It's mentioned elsewhere and never explained, but the software does support configurable bed lengths and greenhouse (GH) flat capacities.
Bed Lengths
The program's default bed length is 100 feet. That's what I use and it seems reasonable. There is a global setting to change this (File > Settings > Bed Length) for all plantings. But, you might ask, what if you have funny shaped fields (or some other reason) where the beds aren't all the same length. Or what if different fields have different row or bed lengths?
Simple: the program is able to interpret the name of the field that you enter for every planting (as the "location" property). If it finds a number in parenthesis, this number is used as the bed length for that particular planting.
Example (field names entered as the "location" property):
* "field 4" - default bed length (See "File > Settings")
* "oaky field" - default bed length
* "oaky field (200)" - 200' bed length
* "oaky field (225)" - 225' bed length
* "(175)" - 175' bed length, no field name
In fact, every planting can have a different bed length.
Flat Capacity
Following the same general format as the bed length, you can also give names to common GH flats and specify their capacity. By default, the program seeks to convert "name" of the flat to the capacity. (This capacity is used to calculate the number of flats you need to sow in the GH.) This would be the case if you sow seeds in 128 cell flats: you might just enter "128" as the flat size. But say you have a system where they're not refered to by their numeric name; say they're called "G"s. Well, you could enter the flat size as "G (128)" and the program would be able to interpret that the "G" flats can hold 128 plants. We use some soil blocks, and I know that I can fit (at least) 340 of those 3/4" microblocks into a 1020 tray, so -- for all of the crops that seed in microblocks -- I enter the flat size as "microblocks (340)". Same for the bigger blocks: "2 in blocks (50)". For all of the plastic flats, I just enter the numeric size, eg "128" or "72".
Sunday, April 6, 2008
Bugs in Version PreAlpha2
Anyone using the "latest" version of the software will already have figured this out, but new users will appreciate the warning: there are a few particularly annoying bugs in the software relating to apostrophe's and other punctuation. None of them seem to cause major damage or ruin anything (well, except for #1).
1. Really annoying: entering any text value with an apostrophe will alter ALL OF THE ENTRIES, setting the property in question to the text which appears before the apostrophe. For example, if you tried to create a pepper with the variety name "Joe's Long Cayenne" will set the variety for ALL ENTRIES to "Joe". Like I said, really annoying.
2. Still annoying, but less so: Spaces and other punctuation are not allowed in crop plan names.
3. The farm name on the printed planting lists is always set to "Fail Better Farm". I know. Sorry.
All of these have been fixed in my internal development version, but there are some other changes in progress that are preventing from making an updated release.
1. Really annoying: entering any text value with an apostrophe will alter ALL OF THE ENTRIES, setting the property in question to the text which appears before the apostrophe. For example, if you tried to create a pepper with the variety name "Joe's Long Cayenne" will set the variety for ALL ENTRIES to "Joe". Like I said, really annoying.
2. Still annoying, but less so: Spaces and other punctuation are not allowed in crop plan names.
3. The farm name on the printed planting lists is always set to "Fail Better Farm". I know. Sorry.
All of these have been fixed in my internal development version, but there are some other changes in progress that are preventing from making an updated release.
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