Warning Message when Screen Resolution is Below Minimum Spec

To enjoy Hero in all of it’s glory, you need to use a screen resolution (laptop or monitor) that is at least set to our minimum screen resolution (Canadian System Requirements and American System Requirements). If your screen resolution is below our minimum requirement parts of Hero will not function as designed. To remind you of this, we will now display a login message warning you of that fact.

 

Warning message displayed at login when screen resolution below minimum needed.

Preparing for Expanded TWAIN Integration

Deployed the evening of June 11, 2013.

One of my favorite movies is 2010, the sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey. You’ll find a great deal of foreshadowing in this movie, all of which builds up to the revelation that the... well, I won’t ruin it for you. One scene I like in particular is where a character asks, “What’s going to happen?” and the other character answers, “Something wonderful.” (See the clip.)

Perhaps that’s a little too dramatic. But, it’s fun, nonetheless. We’ve made some changes to our current TWAIN integration in preparation for a major upgrade to our existing TWAIN integration capabilities.

“What are we going to change?”

“Something wonderful.”

Our development team has been busy working on a new TWAIN integration to allow the capture of files from multiple different TWAIN compatible devices. Once complete our VIP customers will be able to capture images from a large variety of different TWAIN compatible devices, such as intraoral cameras, document scanners, etc. But that’s a secret until the TWAIN integration is completed. Anyway, we needed to make some changes in Hero to prepare for that integration.

Our upload dialog changes are relatively small. You will notice there has been a button name change; Upload changed to Capture. Dialogs indicating the progress of file uploads have also been combined into one upload dialog box.

 

The plugin changes can be seen in Admin > Plugins. There is a new plugin option called the Curve Capture Plugin. The Imaging Plugin has been removed and the old Twain Plugin has been renamed the Dynasoft Twain Plugin.

 

The functionality of the Dynasoft Plugin has not changed, other than a name change, and can continue to be used as before with most TWAIN devices.

For US Customers

The Curve Capture Plugin will be used for acquiring files through imaging devices and from TWAIN-compatible devices (when completed). This new plugin will be available in all modules, except for the Imaging module if your practice has not subscribed to our Imaging Module. The Dynasoft plugin is also only available in our Imaging Module to customers who have subscribed to our imaging module.

For Canadian Customers

The Curve Capture Plugin will be used for acquiring files from our soon to be released TWAIN integration and will be available in all modules.

Please make sure to check out our Community for helpful articles.

Confirmation When Deleting a File or Letter

We’ve made sure that a warning appears whenever you right-click to delete something from the Files and Letters module. This will help stop accidental deletions.

“Accidental?” you ask.

Well, yes. Just ask Rose Mary Woods, the personal secretary of US President Richard Nixon. During the height of the Watergate controversy, Ms. Woods testified that she accidentally deleted five minutes of recorded conversation between President Nixon and and his chief of staff. It’s interesting to note that those five minutes somehow turned into 18½ minutes and deleted potentially juicy words that the prosecution would really liked to have heard.

The point here is Ms. Woods had been using Curve Hero there would have been no “terrible mistake.” As a result, perhaps President Nixon would have been exonerated if the recording were not accidentally deleted. Or, perhaps President Nixon would have served some time in jail.

We shall never know. But, for our VIP customers, they’ll never have to worry about accidental deletions.

 
A warning dialog will pop up when deleting a file or letter to prevent accidental deletions.

New Bank Deposit Report and Improved Period Summary Report

Released the morning of June 5, 2013.

Sometimes, on the first effort, you nail it. Other times you look at the end result of your efforts and you say, “We can do better.” So, we went back to the drawing board to design a bank deposit slip our customers love and something we can really be proud of. We also heard from our customers that the Period Summary Report was just okay. “Just okay” is good enough for client-server fodder, not for state-of-the-art cloud applications. We made some wonderful improvements that are sure to be a hit.

Bank Deposit Report

It’s one thing to say your practice ended the day with x in production. But none of that matters if it doesn’t get deposited in the bank. Our newly redesigned Bank Deposit Report helps. Information is grouped by payment type, which is what you’d expect; however we also added some very simple filters to help you run the report faster and display the information you really want to see. Moreover, all of the information in the report is nicely summarized on the last page, the actual Bank Deposit Slip, which is the part you’ll want to print and take to the bank.

