Skylog Documentation

Tips and Tricks

Introduction

This is a rundown of useful features of Skylog that are not entirely obvious and/or are non-trivial.

Skylog does its best to allow you to completely ignore any features that you don't need to use. It's just important that you and everyone else in your group agree on which features you're going to use and how you're going to use them.

Edit Incident: Close Time

If the Close Time is blank when the form is submitted, Skylog will automatically fill in the current time (this is also true of the Event Time field). This is done because the majority of incidents are simply informational items that need to be recorded but need no further action.

It is OK to fill in a Close Time that is in the future. This would be useful when logging something like a Severe Thunderstorm Warning that comes with a pre-defined time at which it needs no further attention. If a future close time is specified, it will be displayed on the Incident Summary screen.

When the incident needs further attention but has no pre-defined expiration time, enter the word "none" in the Close Time field.

Edit Incident: Location

Enter a period (.) all by itself to have Skylog fill in the last known location of the station. Skylog will respond by showing the Edit Incident screen again with the location filled in for you to review.

Edit Incident: Mac users should use Full Keyboard Access

When using the TAB key, the default Mac OS X behavior is to focus only text boxes and lists. This is not optimal behavior when you enter notes and then want to save the incident. You're forced to use the mouse to click the submit button.

To speed yourself up, make this change:

Go in to System Preferences.
Select Keyboard.
Select the Keyboard Shortcuts tab.
Under Full Keyboard Access, select the All controls option.

This enables you to type notes, hit TAB and hit ENTER to save the incident. Your hands don't need to leave the keyboard.

Edit Incident: Reporting station

By default, if a non-existent station is entered in as the reporting station, Skylog will reject it. This is to prevent typos from resulting in a cluttered station summary list.

If you are intentionally typing in a reporting station that does not already exist, add a period (.) on to the end of it. This tells Skylog to create the station if it does not already exist.

By contrast, the colon commands will (usually) create new stations without any special action. Colon commands are considered to be more powerful, faster and for more expert use, so it is assumed that you really mean whatever it is that you just typed.

Station statuses

The following are the station status indications and their meanings:

Abbr.	Name	Description
AS	Assigned	The station is assigned to an incident (i.e. busy handling an incident, as opposed to in service and ready for an assignment).
CI	Checked In	The station has been heard from during the event and is on the air. This does not necessarily mean that the station is actually ready for duty yet.
CO	Checked Out	The station is not on the air - either they have not yet been heard from or they were on the air and have signed off (as opposed to being temporarily out of service).
IR	In Route	The station is on their way to a given location. When the IR link is clicked in the Edit Incident field, the station is said to be in route to the incident's location. This is also the default for the :IR command, but an additional argument can be entered to override this.
IS	In Service	The station is on the air and ready to perform their duties for the event.
OL	On Location	The station has arrived. If you previously put the station in route, the in route destination is saved as the station's current location. Otherwise, if the station is assigned to an incident, the incident's location is used as the station's new location. The :OL command can be given with an additional argument to override this behavior.

Time and date fields

All time/date fields are processed for a wide variety of meaningful expressions. Most of them are intuitive. For example, now gets translated to the current time. If you want the time that is five minutes in to the future, type in +5 minutes. The word yesterday is interpreted as exactly 24 hours before the current time.

Those are only examples. There are many more ways of expressing time that will work.

User Preferences: Hours to offset displayed times from server time

When the Skylog server is in a different time zone than the user, this setting can be used to adjust the displayed times to match what the user expects. There are some important caveats to note about this feature:

Times are actually saved in the database using the server's local time. This allows two users with different offsets to share the same incidents, log entries, etc. and each see their own local time.
Users will likely observe unexpected behavior near the Daylight Savings Time transition points. In particular, this behavior is likely to happen during the gap between when the server's local time zone makes the transition and when the user's local time zone makes the transition.