TPE Web 4.7 Beta
The first TPE Web 4.7 beta is now available. This adds calendar integration for Shot Plans, making it easier to turn your planning library into an actual shooting schedule.
Add Shot Plans to your calendar
Saved Shot Plans now have an Add to calendar option, with support for:
- Calendar files (
.ics), compatible with Apple Calendar, Google Calendar, Outlook and other calendar apps - Google Calendar
- Outlook.com
Calendar events include the plan’s date and time, location, notes and reference links, plus useful planning context such as the nearest event from the TPE timeline.
They also include an Open in TPE link that takes you directly back to the saved plan on the page where you created it.
Calendar times are stored as exact instants, so they’ll display correctly if your calendar is currently showing a different time zone from the location of the shoot.
Add reminders to Shot Plans
Shot Plans can now have up to 10 reminders, which are saved and synchronized as part of the plan.
Choose from common intervals such as a week, a day or 15 minutes before the planned time, or specify your own reminder interval.
When you export a plan as an .ics calendar file, those reminders are included as calendar alerts. The alternative Add to Google and Add to Outlook links do not support reminders (a limitation of those sites that we cannot work around).
If you haven’t configured any reminders, TPE adds a default alert one hour before the shoot, so an imported event doesn’t silently arrive in your calendar with no reminder at all.
Export your shooting schedule
You can also export multiple Shot Plans into a single calendar file.
Calendar export is available from:
- Shot Plans
- Upcoming
- All Items
- Lists containing Shot Plans
The Upcoming view is particularly useful here: export it and you effectively have your upcoming TPE shooting schedule ready to import into your calendar.
Only plans with a date and time are included.
Add the current view without saving a Shot Plan
Sometimes you just want to put something on your calendar without adding it permanently to your TPE Library.
The Share dialog on the Map, 3D, Moon and Eclipse pages now includes an Add to Calendar option.
This creates a calendar event directly from the date, time and location you’re currently viewing, without requiring you to save a Shot Plan first.
Right-click Shot Plan tabs
Shot Plan tabs now have a context menu providing quick access to common actions, including:
- Edit
- Save or discard changes
- View in Library
- Add to calendar
- Close
If the plan has unsaved changes, Add to Calendar makes it clear that the saved version of the plan is what will be exported.
Other fixes
This beta also includes a handful of reliability and usability fixes:
- Fixed a rare crash when initializing Photorealistic mode in the 3D view after a tile-loading failure.
- Malformed date parameters in shared or manually edited URLs can no longer prevent TPE from starting.
- Help suggestions now display category names containing special characters correctly.
Add to Calendar is available to all users and does not require a subscription.
For beta testing, I’d particularly appreciate reports on calendar behavior across different combinations of Apple Calendar, Google Calendar, Outlook and other calendar apps, including event times, reminders and what happens when you export an updated version of the same Shot Plan.
There’ll be further additions to 4.7 before final release, so watch this space…
