Updates and improvements

• Printing of the Planner view now breaks pages cleanly between activities
• Printing of the Calendar view is cleaner

Fixes

• To Do and Shopping Lists now remember which list was showing after a refresh
• Eliminated problem whereby some completion statuses for shared assignments were being lost

Fixes

• Removed extra lines some people were seeing in the Daily Digest email
• Restored Ctrl-Enter feature for assignments that had been removed with last release
• No longer need to refresh to see changes after editing same activity twice in a row

New features

• Pressing Ctrl-Enter (Control-Return on Mac) in an assignments adds another to that day

Updates and improvements

• More useful dialog when cancelling from create/edit or manage family
• Canadian postal code support in Weather widget
• You can now edit the names of lists you add to the To Do and Shopping widgets, and delete lists from them

Fixes

• Corrections to the way the Homeschool Helper handles days with multiple assignments
• Corrections to the way the Homeschool Helper handles vacation days
• Eliminated cases where the calendar/planner was not reflecting changes to activities
• Assignment information now included in text (SMS) reminders

These latest changes require that you restart your browser to ensure that you get all the latest updates. Follow these steps:

1. Close all open Chrome windows.
2. Restart Chrome.
3. Visit Homeschool Planet
4. While holding down the Shift key, refresh the page.

If after doing all that, things still don’t align correctly, or the display looks strange, or any of the features don’t seem to work for you, contact us right away at betatest@homeschool-planner.com and we’ll help get it resolved for you.

Changes in this release include:

The four existing themes have been finalized. Some of the colors of your classes and other activities may have changed (sorry!). We’ll be adding more themes, but these four should not be changing again.

The layout of the Calendar views has been tidied up. It is more readable, and takes less space on the Monthly view.

Newly created “Everything Else” activities will be pale gray by default. You can still choose a particular color if you like.

Assignments in classes with more than one student are now grouped by student.

The Weather App now shows current conditions, and supports Canadian postal codes.

Sending/retrieving To-Do or Shopping Lists by text message now sends neat lists.

plus a number of other smaller changes and bug fixes.

As always, let us know what you think, and send any questions or report any problems to betatest@homeschool-planner.com.

Thanks for participating in the beta test, and we look forward to hearing from you!

We made some major changes in this update. We wanted to get your feedback about the changes as soon as possible, so we are delivering these changes now, before we have finished testing to the level that we would if the product were publicly available. We believe they should work just fine, but if you run into anything that seems unusual or incorrect, please let us know right away.

The changes in this update include:

Both Classes and “Everything Else” activities can now have both Assignments (which get checkboxes) and Notes (which do not). There is a separate tab for Notes, where you can enter those. The “Every day” assignments will now have checkboxes, so that you can track which were completed each day.

You can now add additional assignments to the “Every day” section, so you can have multiple, checkable items every day

There is a new option in the “Show calendars for” menu that will let you hide recurring activities, like classes, to make it easier to see the exceptional items in your schedule (doctor’s appointments, etc).

The “all day” section of the weekly and daily calendars grows and shrinks to fit whatever activities you have scheduled there, and now will grow to almost the full height of the calendar if needed. There is also a new button (between the two sections) that will let you lock the height instead to a very small area at the top, if you need to see more of the time-scheduled events.

Assignments and notes that have more than one line of text will appear full-sized when you edit them, without having to click in them first to get them to resize.

Note that the change to the Assignments and Notes will change the way that “Every day” items appear. Previously, those were displayed without a checkbox; now they will have a checkbox. If you want to have that text again without a checkbox, cut and paste it from the Assignments tab onto the Notes tab.

Thanks again for participating in the Homeschool Planet Beta Test! Your help has already made the product better, and we look forward to hearing more of your thoughts and suggestions!

Homeschool Planet is live!

We’ve decided to release Homeschool Planet to the public this morning, and so the beta test is officially over.  We will of course continue to improve the site and to resolve any remaining issues.  Please continue to send us your questions and suggestions, and to report any problems you find to betatest@homeschool-planner.com (you still have a private line directly to Joe).

Thank you again for your time and effort, and all the great comments and suggestions.  You’ve really helped us improve Homeschool Planet tremendously!

PS – We’ll be removing this widget in the next few days.

Welcome to the Homeschool Planet Beta Test!

Thank you for participating in our beta test! Your participation will make Homeschool Planet even more useful to other homeschoolers like you. We appreciate your help!

You probably have some questions about what Homeschool Planet can do, and what is expected of you as a participant in the beta test. We’ll try to explain some of that here, as well as on the Homeschool Planet Help web site, where you can watch an overview of the features. Of course, you can always contact us at betatest@homeschool-planner.com with any questions or comments – we are eager to hear from you!

Here are some quick answers to some of the top questions. If you want to learn more, check out the Beta Test FAQ. Or if you’d rather, you can just dive right in! Whenever you’re ready, just click OK to get started

What is a beta test?

Our programmers have brought Homeschool Planet to the point where we think it is ready for our members to use. We’ve invited a limited number of people to try it out, so we can be sure it is truly ready before we open it up to the world.

What am I expected to do?

All we ask of you is that you use Homeschool Planet as if you had just purchased it, and are using it as your full-time planning tool. The more often and the more realistically you use Homeschool Planet to organize your homeschooling and home life, the more it will help us make Homeschool Planet the best it can be.

What do I do if I have a question?

As a participant in the beta test, you have direct access to the programmers who created it, just by sending mail to betatest@homeschool-planner.com. If you have a question or uncover a problem, send a message and one of them will get back to you as soon as they can. And don’t feel uncomfortable asking questions! We are eager to hear from you and to help you be successful with Homeschool Planet.

Where can I learn more?

You can check out more questions and answers at the Beta Test FAQ. We’ll be adding more as questions come in from the beta test participants. And the Homeschool Planet Help web site contains tutorials and explanations of all the features of Homeschool Planet.

Thanks again for participating!