What's New

The Schedule used to be one long list, which suited the things that happen every day and made planning a particular date a scroll. It is now two views of the same programme: Every day for the standing shape of a day - breakfast, the briefing, the bar - and By date, a month where each day carries the number of things written for it. Pick a day and you see that day, with Add an event on 18 September ready; a day also tells you how many every-day events join it, so what you read is what the screen will show. A Find an event Edge server searches titles, detail, times and dates - in By date it looks across every date at once, for the event whose day you cannot remember. Every event now carries its number and lights up as you work in it, exactly like the menu items. The tab that will one day subscribe to an outside calendar is now called Feed, so the word calendar means one thing.

A property has one day's programme, so the Schedule now keeps it in one place for the whole board rather than inside each panel. Put a Schedule on as many screens and pages as you like - the welcome page, the bar, a cabin - and they all show the same programme; change a time in any one of them, or from the staff panel on a phone, and every screen follows at once. Until now a copied Schedule quietly carried its own copy of the events, which looked identical on the day it was made and drifted the moment either was edited. The staff panel no longer asks which schedule you mean, because there is only one.

A vessel running Yachtica EasyBUS can now be driven from the guest screens directly, with no processor in between. Add the ship's ICB ETH gateway once in the Automation tab and every circuit on the bus becomes mappable: lights and dimmers, RGB and tunable-white strips with real colour control, and blinds and TV lifts you can send to a position. Everything reports back, so a lamp switched at the wall keypad moves on the screen within a second. Scenarios already programmed aboard in Cabot can be fired from a menu button or folded into a LookVay scene. A step-by-step setup guide walks the owner and the Yachtica installer through it together, and the Automation tab links to it directly.

Until now the Schedule was a sign: it turned its own pages and a guest read what went past. It can be walked now. Switch on Let the guest scroll it and the arrow keys step through the day, the row in the middle opening as it is reached to show its picture and its full line of detail. Left and right move to yesterday and tomorrow, as far either side as you allow - How many days either side, up to a fortnight, so a guest can look ahead to Saturday without getting lost in March. A Schedule can also be put on a menu button now, exactly like the concierge; opened that way it always answers the remote, whether or not you switched scrolling on for the copy sitting on the page, because a guest who picked it from a menu came to read it. And the heading says which day you are on without anyone having to read the date: today keeps its accent colour, a day still to come is drawn in the ordinary text colour, and a day already gone is muted with every one of its events dimmed - so a guest stepping back and forth can never take yesterday for today. Both of those colours are yours to set.

A new Schedule widget writes the day onto the board - a time, a title and a line of detail per row: "07:30 Breakfast on the aft deck". Each event can carry a picture and an icon, run every day or on one date, and be shown to chosen rooms only, so a crew briefing and a guest programme can live on the same board. An event that has finished goes quiet rather than disappearing, so a guest reading at four in the afternoon still sees the shape of the whole day. If the day is longer than the panel, the panel turns its own pages on a timer - a television never needs the remote to read it, and a finger can still scroll it on a tablet. It speaks the guest's language: a Translate switch on each event and a Translate all / None pair above the list, exactly as your menu items work, so a dish or a place name you want left as you typed it stays that way. The look is yours - Frame around the programme, Lines between the events, which side the picture sits on and how wide it is - and a Just the list button strips all of it back to plain rows over a photograph in one press.

Your duty manager or your captain now has a link of their own - the same idea as the concierge link, for the room desk instead of the order queue. They open it on a phone and see every room at a glance, occupied or free, with the guest's name; tap a room and they can check a guest in, check them out, correct a name, or switch that room's language - without a dashboard account and without ever seeing your settings, your billing or anyone else's property. You decide what the panel offers: a checklist in the board's Manager panel dialog turns each function on or off, and anything you leave unticked is refused outright, not merely hidden from the screen. Two further functions start switched off because they reveal more - showing a room's screen PIN, handy at check-in, and emailing a room its screen link. Turn it on from the Manager panel tab when you edit a board (or the same entry in the board's actions menu), copy the link, and paste it into a chat with your manager. If someone leaves, rotate the key and every link you handed out stops working at once.

A phone turned to landscape is wider than any tablet, so the Tablet look left a black band down each side of it. Every board now has a built-in Phone style as well: while you edit a page's Phone look the canvas shows the phone safe zone - the whole width, with a band off the top and the bottom - and Fit into safe zone on the Phone row, or Fit all pages into phone zone, arranges pages into it in one click, keeping every widget's shape. Set Phone Layout to Phone in the Display tab and a phone held sideways renders that look, ahead of the Tablet Layout; wherever no Phone arrangement exists it falls back to the Tablet look, then the TV look, so nothing changes until you choose it. Tablets, TVs and upright phones are unaffected.

A menu button can now call a member of staff - a steward, a butler, the concierge - and the call becomes a real request the crew has to answer, alongside the room service orders they already work. Choose Call Staff as the item's action, pick the Room Service queue it belongs to and, if you want, the service it is for; the guest presses once and reads your own confirmation on the screen, in their language. On the concierge page - the no-login link the crew opens on a phone or a tablet - the call appears the instant it is raised, marked CALL, with a chime, a notification banner and the waiting count in the browser tab; tap Enable alerts once on each device to arm the sound and the banner. From there it is acknowledged, started and completed exactly like an order, and every phone on the panel sees it the moment a colleague picks it up. Room service orders now reach the panel live as well, instead of on its next refresh. A staff email goes out for every call, and each service can now have its own address: the kitchen's for breakfast, housekeeping's for towels. A service with no address of its own uses the widget's general one, and with neither it goes to the board owner, exactly as before. A guest who presses twice while the first call is still unanswered does not raise a second one. On a property with Crestron the existing call button keeps working untouched - switch on Also call the crew under a Room Control item and one press both fires the relay and raises the ticket. And the guest's screen hears back: when your crew acknowledges the call, the room's screen says so - "your call has been answered, someone is on the way" - and again when it is started or completed, so nobody is left wondering whether anyone saw it. Switch on a short chime with it if you want one. On an iPhone or iPad, add the concierge page to the Home Screen and open it from there - Apple only allows notification banners to an installed page - and the speaker button mutes the chime on one device without touching the others. The concierge page opens on the work that is still waiting, is paged twenty at a time rather than scrolling forever, and when a call arrives while your crew is on another page, tapping the alert takes them straight to it with the card ringed. And it can now say which room is calling: a voice button next to the speaker makes the phone announce "Call from room 214" right after the chime, so a steward who is walking never has to look down.

A Sony Bravia TV or a Yamaha AV receiver can now be driven straight from the room screen over Ethernet, with no Crestron processor in between. In the board's Automation tab add a controller of type Network device (direct IP), pick the device from the list (the standard port fills in), type its IP address and a name, and it is ready: add it to a room as an AV device, choose its zone (a receiver's Main zone or Zone 2 can serve two rooms), and name the inputs the guest should see - HDMI 2 becomes "Sky", HDMI 1 becomes "Apple TV". The Entertainment page then switches it on and off, picks the source and sets the volume, and the screen shows what the device reports, including changes made with its own remote. Choosing a source on a device that is off wakes it first. Volume is guarded: every command is an absolute value, never a "louder" step that could run away, and the guest's 100% is a safe ceiling (60 on a TV, -20 dB on a receiver) that you can change per device in the device form - the device is never sent anything above it. Enable "Simple IP control" and "Remote start" on the TV, and "Network Standby" on the receiver, so they answer while in standby. More brands follow as catalog entries.