News & updates (News) (page 6)
We’ve started implementing the Collectorz.com characters on our website and banners. AJ has created several new ads and Alwin has added Mickie and CeCe to the Movie Collection Software and Comic Collection Software homepages.
After creating Mickie, we had to figure out how we wanted her to appear in our DVD database ads and banners. We normally use horizontal, vertical and square format material so she should strike a pose fitting the screen size.
In our April newsletter, we asked for your feedback on our online databases, the databases that provide the data and images for your Add Automatically screen.
We created 5 surveys, one for each database, and asked you to rate a list of possible problems, choosing from “Not a problem for me”, “Could be improved” and “Yeah, this sucks!”.
We’re happy that a lot of people took the time to complete these surveys. We received 3,251 responses!
Thank you all for you help!
We have created nice bar charts of the responses we received for all 5 surveys, with orange bars for “Not a problem”, blue bars for “Could be improved” and purple bars for “Yeah, this sucks!”.
Looking at the charts below, we’re happy to see a lot of orange and only small purple areas. It seems that overall, you all are quite happy with the results of our online databases. 🙂
Read on for results in more details, for each of the five online databases.
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Comic Collector users know her for quite some time: CeCe. She is our action heroine and features in the comic cataloguing software, on banners, ads and on the website. She brings our software to life and that is why we asked the creator of CeCe, LoopyDave, to give her four siblings for the DVD, CD, book and game collection software.
Yes, after many months of programming and testing, and several delays,
it has finally arrived: Comic Collector for Mac OS X!
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Yes, tomorrow is the day. We are finally going to release the Mac edition of Comic Collector.
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The funny part with the creation of Kacey is, that from her original sketch to her final character and coloring, she hardly needed any alterations at all.
From brief to first sketch, she was alive from pencil stroke one.
The same goes for Gemma, while you can see from the iterations for Mickie, Becky and CeCe that we changed them (and our mind!) a lot.
Our first idea for the book organizer software was for an older fakir with a dragon-like creature on his shoulder. Smoking a pipe, reading a book.
Very funny character but it may be too much for our book audience. Because that is what we have to keep in mind: the mascotte must fit the crowd. We may like the levitated yogi and his pet dragon, but our home librarians not. The character must speak to them, otherwise she will be no good in advertising.
When we started on the Collectorz.com character project, we had a completely different idea for the Movie Collector mascotte.
The first draft was for a James Bond kinda like a guy, the second rough was for an actress winning an Oscar.
This was the toughest hero to bring to life and we went back to the drawing board and came up with something completely different.
Let’s bring Gemma to life with colors.
The names of the Collectorz.com characters hint to the software titles, so do the colors of each figurine.
Movie Collector is green, Music Collector orange, Book Collector purple, Comic Collector blue and the Game Collector color is red.
The only babe missing from the Collectorz.com quintet is the Music Collector mascotte.
To summarize: CeCe for the comic organizer software, Becky for the book home library tool, Gemma for the video game list tool and Mickie promotes the DVD movie organizer software.
Well, here is the music muse in a rough black and white sketch. Her name?
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You know what they say, ‘Never judge a book by its cover’. Well the same quote applies to the Book Collector dame, although slightly altered.
Never judge a girl by her shoes
As heroic as CeCe, adventurous as Gemma and equally skilled as Mickie, Becky may not show it but she has it all.
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Meet Gemma. Or Gem for short. And you hardly need to guess, since it is so obvious. She is our Game Collector gal.
We really wanted to have her yield a big sword, but she should be uber female too. Kinda like Link meets Lara. And the Game Collector color red is perfect for her, with her being a natural redhead.
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As said in yesterday’s post, we wanted to create a Comic Collector hero to feature in templates, banners and Comic Collector advertising in general. Her name is CeCe and she appears on our website and software templates. We like her so much that we asked the creator David Dunstan, aka Loopy Dave, to give her four siblings, one for each program.
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Tomorrow is Free Comic Book Day! And we’re ready for it.
Data and cover art for all 38 FCBD 2011 issues is already available in our online comic book database, ready to be downloaded with our comic book cataloging software Comic Collector.
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We wanted to create a character for Comic Collector, a comic style superhero we could use in the software for details view templates, commercial banners and just overall on our website.
Development on this character started and she became “CeCe”. Check out how she changed from initial sketches, to the final art showing CeCe in several different poses and of course, the Spiderman spoof cover art.
The CeCe character is being used in various Comic Collector advertising campaigns. You may have seen banner ads featuring CeCe on your favorite comic-related websites. Read more
At Collectorz.com, we’re working on a new Mac edition of our Comic Collector software, and on major upgrades of the existing Mac editions of Movie, Book and Music Collector.
There are all huge projects and we need more help. So we are currently looking for an extra Mac OS X developer.
Are you experienced in Mac OS X programming, OR a smart programmer interested in Mac development? Then read on… Read more
Are you procrastinating cataloging your DVDs and Blu-rays because you think it is way too much work? Well, don’t.
Let me share my experience cataloging our shelves when I finally decided to organize our own movie collection.
When I started on the task I did not know how many movies and series we had, nor how much time it would take me to list them all.
My set up: Movie Collector Pro for Windows on my Vaio laptop and the OPN-2001 laser scanner.
How do your organize your books on your shelves?
Alphabetically by author? Or by title? Or just in order of purchase?
Have you tried sorting them by size, or by color?
Here’s a cool stop motion video, created by Sean Ohlenkamp & Lisa Blonder, exploring the possibilities.
Warning: don’t try this at home! You may end up wasting a lot of time that would have been better spent organizing your books with Book Collector 🙂
In the past few months we have implemented many improvements to the support information that is available on our website. We have made sure that almost all questions we get from customers are answered either on the product home pages, in the manual or in the FAQ.
We did this to improve our service to you, but we were also hoping to reduce the number of support tickets we receive everyday.
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We are still aiming to release the Mac edition of Comic Collector on May 17, 2011. Dinh, Pim and Ronald are working programming as fast as they can to make that happen. Mark and AJ are testing every new feature or screen as soon as the developers finish it.
Today, Ronald finished the Find Cover Image screen (one of the most popular features of v5 for Windows). Here the first screen shot of that new screen:
Movie Collector got reviewed by George Norman for FindMySoft.com:
“I know it sounds dumb now, but back in the day I would keep track of my movie collection by using a pen and paper. I had a paper notebook and I would write down in it. But now I know better; I know that there are software applications out there that can do a way better job than that.
After turning to software for help, I found a properly good application out there to help me keep track of my movie collection. The application I am talking about is Collectorz.com Movie Collector. Here are the things I liked the most about this application: … “
It’s finally here, Comic Collector 5 for Windows!
Version 5 adds a feature that comic collectors have been requesting for a long time:
The ability to catalog comics by barcode: Just type or scan the barcode to get automatic details and cover art for that exact issue (currently for American comics only).
And there’s lots more. Here’s a quick overview of what else is new:
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We are working on 1.3 updates for the CLZ apps for iPhone and iPod Touch. Three out of five have already been released.
CLZ Music has been submitted to Apple and is under review, CLZ Comics is under construction.
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