It's been a busy summer here at Scout Labs, what with our acquisition by Lithium Technologies and the need to introduce our new colleagues to the best Thai/Indian/Blue Bottle coffee places surrounding the San Francisco office. Today we're happy to present you with the fruits of our Thai/Indian/Blue Bottle coffee powered development team. The latest enhancements to the Scout Labs application:

1) New interactive query form. A few of the most important changes:
• Edit query terms inline. No more re-typing!
• Select which terms you want sentiment and quotes for- reducing the number of irrelevant quotes and sentiment menu options
• Remove the automatically checked "send me an alert" button which was quite frankly annoying everyone including us
• Drag and drop query terms to reorder them

2) PDF graphs. We've restored the option to export graphs as images, in PDF format now instead of PNG. This is a very handy way to get a universally readable/ usable image from a graph without having to take a screen capture. You just insert the PDF into your PPT and you're good to go.

3) "New Search" button on left sidebar. One of the things we noticed while testing the new search creation form was that users were taking some VERY circuitous routes to create a new search. Though we strive for the minimalist design approach, we can no longer deny that you all need a bigger button with "new search" written on it. You just do. Voila.
4) New graphing controls. Check out this sleek new toolbar. Notice that when you go to "Graphs," the graph type selected is automatically defaulted into "Volume," but "Share of Voice" and all the other handy types are still available.

5) Totals on graphs. Notice that the graph key now displays the total mentions for a search. When you focus on the day, the key will show you the mentions per day. The export, of course, contains the graph totals data so you can make your own visualizations.

The new search creation form is going to take some getting used to. Though we've embedded some help in the application, we highly recommend that you sign up for one of the special new search creation training sessions, or at least watch the helpful 4 minute video.

We recognize that the search creation form in particular is the hardest part of the application to use. We'll always be investing time in making it work better for users. Feedback on this release, or any others, can always be directed to our community or sent to us direct via email at support@scoutlabs.com.

Many thanks to the users who helped us refine this release, including Jeff Esposito at Vistaprint, Ankush Karnak at Citibank, Mark Hopkins at Lenovo, Bryan Kristof at The Marketing Agentc, and Eric Walton at GyroHSR. There are some amazing new features on the way for fall, including a release in mid September with Facebook data and some gorgeous new PDF reporting options. If you'd like to be in the test group for these new features, ping us at support@scoutlabs.com. I cannot resist giving you a little sneak peek: