Hello awesome humans! 👋 Brendan here, bringing you the details of our latest updates that improve your lives, and the lives of your patients. Let's dive in!

Version 6

Version 6, released at the end of 2023, represents a huge leap forward in the capability of your Forms. There's too much to mention here, so check out the
​What's New in v6 article, or check out the video below for the highlights:

Print blank forms

Ever had the internet go down and been unable to use Finger-Ink? Or a patient who refused to use an iPad to fill out a Form?

We know how much effort you've all put into designing your perfect Forms within Finger-Ink — so we put some effort into giving you a "print preview" of your Form. Access it through this new button in the Form editor:

We do our best to ensure your visibility conditions are followed — obviously we can't show or hide questions on paper as the pen is writing, but we do try to label anything with a visibility condition appropriately — so they're answered only when required.

Print preview is a "beta" feature for now as there may be some rough edges. Please let us know if you find any. 🙏

Web Form improvements

Better sidebar for smaller resolutions

When Forms are filled out on a laptop or desktop, we show a sidebar. This sidebar shows your logo, clinic & Form name, and the sections contained within the Form — among other things.

The sidebar now displays more easy-to-follow progress as you move through the sections:

It's also resized in a smarter way: the logo is no longer hidden, and if the list of sections is too long, a scroll bar for the sections appears and is moved as you progress through the Form.

Logo displayed on mobile devices

Previously the logo was only displayed on the sidebar. Now, we also display the logo prominently on mobile devices:

Required fields are more obvious

Previously, we placed an asterisk next to a field to show it was required. We've now introduced a much more obvious "required" label, which changes to a tick once the field has been filled:

(note: this tick also appears when an option field is filled)

Multi-line text fields auto-expand

Multi-line text fields now automatically expand when more text is entered than the box originally allows for:

That's all for now! Enjoy the updates, and thanks for reading 🥳

Hello to all you fantastic people, happy Friday! 🤩 Today I bring you news of good things that have recently made their way to Finger-Ink. Onward!

Autosave

This is something that's actually been "live" for about 3 weeks, but we just didn't say anything about it. 😅

Well here's the scoop: web forms now keep track of where you are, and what you've filled as you go through the form, with Autosave:

Autosave is enabled by default, but it can be disabled by clicking the autosave button in the sidebar — the one that changes to indicate changes are saved:

If the form is accidentally refreshed, or left in an open tab for a few hours then revisited, progress won't be lost! 🎉

Note: if the tab is closed, then any progress is removed for privacy reasons.

Improved connectivity

Ever had your iPad just stop receiving appointment updates? Or stop sending filled forms to the portal? Like it decided to ghost you?

This may have happened occasionally in the past, but it's now a thing of the, er... past. 😁

A process now runs on the server that detects the problem, and fixes it — no more ghosting!

Version 6

Some of you astute individuals may have noticed that we just ticked over a major number: the portal is now running v6.0.0! That's because we're getting super close to releasing the new form editor, complete with all it's lovely goodies.

We'll be sending out further communication about this in the coming days/weeks, but if you'd like to get in early for a sneak peek, do let us know and we'll enable the beta for your account!

That's all for now. As always, if you have any questions about anything at all, don't hesitate to reach out. 🥳

Hello you awesome humans! We haven't shared much news recently, and yet somehow we've gone from versions 5.31.0 to 5.39.0. How did that happen?

Well, the culprit is our new form editor (currently in beta). It expands greatly upon the existing capabilities of our forms, and we hope to release it to everyone within the next month.

Until then, please feel free to check out the new editor changelog, which I'm updating as new features are added.

If you'd like to get access to the beta, do let us know.

A new date picker

This has actually been around for a little while now, but we're only just reporting on it.

Our date picker has evolved to be more usable on the web — dates can now be entered with a keyboard, or via a dropdown menu:

Even more capacity

In other news, we increased our server capacity over the weekend — we're now operating at 2x our previous specs so everything will feel even snappier than usual.

That's it for now. Thanks for reading! 👋

Hello to all you fantastic people! Our latest 5.31.0 update brings news of some tweaks we've been doing to improve our web forms experience. Let's dive in.

A new loading indicator for forms

When a form URL was visited, a "skeleton" page is displayed while the connection is made to the form — after which the welcome screen is displayed.

Previously, a blank screen with the usual green background would be displayed while the connection was made. Most of the time this didn't matter as forms load pretty quickly — but on a mobile connection this could take a few seconds.

So, we've introduced a new loading indicator that is displayed as soon as the page is loaded, while we wait for the connection:

A new "please wait" page

We do a lot behind the scenes to make sure that our forms feel as snappy as possible — including caching our forms.

This simply means: instead of having to go to the database each time someone requests a form, we get them all from the database when the server boots — and keep them in a place that can provide them quickly upon request.

If someone happened to be requesting a form immediately after the server booted (for instance after we deployed a new version) — it used to display a "form not found" page:

The patient would thus think that the form URL they were sent was incorrect, and would have to go back to the clinic to ask for the "right" one. That was extra work and frustration that wasn't needed.

With this new update, we now direct patients to a waiting page if form caching process hasn't yet completed:

This page automatically reloads when their form is ready — meaning no extra work and frustration.

While this wasn't a common occurrence, it did occur occasionally and was worth sorting.

More modern browser requirements

Browsers are getting better and better at keeping themselves up-to-date. With each subsequent update, bugs are fixed, security is improved and new features are added.

We had previously tried to maintain compatibility with very old browsers. This meant having to convert a bunch of the new code we were using into code that was compatible with these older browsers. This increased both the surface area for errors to occur, and the download size of each of our form pages.

