The only application I use for my business other than Panorama is MacDraft for my mandatory monthly farm map updates that document my crop rotations and plantings. I use Pan for invoicing, Work Orders, letter and paper writing, product literature, general ledger, Payroll, P&L and Cash Flow statements, and both Federal and California business and personal tax returns. Hence, I don’t need Quick Books, Word, Quark, Excel, Peach Tree, or Turbo Tax. What does ProVUE use Panorama for in managing their business?
Are you thinking this is a “gotcha” question? Of course ProVUE uses Panorama for every aspect of the operation - including bookkeeping, tax preparation, management of Panorama user accounts and payments, running free trials, etc. We don’t use anything but Panorama for anything involving finance - no spreadsheets or third party accounting software.
Panorama is also used for many aspects of actual product development and marketing material. I’m going to elaborate on this for the general audience that might be reading this. The entire Panorama help documentation is created via a Panorama database - there is a video describing this on the web page (it’s one of the Boston CocoaHead ones). The FAQ pages on the web site are also created using another database. A Panorama database is also used to keep track of versions, including release notes and all aspects of publishing a release. When a new Panorama release is ready, I push a single button (Build) which automates the entire process, which takes about 5 minutes.
The Panorama procedure performs all of the actions needed -
- drives Xcode to create the production version of PanoramaX.app.
- signs the app and compresses it to a zip file
- uploads it to Apple for Notarization then waits for Apple’s response
- staples the returned notarization receipt to the app and validates the completed notarization
- uploads the notarized zip file to provue.com
- generates the Panorama Server.app version of the release, compresses it and uploads it
- updates provue.com so that Check for Updates will know about the new release.
All of the updates are tracked in the database associated with this button.
There are probably other uses of Panorama here at ProVUE that I’m not thinking of at the moment. However, there certainly is other software used at ProVUE, Panorama is only used where appropriate. For example, all the Objective-C code is developed using Xcode. Version management is done with Fork (for Git), and Dash is used for viewing developer documentation. Email is done with Mimestream. Web development is primarily done with Panic’s Nova, also a bit with BBEdit. A lot of graphics is done with Keynote, also Pixelmator Pro. I have a lot of other software that is used occasionally, I try to use the best tool for the job whenever possible. For anything organizational that is almost always Panorama.
1 Like
Like Jim and Provue, I’ll bet there are many here who will tell you that they run everything in their company in Panorama databases. We’ve all had to adjust to the switch to Pan X, and most everyone has survived.
Pan X is far more flexible and has many more new features that make database upkeep, manipulation, and generation easier than Pan 6. I, for one, would never want to go back after making the necessary adjustments to my databases to make them Pan X compatible. It was a little bit of work, but it was definitely worth it.
Yeah, we all missed view-as-list functionalities. We found a way around it, and moved on. Then we learned of Pan X’s new capabilities, and tried to incorporate some of them (there are literally hundreds of them; for example, I’m still running across new and improved functions and statements all the time, even years later).
1 Like