Hey awesome humans! This update will go unnoticed for most of you, but it actually took a surprisingly large amount of engineering resource to get done properly. 😅

What's the deal?

All existing Finger-Ink accounts were created by entering in an API key, which came out of Cliniko. Some accounts have multiple API keys connected: maybe one for each practitioner, or perhaps one for every connected portal user. These API keys are used as passwords so that we can talk to the Cliniko API on your behalf (to do things like send PDFs to your patient records).

Sometimes, these API keys become invalid:

1. They can be removed by the owner via the Cliniko UI.
2. The user can be made inactive in Cliniko.
3. The user can be removed from the original Cliniko account entirely.

If we ever tried to use an invalid API key with the Cliniko API, then Cliniko would tell us that the key is invalid. Before this change, if we ever received a reply from the API that a key was invalid, we'd remove it instantly and go on about our business.

Unfortunately, what we didn't know before, is that there are certain times where is is possible that the API will tell us that a given key is invalid, when it actually isn't. This is not very common, but it does happen occasionally.

During a recent Cliniko API outage, that only lasted a minute or so, our system managed to remove valid API keys from over 30 accounts — which was pretty annoying for everyone involved!

So what have we done?

We fixed it! 😁

There's a lot of technical details I could go into but, for fear of putting you to sleep, I shall not.

The gist is we will no longer remove a connected API key from Finger-Ink, until it has received quite a few "invalid" responses from the Cliniko API, in the space of a week or so.

You may occasionally get an email about a key being suspended. If this happens, and you don't think the key is invalid, please do let us know.

Otherwise, keep using Finger-Ink without having to worry about any of this. 🤩

Cover image by Yuyeung Lau

Hey all! This has actually live for a few weeks now, but here's the low down:

Our web forms have a new date picker! 🥳

Date picking on the web has been somewhat of a contentious issue for quite a while. We originally released our date fields with keyboard-only entry. This was great for some, but others wanted to be able to use a calendar to pick a date — so we changed it. For most, that was great. But for some using Finger-Ink forms internally, this really slowed down entry.

Well, now we've got the best of both worlds: keyboard entry by default, with a date picker when you want one.

Enjoy ❤️