIFT key.

The Main Event – starring Revolution Online

Yep, that’s right. We’ve secretly been working behind the ’scenes’ to develop a new thing in Revolution Online. (We say “thing” when we don’t want to refer to modules because we don’t believe in “modules.”) Introducing ROI’s Events Management System — directly in your own Revolution Online database at no extra cost.

The Revolution Online Events Management System allows your organization the ability to track and manage events directly in your main database. Everything from events, venues, activities, participation, attendance, payments, and outputs such as name badges and tent cards are provided directly in this system. And with the events management system managed directly in your ROI Revolution Online database, the capabilities for reporting and in-depth analysis are limitless.

The system allows you to set up seating arrangements within your venue and the ability to clone an entire seating chart.

And then once you’re in a record, you can VIEW which events the person has participated in by clicking on the EVENTS Folder within their record.

There’s a lot to this Events Management System and this brief overview doesn’t do it full justice. To receive our White Paper on Events Management or to schedule an online demonstration and training, contact your ROI Client Service Manager.

Open APIs

Imagine someone coming into your organizational website and being able to do several things:

1. Updating their information — either by making changes to their existing record or adding new information.
2. Joining the organization in some way — by making a donation or taking action or simply expressing interest.
3. Viewing some information that you choose to expose to them, like their entire giving history.

Now imagine all that information coming directly into your ROI Revolution Online database. Scary huh? Well, it doesn’t have to be. Why? Because we give you FULL control over what ultimately gets written to any record in the ROI Revolution Online database. (Let’s face it — some of the web-based requests that come in off the street can be kind of sloppy and we’ve all taken great care to protect the integrity of your data).

Using ROI’s Open APIs we’re able to bring those requests directly into your database into their own PENDING WEB REQUEST section — where YOU can have control over what gets written to your database, either through automated and unattended scripts or manually via end user actions.

ROI officially introduced the Revolution Online Open API back in February of this year and in the past month, we’ve expanded its capabilities to include a “two-way” interaction with websites — meaning if you want, you can expose some relevant information back to the member or donor on the other end.

Revolution Online is PicLens Enabled

Um, this is so cool…

So our developers got a little side tracked one day and decided to enable “us” to use the popular browser add-on PicLens. Have you see this yet? It’s a really interesting way to view images. You can get it via the following URL and enable it to work in your browser. http://www.piclens.com/.

Anyway, as we were admiring its beauty, we got to thinkin’ – this should be in Revolution Online. So by 5PM that day it was! If you’ve added the add-on, click the button and watch what happens….

Did You Know?

When keying in an address record, if you key in the zipcode, we will populate the City and State for you automatically.

And – if you don’t know the zipcode, you can key in the City and State and click the “find” button. A window will display the likely zipcodes for that City and you can choose one.