[CLZ News] Coming up: v9.0 for CLZ Movies/Games/Books/Music + our current Core projects

The end of the year is near, so this is CLZ Alwin with the 12th and last CLZ Newsletter for 2023. But first: A happy 2024 from the entire CLZ Team (13 people now!): Martin, Rowdy, Sven, Stijn, AJ, Pim, Joe, Bernard, Justin, Taco, Senno, Sytske and me, Alwin!

December 2023 was kind of a slow month in terms of app updates and software releases. But we have definitely not been sitting still 🙂

With CLZ Comics 9.0 alive and kicking, our mobile team Pim, Bernard and AJ are preparing four upcoming v9.0 updates for the other four mobiles: CLZ Movies, CLZ Games, CLZ Books and CLZ Music. Read on below for more details.

The CLZ content team has been working on three huge Core projects, for movies, games and comics. More info below. We even hired a new part-time content manager to help with that: Taco’s friend Senno has joined the team for two days a week!
Also, Justin has created a cool Wrap-Up 2023 infographic about our Core comic database, find the link below.

Let’s go over these projects in this newsletter:

• App and software updates:
  • Coming up: version 9.0 for the CLZ Movies/Games/Books/Music mobile apps
  • Coming up: additions and improvement for the Connect web-based software
• CLZ Core updates:
  • Core for Games: better cover art and region info for game releases
  • Core for Movies: better cover art for 4K, Blu-ray and DVD releases
  • Core for Comics: internal database re-design
  • Core for Comics Wrap-Up 2023

App and software updates:

Coming up: version 9.0 for the CLZ Movies/Games/Books/Music mobile apps

With CLZ Comics 9.0 live in the App Store and Play Store, our mobile team (Pim, Bernard and AJ) are preparing for big v9.0 for the other four CLZ mobile apps, for movies, games, books and music.

A quick overview of the planned new features and improvements:

• New collections tab-bar at the bottom of the screen, for quickly switching between collections without opening the menu.
• Adding by Barcode: Improved “Unrecognized Barcode” screen, for reporting unrecognized barcodes to Core.
• CLZ Movies: Report unrecognized Box Set barcodes, including the movies contained in the box!
• Adding movies/games by Title: better selection screen for choosing your specific edition, with big cover images
• CLZ Movies: tap an actor name in the movie details to find all movies with that actor

Coming up: additions and improvement for the Connect web-based software

• Comic Connect: new Check Values screen, for looking up a CovrPrice value without having to add the comic to your database first.
• Better Manage Pick Lists screen and Select Item screens for pick list fields.
• Adding movies/games by Title: better selection screen for choosing your specific edition, with big cover images
• Re-design of details templates for all Connect flavors.

CLZ Core updates:

Core for Games: better cover art and region info for game releases

A huge project that Martin, Senno, Sytske and myself have been working on for the past 2 months: checking and fixing game cover images, to make sure the cover image actually matches the exact edition (by barcode). So better recognition of regular editions, collector’s editions, steelbook version, etc.. Also, making sure you are getting a picture of your exact local release, with the correct audience rating logo (ESRB, PEGI, etc…).

At the same time, we are correcting the Region field for those editions, so that in the upcoming updates for our game tools, we can offer better Region filters in the Add Games screen!

We expect to be working on this for at least 4 more months, but… the effects of our work should already be noticeable now, especially for current and recent platforms: PS5, Xbox Series X, Switch, PS4, Xbox One, Wii U and Wii.

Are you getting the wrong cover image when adding a game by barcode? Then please report it to us, either on Facebook or Discord:

• The “Wrong Covers” pinned post in the CLZ Games group on Facebook
• The #wrong-covers sub-forum in our CLZ Games server on Discord

Core for Movies: better cover art for 4K, Blu-ray and DVD releases

Similar to the above, the next big project is checking and fixing cover art for all 4K UHD, Blu-ray and DVD releases. Here too, making sure the cover images matches the actual release, by barcode.

We are just getting started on this, working on cover images for 4K releases now. Just over a million releases to go through though, so I think we won’t finish this project any time soon 🙂

Core for Comics: internal database re-design

This has been the main task of our lead developer Sven for the past few weeks: a re-design of the structure of our Core online comic database, combined with the required updates to the internal CMS tools that our content managers use to work on this database.

The main goal here is to make data storage for variants more efficient. That is, to enable the sharing of as much data as possible at the issue level and to prevent duplicate data being stored for each variant.

This change will improve the quality and consistency of variant data. At the same time, it will drastically increase the efficiency of our internal Core content management tools.

Don’t worry, the database change will have no impact whatsoever on the database structure of the mobile app, web-app or desktop software. Other than getting better data, you won’t notice a thing 🙂

Core for Comics Wrap-Up 2023

We have done some queries on our Core online comic database to gather popularity stats, based on usage of CLZ Comics, Comic Connect and Comic Collector. Using the results of those queries, CLZ Justin created this nice infographic with top 10 lists:

• Top 10 comics of 2023 (1 per series)
• Top 10 Marvel series
• Top 10 DC series
• Top 10 indy series

Talk to you again next year!