Blog
Weather Related Outages For Most of Olympia (Delayed MOS Support)
Posted on January 20, 2012 at 12:03 pm by Ivan Stanojevic
I’m writing this post from California as one of the only employees of MerchantOS with power. An unusually large winter storm has covered Olympia with snow and freezing rain knocking out power to most employees houses (some were working from home) and at our main office. Those with power do not have internet. All of our support is run out of Olympia and we are not able to field your calls or emails right now.
I apologize for the trouble. We do have a couple people available with communication to handle emergency situations and continue close monitoring of our systems.
** Point of sale software customer service is now back to normal **
MerchantOS API Changes
Posted on January 16, 2012 at 12:00 am by Nathan Horter
It’s been one year since we first introduced our API. It’s taken a lot of work to get where we are and it will take even more to get where we want to go with our API. We’ve seen ever increasing use of our API for external integrations like Perkville and internal projects like adding new inventory and generating packing lists. We wouldn’t have been able to make many of the improvements listed below without the valuable feedback of our API users. Thank you for your feedback and suggestions.
We are proud to annouce some changes and improvements to our API that are coming in our next release. Here is a quick overview of what is coming.
API Errors Returned in the Requested Format
Now when the API encounters an error instead of returning an html error page it will return error information in the format that was selected in the request (XML or JSON). This should allow for better error handling by client applications.
Fixes to API Datetimes
There was a bug that was causing some datetimes in the API to be returned incorrectly. Datetimes are now returned as GMT corrected for the timezone set in account.
Add Category and Tags to Receipt Template Items
We had a request to load the Item Category and Tags on the XML returned in the receipt template. This change will give access to those values to people using custom receipt templates.
Load Customer and Employee on Workorders
Another request we had was to load Customer and Employee information on returned Workorder objects. This gives access to the Customer name and address and Employee details for a Workorder without having to make more requests.
Sale Write Access
The biggest change that we have made is open up write access to Sales via the API. This is an important step forward for our API as it exposes more of the functionality of our application via our API. There are some important caveats to the functionality that we have exposed:
- Refunds and Returns are not yet supported
- Sales can be Archived (using the Delete method) or Completed, but they cannot be Unarchived or Uncompleted
- We have made every effort to fully test Sale write access via the API, but proceed with caution. If you find an error or discrepancy please contact us and let us know so we can correct it.
We still have plenty of work to do to improve our point of sale software API, including improving performance and exposing write access to more objects. We’re excited about these changes as they allow us to make big improvements to our product in the future.
If you have an API question, comment, suggestion or issue feel free to contact Nate at nate@merchantos.com.
Weekly Rewind January 13, 2012
Posted on January 13, 2012 at 2:28 pm by Justin Laing
This week brought with it a flurry of activity. We expanded our head quarters, moving the Dev team into a cool new office downstairs. Keep an ear open and an eye out for fresh new developments and updates to the software!
In the coming week, Murdoc is going to tell us all about his holiday trip to Germany, and Chris is going to give us another installment of the Workaround series, this time he’ll be covering coupon items.
- And now, as always, some cool stuff we found in the ether:
- Remember Ted Williams? No, not the baseball icon – I’m talking about the homeless man that became an internet sensation a year ago because of his smooth radio voice. Well, evidently life has taken a turn for the better.
- 343 days. 17 countries. 19 planes. 58 buses. 18 boats. 6,327 photographs. One stunning video.
- A step in the right direction – Apple outs itself over labor violations in its supply chain.
- ‘OK Go’ has an awesome music video/slash web project with the folks at Play with Chrome.
We had a party!
Posted on January 9, 2012 at 5:20 pm by Justin Laing
As you’ve read in recent posts, we’ve been hiring a lot this past year, doubling the size of the company, in fact. We recently had to rent more office space downstairs in order to accomodate the entire development team. In typical MerchantOS fashion, we had a party to celebrate the opening of the MerchantOS Annex!
Now back to improving our point of sale software!
MerchantOS 2011 MixTape
Posted on January 5, 2012 at 1:51 pm by Justin Laing
It’s the end of the year, and like many, we’re looking back on 2011, the highlights, the lowlights, the mediumlights. Our team has doubled in size this year, and with that comes many different influences, no better representation of that is the 2011 MerchantOS MixTape – here for your listening pleasure…