As the vast majority of our users are using quite recent versions of the major browsers, we decided it was time to support a much more modern stack.

If you, or one of your patients, is running a browser that is out-of-date, they will be notified and won't be able to fill out the form until they switch to a more modern browser. We support pretty much everything released in the last couple of years.

That's all for now, but we've got lots more on the way in 2023 so watch this space! 😊

Cover image by Caleb Russell.

Heya party people! This is a tricky bit of news to share, but it needs to be done.

We had some down-time

If you're not in the UK you probably didn't know but, two weeks ago, we had some down-time. 😬 This was our first significant period own down-time in the history of Finger-Ink. The entire platform was unusable for a number of hours.

Even worse, a couple of days later there were further issues for the same group of customers. Web forms were still available, but a large part of Finger-Ink's functionality was offline for a number of hours.

I've heard from many of you as to how frustrating this was. To everyone who experienced this outage — I am truly sorry.

It's been sorted

As of writing this, all major issues having a hand in this have been addressed, and Finger-Ink is in the best shape since our introduction of the portal.

If you're interested in understanding what went wrong, and what's been done to address this, please read on.

The first outage

Occasionally, the servers that run Finger-Ink need patching. Security and stability updates are released, and these need to be applied in order to ensure our servers are not vulnerable.

Our hosting provider ensures that our servers are up-to-date. They do this by applying these patches for us, as required. At the time, however, it also meant that our servers would be restarted automatically after these patches were applied.

Prior to this event, all patching had been done during Finger-Ink's office hours (or close enough to them). This was important because, when our application came online, there were some manual steps that needed to be performed in order to make sure that our encryption module comes online. This encryption module is used throughout Finger-Ink — nothing can operate without it.

Unfortunately, on this day, the patching and restarting was done well outside of our regular hours. When the application came back online, and sent a notification that the manual steps were required, no one was around to receive it. This meant the encryption module remained offline, until I checked in on things at 5:30am the following morning, and brought the encryption module online.

The second outage

Following the first outage, on that same day, we deployed a change to ensure that the encryption module could come online all by itself — without requiring any manual steps.

This ran well until another patch was applied a day or two later. The server was restarted again, after hours. The encryption module came back online, as intended, but the key server (our new fancy tech that ensures API keys aren't removed immediately after being told they're invalid by the Cliniko API) did not, due to it running into database connection limits.

While the portal remained usable, web forms couldn't match to patients, and workflow couldn't run.

Getting it sorted

Since then, our top priority has been making sure that this does not happen again. In addition to ensuring that the encryption module always comes back online, we've also taken further steps to improve reliability.

Regarding unplanned patches & server restarts:

1. Patches are now only applied once per week, rather than daily.
2. Server restarts after patching need to be initiated by Finger-Ink, they will no longer happen automatically. This ensures we will be there to make sure everything comes back online, just in case.

Regarding database connectivity & capacity:

• Our database connection limits have been increased 3-fold.
• We've optimised our database connection configuration to ensure that waiting for the database a little longer than usual doesn't cause errors.

Other things we've done:

• Optimised our start-up procedures within the app to reduce initial load on the server during boot.
• Reduced unnecessary load on the server
• Fixed an issue which, due to server load, could have caused appointment syncing (from the iPad) to pause until the next launch of the app.
• Implemented a more thorough monitoring system for our platform.

Going forward

All is going well thus far. The new connection limits have increased the overall snappiness of the portal interface, and we haven't had any further issues.

There are some additional changes coming the platform, which will reduce memory usage even further.

Thank you all for your continued support. 🙏

Cover image by Ian Taylor.

Hey awesome humans! This update will go unnoticed for most of you, but it actually took a surprisingly large amount of engineering resource to get done properly. 😅

What's the deal?

All existing Finger-Ink accounts were created by entering in an API key, which came out of Cliniko. Some accounts have multiple API keys connected: maybe one for each practitioner, or perhaps one for every connected portal user. These API keys are used as passwords so that we can talk to the Cliniko API on your behalf (to do things like send PDFs to your patient records).

Sometimes, these API keys become invalid:

1. They can be removed by the owner via the Cliniko UI.
2. The user can be made inactive in Cliniko.
3. The user can be removed from the original Cliniko account entirely.

If we ever tried to use an invalid API key with the Cliniko API, then Cliniko would tell us that the key is invalid. Before this change, if we ever received a reply from the API that a key was invalid, we'd remove it instantly and go on about our business.

Unfortunately, what we didn't know before, is that there are certain times where is is possible that the API will tell us that a given key is invalid, when it actually isn't. This is not very common, but it does happen occasionally.

During a recent Cliniko API outage, that only lasted a minute or so, our system managed to remove valid API keys from over 30 accounts — which was pretty annoying for everyone involved!

So what have we done?

We fixed it! 😁

There's a lot of technical details I could go into but, for fear of putting you to sleep, I shall not.

The gist is we will no longer remove a connected API key from Finger-Ink, until it has received quite a few "invalid" responses from the Cliniko API, in the space of a week or so.

You may occasionally get an email about a key being suspended. If this happens, and you don't think the key is invalid, please do let us know.

Otherwise, keep using Finger-Ink without having to worry about any of this. 🤩

Cover image by Yuyeung Lau

Hey all! This has actually live for a few weeks now, but here's the low down:

Our web forms have a new date picker! 🥳

Date picking on the web has been somewhat of a contentious issue for quite a while. We originally released our date fields with keyboard-only entry. This was great for some, but others wanted to be able to use a calendar to pick a date — so we changed it. For most, that was great. But for some using Finger-Ink forms internally, this really slowed down entry.

Well, now we've got the best of both worlds: keyboard entry by default, with a date picker when you want one.

Enjoy ❤️