Today, we are excited to announce the release of v2018.0.0. This release launches 🚀 us out of Alpha into Beta.

We have migrated our backend to the Australian region, meaning faster load times (334 ms to load a unit compared to 1.04s previously), a increase of around 70%! ⏩💯

This means, we can deliver faster content to the majority of our users, ensuring faster and smoother transactions.

Working with another project — Smart Electives has allowed us utilise a better search engine. We are using a system like Google which allows us to search better. Whether its searching ambiguous things from modern culture, all the way to rocket science, we’ve got you fam. 👪

More Mobile Friendly 📱 and Responsive 💻 then Ever Before

After looking at our user traffic we have decided to make our app more mobile friendly then before, with semester on the sidebar, as well as clearer shortcuts on the toolbar. But, we still recommend you to use a laptop.

Semester/Teaching Periods are now on the left of the units which belong in that teaching period

Icons are now display on the top of the sidebar

Adding Units are now done directly inside the teaching period or via the unit place holder

Unit Size (by Credit Points) resize per teaching period (not whole)

That’s right, you’ve heard me. You can now print and email course plans to whoever you like (just don’t spam email your course advisor, our system will kick 👢you off and block 🛡️you).

It’s really great that most of our users are returning to us. That’s why we are dedicated to be as transparent as possible, whether it’s feature requests all the way to issues. We’ve got a new issue form over via https://tinyurl.com/monplanissue and a new Public 🌏tracking board over at Trello for you to monitor and see your issue! https://trello.com/b/oYR5vu8S/public-bug-tracking-board 🐛For our delivery status visit: https://stats.uptimerobot.com/OM9AOf2D0

2018 Units and Course Maps (really really minor, but whatever)

Credit Points are displayed on the front of each unit to make it clearer about the weights of each unit.

Here is some notes which may affect external systems

monPlan Prod API (JP Region, monplan-api-dev)

This service will become a dev environment, where we test out various new endpoints, all of this means that this application will not become our source of truth and may have a degraded service from time to time.

monPlan Dev API (JP Region, monplan-api-development)

This service will be suspended and shut down.

monPlan Prod AU API (AU Region, monplan-api-au-prod)

This is a new service, the API URI is https://monplan-api-au-prod.appspot.com with same endpoints as the previous dev environment

monPlan Search API (AU Region, monplan-searchapi-prod)

This is a new service. Just send a POST request to https://monplan-searchapi-prod.appspot.com with a JSON object.

{
    search: // text: ,
    filter: // object: the object to search,
    from: 0 // integer,
    size: 30 // integer: number of results,
}

Today, we are excited to announce the release of v2018.0.0. This release launches 🚀 MonPlan out of Alpha and into Beta.

As we are coming to our first birthday, we want to really look back on how we grew monPlan to what it is today.

At the start we used many ways of looking at course planning, such as using Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, even paper. But we always ran into 1 singular problem, every time we had to look through several tabs of the Monash Handbook, (we will back to this later). We also had to spent a few hours just to talk a course advisor, while the course advisors spread out multiple plans across the table talking to us about our course. This was not really helpful.

All the unit rules were spread all all over the place, different places gave different information. We decided to start off with a simple post to see if this was a pain point for other students with apost on Monash Stalkerspace.

This was fairly supported by the student community. So we decided to proceed ahead. Using various purpose-built tools such as a Unit Handbook Scraper (https://github.com/monplan/monScrape/tree/master/UnitScraper) we built a ‘basic’ version of the application which now currently lives at https://monplan.github.io/monPlan-Legacy

And then suddenly, we were approached by a eSolutions Director, Teresa Finlayson who asked us if we were willing to continue development alongside eSolutions. We (we being Josh Nelsson-Smith and Eric Jiang) agreed as we both believed that it would really help improve the student community. This was officially started in December 2016.

And the rest is history, we continued development with a newer technology and our application has being growing everyday.

Looking back we really encourage everyone to continue developing whatever it is you are interested in. The team has really helped shape the student innovation pathway for other students.

We have worked with various senior managers at eSolutions, to help develop and shape the following:

Test.Drive — Monash University’s student incubation program

Some cool projects which will be released soon, sponsored by some faculties and departments across the university.

As one of the many developers on this team, I am very happy to announce our new public release! This is one of latest patches not only going back to our roots and making it better but also bringing the foundations of some key new features which will be present in the application over the next few months.

This release allows us to take a look at where we are and where we want to move forward. monPlan is really about making the journey which students take whilst studying at Monash more easier, and make the information much more accessible. So we had to go back where we begun, and redo the entire site one step-at a time and make it modern, and similar to other Monash Apps, making the transition between the sites more easier.

The site is now rebranded, we have incoporated many Material Design Principles to make the app look more modern, as well as taking it above and beyond with our AX Fixes.

This release introduces one of our testing features, users can login via Google and Facebook and sign up for an account. But most of these will change over the next few weeks as we introduce Monash SSO support, meaning current students can login via SSO and my.Monash. It is now known as my monPlan.

We are also excited to announce our monPlan Insiders Program. The program looks at: letting you (the users) attend our bi-monthly testing workshops, vote on designs as well as testing out new functionality that we are introducing. This is available here: https://monplaninsiders.slack.com/ and you can signup over this link.

But first we have been driven by many fixes that will help us towards a more functional and better app that allows everyone to use across multiple sites.

Issues fixed includes: #493 (CRIC-002), SECMED-001.

Other issues submitted by our community and our support teams have gradually improved the application, such as: Key Accessiblity Fixes allows users with AX Supported Browsers to use within our site The team thanks for being on this journey with us so far! We would very much appreciate feedback. We can be contacted via email at esol-stft-monplan-l@monash.edu as well as over the “Give us Feedback” link in the component sidebar.

Eric Jiang
Project Lead and Co-Founder monPlan
E: eric.jiang@monash.edu

Originally published at monplandevblog.wordpress.com on May 31, 2017.

As one of the many developers on this team, I am very happy to announce our new public release!This is one of latest patches not only going back to our roots and making it better but also bringing the foundations of some key new features which will be present in the application over the next few months.

monPlan Update — v2017.2.4 Release Notes

Version 0.4.0 refines our integration with our API as well as introduction nice and cool features. Most of the updates this time is improving our app through various fixes such as improvements to the server-side as well as other cool features.

Our app is completely User Driven, meaning the feedback you provide help us to improve our app.

Our new colors fully integrate the app well into the Monash Community, as well as providing a more cleaner and modern design. Allow us to build an even more beautiful app.

We have a new course information header, which displays critical information about the progression of your plan as well as core course information. Otherwise view your course as normal.

Validation now in beta And Adding Units just Got Easier

We have introduced Validation in beta. Helping you to pick relevant units, at the right time and in the right order. Just remember you can still ignore validation warnings, they are just warnings after all. As well as units being to be added more easily, just click on a greyed out area and search as usual.

Most of this release focuses on our API, in order to migrate to Google App Engine, we recoded the App in Java allowing a more easier to use environment as well as models to help validation different DB schemas. Everything except for snapshots have been migrated over.

Originally published at monplandevblog.wordpress.com on May 1, 2017.

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