New Hide Employee Total Hours Option

We just added an option to remove the total hours for each employee on non-manager schedules. When logged in as a manager, you will always see the total hours for each employee on the left end of the schedule. Go to Scheduler Properties and click the Hide Employee Total Hours box, scroll down and hit save. Now if there is tension regarding the number of hours handed out, it will be less obvious.

Happy Scheduling,

schedule-my-employees.com

New Hide Pay Option

To make it easy to hide the pay rate for employees when a manager is editing the schedule, we have added a new Hide Pay option. This is very handy so an employee walking up to a manager when they are working on a schedule can not peak at what everyone makes. It only hides the employees pay on the manager's view schedule. The pay rates are not affected and the total for all employees is still displayed.

You will see the option in the Scheduler Properties area under the View Code field:

Happy Scheduling,

schedule-my-employees.com

Clear Day Bug Resolved

The red X used to clear all the selections for a day has been fixed. If you notice any further issues, please leave a comment.

Happy Scheduling,

schedule-my-employees.com

New Option to Display Schedules in AM/PM or 24 Hour Time

You can now go to the Scheduler Properties area and select to display schedules in AM/PM or 24 hour time. Currently editing is still done in AM/PM time regardless of the display format setting.

Happy Scheduling,

schedule-my-employees.com

New Employee and Schedule Shift Notes Feature

We have added a feature that has been requested a number of times. It allows you to add short (up to 250 characters) notes on schedules below the employee's name and the shift segments. The notes have some extra features that can help in controlling the display of the notes without making the schedule explode in size. These feattures are:

- Ability to set how many characters of a note you want to display under the name and shift segments

- Hovering your mouse over a note displays the complete note in a tool tip box

- The employee mobile friendly view pages display the entire note

- Notes that begin with http are automatically converted to web links that display as

If you want to use this new feature, we recommend you go to the Scheduler Properties area and decide how many characters you want to display under employee names and shift segments. Don't stress too much over this, you can always go back and adjust these settings as needed. Look for an area like you see below, pick the values and save.

Now you can go and edit one of your employees. Below each segment, you will find a edit box to enter a note for each segment. Remember, notes starting with http will be converted into links.

In the employee properties area you will find new note editing fields. The Employee Notes field works the same as the segment notes fields--displaying on the schedule, length limited, the whole note showing up when the cursor is hovered over the note and notes starting with http converted in to links. The Employee Private Notes field can be used to keep track of information you don't want displayed on the schedule. You will only be able to view and edit the private notes when logged into the scheduler.

Below is how the above example shift segment notes will appear on a schedule:

Happy Scheduling,

schedule-my-employees.com

Confusion With Desired Hours Indicator Limits

It seems the help text we had next to the Desired Hours Indicator Limits fields was leading users to enter the actual range of hours an employee should be scheduled. This is incorrect. The fields are instead used to set the number of hours the employee scheduled hours can deviate from the desired hours set for each employee. Once an employee's scheduled hours go above or below the desired hours plus/minus the Desired Hours Indicator Limits, the scheduled total will change color on the schedule. Below is the new help text:

If an employee has the desired hours field set, and their scheduled hours are above the desired hours plus the Above limit, or below the desired hours minus the Below limit, it will be indicated on the manager view schedule.


Happy Scheduling,
schedule-my-employees.com

Continuously play all mp3 files in a directory in Linux

I was working a project to play background music in a restaurant on the cheap.  So I put together this small script to continuously play all the mp3 files in a directory in Linux. This was written and tested on Ubuntu 10.04, but should work as long as mpg123 is installed. Any old box you have laying around that can run Ubuntu should have no problems running this script. The tricky part was getting the script to work when there are spaces in the file names. The `read file` command was the solution to the space in the mp3 filenames issue.

Put the script below into a file, make it executable, and pass the directory with the mp3s you want to play on the command line.


#!/bin/bash

while sleep 1; do
  find "$1" -type f |grep .mp3$ |while read file; do
    mpg123 "$file"
  done
done