What's new?

“Export to Text”, a feature previously only available to Connect subscribers, has now also been added to the CLZ Cloud viewer.

We figured that exporting to a text file, e.g. a CSV for Excel, should be available to any user, whether they own Connect, the desktop software or a CLZ mobile app.

You can find the Export to Text feature by visiting your own collection in the CLZ Cloud viewer, clicking the little “wrench” icon top right, then selecting Export.

Enjoy!

Fixed:

• CLZ Cloud Sync: Notes were not down-synced.
• Edit Screen: Year picker: it was not possible to pick a year before “1888″.
• Manage Pick Lists screen: labels width was too short.

Fixed:

• Program could throw a “Handle is invalid” error after multiple edits

Fixed:

• Main Screen:
  • The folder tree was wrapping the values in the list
  • A double hint was showing for the thumbnail slider to resize thumbnails in Images View
• When working offline, closing the program could cause Access Violations
• User Defined Fields: values of check box lists were not loaded correctly in some cases

Improvements:

• Cloud Syncing: Now does up to 5 retries when a sync action fails because of a temporary connection problem.
• Edit Game: Improved “search as you type” behaviour of search boxes for adding credits.
• Dark Skin: active window now has a light grey border, making it stand out more when windows overlap.

Fixed:

• Screen started to “flicker” after leaving the program inactive for a few minutes.
• Add Automatically: adding a checked result would sometimes uncheck a result from another search in the queue.
• Main Screen / Two Panel Mode: selection status text would sometimes show an invalid text when no games were showing in the list.
• Edit Multiple: F8 to clear didn’t work for memo fields like Description and Notes.

• Fixed losing changes when suspending the app while editing

Version 4.2 adds a couple of improvements and tools that are essential for users who are doing most of their editing on the mobile apps:

• New “Manage Pick Lists” screen (under new Tools menu).
  This new screen lets you take control of your pick lists, that is book Authors, music Artists, comic Series, Publishers, Formats, Genres, Subjects, etc… Use it to:
  • Fix typos in names.
  • Remove unused entries.
  • Merge duplicate entries.
• Edit screen improvements:
  • New “value picker” screen for pick list fields, like Authors, Artists, Series, Genres, Subjects, etc… Just tap the field, pick a value from the pick list that appears and done. No more need to type the first few letters of a value (we all hate typing on mobile devices, don’t we?)
  • Tap the pencil icons to directly edit names of pick list entries.
  • Tap the pencil icon for Artists, Authors and Series to directly edit Names *and* SortNames.

• New “Manage Pick Lists” tool for editing and merging Platforms, Genres, Formats etc…
• Edit screen: Now edit the names of Platforms, Formats, etc…
• Edit screen: New “value picker” screen for quickly filling fields like Platform and Publisher.
• New Tools menu, with Manage Pick Lists, Field Defaults and Empty Database tools.

Fixed:

• Edit Game:
  • Changing collection status sometimes would uncheck a radiobutton but not check the selected one
  • Previous/Next/Ok could mess up data when the edit screen was still loading

Fixed:

• Export to HTML: access violation could occur in some cases when using a custom index template
• Edit Screen: Checkbox List hints would sometimes not disappear
• Main Screen: changing font size could make some screen elements disappear

Changes

• Date Fields: Year field’s position now also depends on system’s shortdate setting

Fixed:

• Edit Game:
  • Date fields didn’t clear their Month and Day values using next/previous when they weren’t filled in for the next/previous item
  • Delete key didn’t work in Month and Day fields to clear their values. Backspace did work normally.

Changes

• Date fields now have dropdowns for Month and Day. Order of Month and Day dropdown depends on system’s shortdate setting now

Fixed:

• Edit Multiple: F8 in date fields didn’t clear them
• Main Screen:
  • horizontal scrollbar was sometimes showing in folder tree when it shouldn’t
  • Cards View: scrolling using the mouse wheel wasn’t working properly
  • layout wasn’t always restored properly when quick filter panel was showing
• Quick Filter Panel: collection status filter wasn’t showing in filter description at bottom of the screen

NEW: Choose between Light, Dark or System skins

Yes, We’re getting rid of the gray!

Game 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.

• Light: A clean look, white backgrounds, dark fonts. Very readable, easy on the eye.
• Dark: A cool looking, modern design, with dark backgrounds, light fonts.
• System: Keep things as it was, with the program following your Windows theme.

Please note:
The program now defaults to the Dark Skin. You can change to a different Skin using the Skin option in the View menu.
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• Fixed crashes in in-app purchase screen on certain Xiaomi phones
• Fixed crash in in-app purchase screen when only one in app purchase was offered

• Fixed barcode search not working with hardware keyboards
• Search not working correctly after updating a game 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.

We have completely rewritten our Core for Games search engine, that is, the online code that gives you results when you search our Core by Title in your Add screen.

The new search engines will provide better search results that are more “to-the-point” and less “fuzzy”. Also, results will be returned much faster.

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!

CLZ Games is now free to download, with a database limit of 100 games. Unlock higher database limits using In App Purchases.

If you purchased CLZ Games *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!

New:

• Easily switch between Add methods (Platform & Title / Barcode / Manual).
• Re-designed search results with included cover images.
• Now add directly from results using quick-add buttons
  (no more need to open the Preview Screen).

• New black style for Preview Screen.
• Add by Barcode now automatically opens Camera Scan screen.

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 game, showing the main game details and a small cover thumbnail.

Fixed:

• Add Automatically: right click menu didn’t popup when there were no results showing
• Templates: Online https links didn’t open

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

Apart from several improvements to the Add Game screen (see below), the 4.0 version contains an important change:

CLZ Games for iOS is now free to download

Starting with version 4.0, CLZ Games is free to download and starts with a limit of 100 games.

New: Improved Add Games screen

• Easily switch between Add methods (Platform & Title / Barcode / Manual).
• Re-designed search results with included cover images.
• Now add directly from results using quick-add buttons
  (no more need to open the Preview Screen).
• New black style for Preview Screen.
• Add by barcode 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 game 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.

We immediately went to work and updated all our Windows and Mac programs
to use Bing Images for the Find Image Online tool instead.
Obviously, this generates considerable extra monthly costs (well over US $1,000),
but we have decided that we will NOT pass on these extra costs to our customers.

So here it is: the new Find Image Online, powered by Bing. Enjoy!

Fixed:

• Freezes at start up for some users, caused by the webcam detection.