The all new Bank Deposit Report makes this task easier to complete.

You can learn more about the all new Bank Deposit Report by visiting the Curve Community:

• Generate the Bank Deposit
• Understand the Bank Deposit

Improved Period Summary Report

We have also given our Period Summary Report a facelift to simplify period end reporting. Our taking the surgical knife to the Period Summary Report is a success and this star report has never been more beautiful.

We’ve improved the organization and look and feel, which has resulted in a more simplified report without decreasing the information that can be retrieved. We’ve also made the filters easier to use so you can generate a basic report with a minimal number of clicks.

A few injections of Botox and BAM! the new Period Summary Report looks fantastic!

In its current form the Period Summary Report looks sexy on screen. If you wish to print the report it won’t appear as what you see on screen. We hope that our customers are printing less and less, but we also realize that sometimes a printed report can’t be substituted by anything else. That’s why we’ll be making changes to the printed version in the near future.

Want to learn more? Visit Curve Community to view other Period Summary Report information.

Printing Images from Curve Hero: A Simple Right-click Affair!

Our development team is making changes to the software on a continuous basis. We no longer deploy new versions of the software with new features. Instead, when a new feature becomes available we make it available to our VIP customers (and all of our customers are VIP’s) immediately.

We just added new printing functionality to Curve Hero specific to digital images. Printing images from Curve Hero has a been a rock-in-the-shoe type of thing for our customers, so much so that we made some project assignment changes that would shift priorities. And now our customers can enjoy that feeling of relief when you stop to take the rock out of the shoe.

Now our customers can print images by simply right-clicking on an individual image, anywhere within Curve Image, such as:

• recently acquired images in Starting Point of Imaging
• image thumbnails in Imaging Gallery
• individual images in the Viewer
• images in the mount slot
• images in a fullscreen mode
• associated images in Planning or Historical Charting

When you print an image, the printed document will include the image (duh!) and patient information, such as the patient’s first and last name, patient’s date of birth, site name and address, patient’s default dentist, date image was taken, date printed and associated teeth.

Improving Border Security: Staff Member First Name Now a Required Field

While doing a perimeter check, our development team decided to tweak staff name requirements within Curve Hero, which will strengthen current security measures. Effective immediately, when entering staff information a first name is now a required field. Next time you add a new staff member to Hero you can only save the new addition if the First Name field contains a name. Hero doesn’t care what name you put in there (a recent google search shows the most popular names for babies in 2012 were Sophia for a girl and Aiden for a boy), just as long as you throw in a name.

If you wish to remove a staff member all you need to do is change the staff member status from Active to Inactive. All Inactive staff members will still appear in the list, but are greyed out.

Mobile Phone Access to Patient Information and Schedules: One Small Step for Now, More Giant Leaps to Come!

From this moment forward you can pull out your mobile phone and access patient contact information and the practice’s schedule. Our new mobile phone capability provides you with access to key practice information when you’re out and about, running errands, walking the dog, or standing in line to see Santa.

You can log into Hero using almost any browser on almost any mobile phone, using the same URL, username and password. You will need to add a new permission role to every team member’s account in Hero to gain access to the mobile phone application. You may or may not want to let every member of your team access practice information using their mobile phones. That’s completely up to you.

You are able to search for and view basic patient information, make calls and text message to patients, and view the scheduler. See these exciting screen shots:

Searching for a patient is pretty standard; just begin typing in the search box. Patients matching the search string will appear below.

Touch any patient in the search results to view more information. A picture of the patient will appear (if one is on file) as well as the patient’s age, status, and type.

To send a text to a patient, touch the “Send Txt Message” button and then choose the applicable phone number to send the text to.

To call the patient directly, touch the “Call a Number” button and then choose the number you wish to call.

You can also view your practice’s schedule, one operatory at a time.

To find out more about our mobile phone web application, please make sure to check out our articles featured on the starting page of Community.