There are a ton of fixes in place. Before I get to the good news, however,
PARTIES LOADS SLOWLY ON CASES WITH LOTS OF PEOPLE.


Update: Fixed in 1.49. It's now always fast.


In my testing, it is hardly noticable until the number of people gets above 20.

In actuality, it’s not slower than it was, but it is no longer giving you a loading bar because it is fast(er) on cases with fewer parties. We tested with a dozen cases and noticed lags up to 1 second (just enough to worry), but a fringe case of 40+ parties caused a surprising lag of several seconds. Since most “real” cases are under 20, we decided to push anyway.

Note that the speed here is now entirely dependent on your local PC. We are doing some seriously complicated stuff to dynamically generate, order, and format the parties. As a metric, each “party box” (don’t we wish that meant something different :-) takes about 80ms to process on a 3 year old laptop.
This also tends to be less noticeable in Chrome or Safari, although Safari 4 on Windows isn’t Gears-friendly. The claim that Chrome is a faster browser than FF is actually true when it comes down to it.

Now for the good stuff:

• You’ll notice a new alert for Google Gears. It’s a good thing, don’t freak out. With it installed, over time, details will load from a cache on your local hard drive (unless changed of course), not the server.
• Party->Add improvements. All that “where did my company go” stuff is gone.
• You can now add a company as a party directly. No more of this “add only a contact and then attach a company” nonsense.
• Out-of-box Office Form count is up to almost 100. We also support an additional “letterhead middle” on all existing forms.
• SSA forms are loaded. They are not auto-pop’ing as well as EAMS, but there is minimally support for the firm (our attys) and the plaintiff.
• Maps widget on all contact details panes.
• Control of companies (editing, etc) directly in the party tab. Attach/Detach/Edit, etc.
• There are another 50 lower impact features, but I won’t list them here. Ask if interested...