Make the workspace your own

Personalise last, and that is deliberate

This step comes at the end of the journey for a simple reason: you do not know what you want to hide until you have used the app. A keeper who never shows at exhibitions, another who does not track expenses, a third who lives in the Laying page six months a year, all need a different screen.

Nothing that follows is irreversible, and a reset button returns the sidebar and the dashboard to their original state.

The sidebar

In Configuration, Navigation tab, you reorder the modules and hide the ones you do not use. The order you choose also applies to the navigation buttons on the phone, which spares you having two mental models of a single tool.

The collapse button, at the bottom of the bar, reduces it to its icons. On a thirteen-inch laptop, that is a hundred or so pixels handed back to the working window, and the state is remembered between sessions.

The dashboard

The dashboard is an assembly of widgets, each summing up one aspect of the aviary: the flock by sex, the week’s and the month’s egg production, revenue, expenses, the laying chart, the breakdown by species and breed, upcoming hatches, banding due, recent activity, the weather for your location.

In the Dashboard tab of the configuration, each widget switches on or off, moves with the arrows, and changes size: small, medium, large or full width. The greeting stays at the top and does not move. Changes save themselves as you click.

The quick actions widget is worth a visit: it carries four shortcuts you choose, and it decides what you reach in one click every morning.

The opening view of each module

Every module opens in grid, list or table, and that choice is set module by module in the Default views tab. The grid shows cards, the list goes dense, the table gives sortable columns.

The same page lets you decide that a module opens straight into fullscreen on a computer. That is the setting to make for the one you open first every day.

The windowed interface

On a computer, every page opens in a window you move, resize, minimise or maximise, as on a desktop. Two windows side by side, the pair list and a bird’s record, beat going back and forth between two pages.

On mobile, that mechanism disappears of its own accord in favour of tab navigation at the bottom of the screen.

The command palette

Cmd+K on Mac, Ctrl+K on PC, or the search bar in the sidebar: the palette searches the whole aviary, birds, pairs, clutches, aviaries, exhibitions, expenses and health records. It also navigates to any page and launches the quick actions, and it keeps your recent searches.

It is the shortcut that replaces the most clicks. A ring number is enough to open the matching record, without going through the Birds page or its filters, and the six creation forms, bird, pair, clutch, health record, exhibition and expense, open from the palette whatever page you happen to be on.

The moves that save time

The three-dot menu, at the top right of the cards, and a right click on an item open the same quick actions: add to favourites, edit, open the record, add a health record, delete. The entries offered change with what is under the cursor, and some save far more than a click: on a pair, “Add a laying” opens the form with the pair already filled in, without going through the Laying page or the record.

The star marks a bird as a favourite, and the “Favourites only” filter brings them together. It is the simplest way to keep the few birds you are watching this season within reach.

Theme and units

The theme is chosen in the settings: light, dark, or automatic following your system. On a computer, a button in the sidebar switches without going through the settings.

Units of measurement are set in the same place, Celsius or Fahrenheit, which changes the weather widget and the forecast detail.

Your settings follow you

Everything you have just set is stored on the server, not in the browser. The sidebar order, the widgets, the default views and the theme are the same on the aviary computer, on the tablet and on the phone.