What's new?

Quick Filter panel tweaks

• Quick Filter panel is now opened/closed using a new button on the toolbar (to the left of the folders button).
  No more automatic sliding when moving the mouse.

• Smoother filter sliders (Ratings, Year, Running Time)

Fixed:

• Edit Multiple Books:
  • Number of Pages field was always cleared.
  • “Cannot focus a disabled or invisible window” when clearing a check list with F8.
• Edit Book:
  • Number of Pages field was limited to 999.
  • Author grid didn’t restore column widths properly.
• Opening then closing the Quick Filter panel could change the width of the other panels.
• Minimizing a full screen program, then restoring would not restore to full screen.
• Weird problems while resizing program windows.
• Main Screen: Cover flow had a white background with Light and Sytem Skin (now black again).
• Switching to or starting in System skin didn’t always refresh Details Panel.

NEW: Choose between Light, Dark or System skins

Yes, We’re getting rid of the gray!

Book Collector now comes with a skin system, which affects the look of all screens in the program,
main screen, edit screens, add auto-screen, sync screen etc.. even the settings screens.

We have designed two different skins for you to choose from: Light and Dark.
The third option “System” is basically the old pre-v16.3 look.

Read more

Fixed:

• Main Screen: 2 Panels Horizontal Layout: view sizes were not restored.
• Add Automatically: By barcode: Sometimes a new book was added without barcode.
• Manage Pick Lists: sometimes no warning was shown for duplicated items.
• CLZ Cloud Sync: Fixed a crash when down-syncing a new book.
• 2 Panels Mode: Folders were always sorted by article.
• Folders: Preference “Ignore SortName of Person Item” was not working.

• Fixed barcode search not working with hardware keyboards
• Search not working correctly after updating a book from Core
• Fixed crash while syncing broken images

New:

• Settings / Field Defaults: choose field values that will be set for each new entry automatically.
• Edit screen improvements:
  • Improved layout to make it easier on the eye
  • New “Select Value” screen for easier entry of pick list fields (e.g. Artist, Format, Genre, etc…)
  • Cancel and Done buttons have been moved to the top bar.
  • New Delete button at the bottom.

Fixed:

• Templates:
  • Credits with role “Author” were not listed
  • Template: ISBN icon was missing
• Duplicate Book: Stories were not copied
• Main Screen: Edit in List
  • un(checking) checkbox lists didn’t trigger a “sync change”
  • changing “Read It” and “Changing Date” didn’t trigger a “sync change”
• Cards View: the new cover was not displayed using Find Cover
• Add Auto: sometimes not selected queue items were also added using “Add Selected” in queue mode

Fixed:

• User Defined Fields for Stories were not saved
• Full Covers Template: Subtitle was not spaced correctly
• New Maintenance tool: Tools > Maintenance > Open database location
• Automatically Close Add Auto screen after queue is emptied was not working
• List Sorting: Empty values were not sorted correctly
• Pseudonym can not be selected in “Manage Pick List” screen if a quick search has been done.

Fixed:

• Main Screen:
  • Cards View: selection wasn’t always restored properly
  • Scrolling the Details View with the mouse wheel would scroll the list when the scroll bar reached the top
• Quick search:
  • pasting text into quick search box didn’t show the clear button
  • Escape button will now clear quick search
• Sync with Cloud: cancelling sync didn’t always work

Previously, the Connect free 30-day trial limited trial users to 100 items in their database.

To allow full evaluation of our Connect software during the trial, we have removed this database limit. The free 30-day trial now lets you add, import or sync as many items as you want.

Enjoy!

Fixed:

• Default Fields: “Read It” was missing
• Add auto screen: “Collection Status” setting was not working properly
• Images View: Newly added items with “Add Automatically” were not selected

CLZ Books is now free to download, with a database limit of 100 books.

If you purchased CLZ Books *before* the 4.0 release, then the 4.0 version will be automatically unlocked to an *unlimited* database size. You do NOT need to pay again 🙂
If, for whatever reason, this didn’t work for you, then just CONTACT US and and we’ll unlock it manually, free of charge!

