Category: News

This is a maintenance release. Most users will be unaffected.

This page contains all the late-breaking news for the Sales Manager. Regular users should consider bookmarking this page, rather than the home page, which is aimed at prospective users.

The security for the vanware.co.uk domain no longer uses a conventional SSL certificate. Instead it uses a new feature of cPanel, called AutoSSL. This uses free certificates from an outfit called Let’s Encrypt, which is part of the Linux Foundation. AutoSSL is completely stable, and is the option of choice for most smaller domains. The purpose is not to save money, but to avoid the absolute polaver of replacing the certificates manually. The Certificate Authorities were the problem, not the solution. They were either greedy or incompetent, or both.

The site will be down for a while on Sunday, 12th May 2019, while I upgrade to a newer version of PHP. Please let me know if this causes any inconvenience.

8 Feb 2019

Designing new interface for iCloud screen. This is necessary, because Dropbox had a completely different paradigm.

7 Feb 2019

• Recharged test device.
• Upgraded software on both PC and test device.
• Connected to test device.
• Fixed minor bugs in iCloud screen.

Fix for SSL problem on earlier versions of Android.

It has been brought to my attention that the hosting service may require Android 5.0 (Lollipop) or above, and not Android 4.0 (KitKat), as previously stated.

This is because of a bug in SSL support, in earlier versions of Android. The site switched to SSL some time ago, because of pressure from Apple and others.

We may try to fix this, or we may take the opportunity to implement Material design. The statistics are now 11% of Android 4.4 users, and 5% of users running earlier versions of Android.

Any device purchased in the last 5 years should be OK.

Update

A user has submitted the following error message:

File I/0 error: javax.net.ssl.SSLProtocolException: SSL

handshake aborted: ssl-0x605cba30: Failure in SSL library,

usually a protocol error

error: 14077410:SSL routines:SSL23_GET SERVER HELLO:sslv3

alert handshake failure (external/openssl/ssl/s23_clnt.c:74-4

0x5f16c6fd:0x00000000)

I have found a possible fix. I will give it a go, but I do not understand it very well, and I have no idea whether it will work.

Later

I managed to test the patch on an emulator, and it works! So I will be rolling it out shortly as version 6.2.2.

Aftermath

• The patch is perfectly reasonable, even if I do not fully understand it. The important point was that I was able to test it on an emulator.
• The fact that the patch is only necessary on older versions of Android suggests that they may not be quite as well supported as newer ones.
• With 16% of users running Android 4.4 or earlier, the stats still do not justify ditching support for it.

The current year on the About screen has been changed from 2018 to 2019. There are no other changes.

The site has been upgraded to WordPress 5.0.

• Word on the streets was that it was not going to be released until the new year, so it will be interesting to see how the WP community reacts to that.
• There was a new version of the parent theme Twenty Sixteen, but I had carefully followed the guidelines and created my own child theme, and there were no problems upgrading it.
• There is also a new theme Twenty Nineteen, but it doesn’t have a sidebar. The site is designed around a sidebar, and I don’t think I will be able to use it.
• Most of the fuss is around the new editor, which I am using for the first time. These are early days, but it does not look like a big deal to me.

The SMS and call log features have been removed from the Customer screen, as mentioned in an earlier post.