2.0 Growing Pains

Overall, the release of TherapyLog 2.0 went very smoothly. There was one issue, however, that did plague us for a little while , and now that it's resolved I just wanted to put out a public service announcement to let everyone know about the issue, and about what was done to fix it.

PDF Lesson Plans

One thing that many of our users told us last year was that they felt like they just couldn't use the printable lesson plan. "We'd like to", they'd say, "but the information is so badly formatted and improperly proportioned that it's just not usable".

Well, dissatisfaction is not acceptable in our office. Ideally (in my software-developer mind), no one would have to use paper for anything, but some therapists really want to have that lesson plan sheet with them to keep notes on, and if that's something that's critical to the therapists than it's critical to us. So we thought about what we could do to make lesson plans easier for therapists to print reliably; we tried better formatting for our web page and more restrictive margins, but because of different screen resolutions, different operating systems, and different browsers, it just proved to be too tough to get a format that looked good for EVERYone. Then we had an idea: if we made these lesson plans PDF files instead of web pages, the standardization of the format would mean we could get everything (student info, goals, activities, etc) into that file with pixel-perfect formatting that would be the same no matter what browser you downloaded it from.

So we ripped out all the code that did lesson plan generation and re-wrote it from scratch to make it generate a PDF file. We were really proud of this when our first batch of therapists started using this new feature, but there was a problem: Internet Explorer 7 users were unable to get anything to happen when they tried to print their lesson plans.

Fortunately, it didn't take us long to find the problem. IE7 doesn't recognize PDF files as downloadable unless you include special indicators called "headers" to let it know. Since we're a Firefox office, we never ran into a problem. Thanks to the feedback and diagnostic information from Christina Finazzo (Special School District), Anna Bembower (St Louis Public Schools), Donna Brown (Spokane), Emiliya Fradkina (St Louis Public Schools), and Martha Polen (Cape Girardeau), we were able to isolate, test and fix the bug before it had any widespread effects. It always pays to let us know as soon as there's a problem, since that means we can get it fixed that much quicker.

Keep that feedback coming, and let us know if there's anything we can do to make your work flow easier. We can't promise to do it all, but we do promise to listen to and consider any idea or suggestion that our users have. If we can't do it, we'll at least let you know why and what other routes we could take to solve the same problem.

~Ethan