It's often the little things and the attention to detail that make a product stand out from the competition. You can only learn these things if you are always in contact with the customers - better: with the users. And this is exactly what we try to live at INTRASOFT; the constant exchange with the user base and taking valuable feedback on the product and its operation.

In recent months, there have been repeated requests to improve the navigator in PQFORCE, i.e. the dynamic menu on the left side of the browser. For some users it is not always clear which object is currently selected and visible in the main window. For others, the setting buttons are not clearly placed or are even superfluous. Since this feedback has accumulated and all went in the same direction, we have decided to take action. Here is a picture showing a direct comparison between the old and the new navigator (click to enlarge):

The good thing up front is that the Navigator remains the Navigator. We haven't thrown everything overboard. But the following points are different - the numbers refer to the picture:

1. The navigator has been made a little brighter and lighter. What was grey until now, namely the bars for the object groups, has now become white.
2. Now, when clicking on a sub-object, this object is no longer navigated, but simply displayed in the main window.
3. Only by clicking on the arrow on the right side of the bar, the object is actually navigated and becomes the selected main object, displayed in the header of the navigator. This is just the reverse of today's behavior. Up to R4.04 the object was navigated by clicking on the bar and by clicking on the eye symbol on the right side of the bar it was only displayed.
4. The selected object (main object or subobject) is now highlighted more clearly. Whether the main object (light blue highlighting of the navigator header) or a subobject (light blue highlighting of the corresponding bar) is selected should become more obvious than it is today. For example, it should become clearer that a scenario (subobject) of a project (main object) is selected and thus displayed in the main window.
5. To make this selection even clearer, an explicit message is now displayed at the bottom left when a subobject is selected (so-called toast). The user is informed that this object is now selected and that the main object can be selected again by clicking on the header. This message can be deactivated if it is no longer needed.
6. The button to close and open the navigator has been moved to the top right of the navigator header. We left out the pin to dock the navigator to the main window, as it was rarely used and hardly adds any value.
7. The state of an open or closed object group is now saved automatically. And since the opening and closing of all groups was rarely used, we removed the whole line with the options to clean it up a bit.
8. And finally, we removed the back arrow that navigates back to the last selected object. This can (and always could, by the way) be done with the browser's back button. In Chrome on Windows, by the way, you can do this with the Alt+left arrow key combination.

Of course, there are further functional enhancements in release 4.05.0. For example, the portfolio tree is now colored with the colors of the project statuses and the portfolio affiliation of a project can be edited in the side panel. Furthermore, the project controlling view has been made more flexible, so that now the efforts and costs are broken down more clearly and, if desired, also customer-specific. As always, you can find everything else in the integrated release notes.

We hope all users enjoy exploring the latest release and working with PQFORCE on a daily basis! And remember: We take feedback very seriously and will gladly implement good ideas and suggestions for improvement in future releases.