Improved Add Books screen:

• Easily switch between Add methods (Title/ISBN/Manual).
• Re-designed search results with included cover images.
• Add by ISBN now automatically opens Camera Scan screen.

Fixed:

• Templates: changing Read It/Rating didn’t trigger a change for syncing
• Templates: 2 panels mode with selected folder: selection was lost after changing “Read It”
• Edit in List: Edit Rating was not working
• Templates: Online Links: “https” URLs didn’t open
• Cover Flow panel now has a black background
• Performance: Statistics are no longer updated if not necessary
• Sort Sets selection was sometimes lost after restarting the app
• Main Screen: “Collection status” filter selection was not remembered after restarting the app

Fixed:

• Menu: “View > Cards” item was missing
• Cards View was not working on Mavericks

New view for the main screen: Card View

Next to List View, Images View and Cover Flow, we have added a Card View, a multi-column view with little info cards for each book, showing the main book details and a small cover thumbnail.

Fixed:

• Add Automatically: right click menu didn’t popup when there were no results showing
• Content View: Folder grouping on a field with inheritance didn’t take the inherited book values into account

Fixed:

• List View could crash after opening the program, making it seem like no database was open.

New view for the main screen: Card View

Next to List View, Images View and Cover Flow, we have added a Card View, a multi-column view with little info cards for each book, showing the main book details and a small cover thumbnail.

Read more

It’s been a long time in the making, but it’s finally here:
CLZ Books 4.0 for iOS!

Apart from several improvements to the Add Book screen, the 4.0 version contains an important change: CLZ Books for iOS is now free to download
Starting with version 4.0, CLZ Books is free to download and starts with a limit of 100 books.

New: Improved Add Books screen

• Easily switch between Add methods (Author & Title / ISBN / Manual).
• Re-designed search results with included cover images.
• New black style for Preview Screen.
• Add by ISBN now automatically opens Camera Scan screen.
• Larger Camera Scan screen on iPad

Fixed:

• Loading of backup.xml is now more robust

Fixed:

• Improved Webcam functionality for Webcam Barcode scanning:
  • Sometimes starting the webcam feature would hang the program
  • Some webcams didn’t show any video
  • A JPEG error could be thrown for some webcams
• Add Automatically: when you didn’t want to move a book from your wish list into your collection, it wasn’t possible.

Find Image Online tool now uses Bing Image Search

The Find Image Online tool previously used Google Images to find images.

However, it turns out that on December 1, Google terminated the free Google Image Search API
that we were using, causing our Find Image Online functionality to stop working.

Google provides a new paid version of the Search API, but it is limited to max 10K searches per day.
With the amount of customers we have, we need at least 20K daily searches (600K per month!) 🙁

The solution: Switch to BING!

Microsoft also offers a paid Bing Image Search API and this one has no limits.
Or, to be more precise, they let us pay more for higher limits.
Read more

Fixed:

• Access Violation when starting the program after a fresh installation.
• Access Violation when closing the program.

Fixed:

• Delete Orphan Images tools didn’t account for images linked in the Links / Local Files tab.

Webcam barcode scanning

Use your webcam as a barcode scanner, to add or find books by ISBN.

• Scan barcodes with your webcam
  Just use the live camera view to point your webcam at a barcode
  and let our software detect the barcode that is in view.
• Use the webcam scanner to add books by barcode
  Pop-up the scan window and scan ISBN barcodes,
  either using Direct Search or scanning into the Queue.
• Or use it in the main screen to find books by barcode
  Scan an ISBN barcode while in the main screen,
  to quickly search your local database by barcode.
• Works best with auto-focus or manual-focus webcams
  Fixed focus cameras will not work well (or at all).

Read more

For better security, we have now moved both the Cloud and Connect websites to the HTTPS protocol, using so-called Extended Validation SSL certificates.

This SSL connection is indicated by the nice “green bar” in your address bar:

In the past 2 weeks, we have moved all 5 online media databases (movies, books, music, comics and games) to 5 new separate database servers.

This week, CLZ web developers Sven and Dion have further optimized these new servers to give you even better performance from Core, especially for title searches that have many results.

The fruits of their labour are now immediately noticeable in the ADD screens of your Connect software. Enjoy!