[CLZ News] We are now “CLZ”! New website at clz.com

News & updates

CLZ Alwin here, bringing you the CLZ newsletter for October 2024.

This month was all about our name change (we are now “CLZ”!), our new website, new app icons and new names and URLs for the web-based software. This big change has been cooking for a long time and we are super happy it is finally all live now!

Most of the team has been involved in this big “renaming” project, as we have been updating all sites and products. And we’re still not done. You can expect to see minor tweaks to the look and feel of our sites, fixes to our documentation, etc…

While all that was going on… our mobile team has been quietly and secretly working on a major new feature for the CLZ Books mobile app: OCR scanning of ISBN numbers!
A great way to add books that do not have barcodes, but DO have an ISBN listed on the book. Read on below for more details.

This is what we have been working on in October:

We are CLZ!
- Collectorz.com is now “CLZ”
- New logo and new website
- New app icons for all 5 CLZ Mobile apps
- Connect is now called “CLZ Web” and is now at app.clz.com
Coming up:
- CLZ Books 9.5: Scan ISBN numbers with OCR!
CLZ Core updates:
- Core for Games: “Check Covers” project, FINISHED!
- New Core for Games project: a better Hardware database
- Core for Movies: “Check Covers” project, 81.75% cloud coverage!
- Core for Comics: New Comic Book Day summary, 2,493 new releases

We are CLZ!

Collectorz.com is now “CLZ”!

Starting from the year 2000, our name has been “Collectorz.com” with our website at “www.collectorz.com”. Makes sense, right?

But since the release of our mobile apps, titled CLZ Comics, CLZ Movies, etc.. many users started to refer to us as “CLZ”. So we figured, let’s go with the flow and officially rename the company to just “CLZ”!

So on Monday Oct 7, we made the big switch. Our company is now called “CLZ” and our website has moved to clz.com.
(We have owned the cool CLZ.com 3-letter domain for many years and now we can finally make full use of it!)

New logo and new website

The old Collectorz.com logo was designed in the year 2000, by our friend Johan, an ex-colleague of Sytske and me (Alwin) from the Lost Boys period. Back then, Johan created the logo and the 2000 version of the website. Through the years, the circular logo has served us well, basically unchanged, even though the website has seen several iterations.

Fast forward to 2024, Johan now runs a design company called Studio Black, together with his wife Sacha. So we thought, how cool would it be to hire Johan and Sacha again to do our new CLZ logo, website and app icons? So we contacted them and they agreed! Over the past few months, we have worked together through several iterations of the design. And we are very happy with the final result!

Thank you, Johan and Sacha!

Check out the new website and logo here

New app icons for all 5 CLZ Mobile apps

To better fit the new brand logo, new website and styling, we also updated the icons for all 5 mobile apps.
And while we were at it, we added support for dark and tinted / monochromatic mode.

Dark mode:

And these are some tinted / monochromatic examples of the CLZ Comics app icon:

Connect is now called “CLZ Web” and is now at app.clz.com

Next to the company name change, we also renamed our “Connect” web-based editions to “CLZ Web”. So:

Movie Connect became CLZ Movies Web
Comic Connect became CLZ Comics Web
Game Connect became CLZ Games Web
Book Connect became CLZ Book Web
Music Connect became CLZ Music Web

Also, we moved the CLZ Web editions to a new domain name at app.clz.com. (previously “connect.collectorz.com” ).
At the same time, the CLZ Cloud site moved from cloud.collectorz.com to cloud.clz.com.

Don’t worry, the old connect.collectorz.com location automatically redirects to the new app.clz.com location.
The same holds for the cloud site: cloud.collectorz.com automatically redirects to cloud.clz.com

Coming up… CLZ Books 9.5: Scan ISBN numbers with OCR!

Our mobile developers CLZ Pim and CLZ Bernard and UI/UX designer CLZ AJ are currently working together on a cool new feature for the CLZ Books app:

Adding books by scanning the actual ISBN numbers using OCR

This is gonna be super useful when adding books without barcode, or when the barcode is somewhere on the inside of the book. In cases like that, just point your camera at the page where the ISBN is printed and the app will find and “read” the number. No barcode needed!

ETA: within 2 weeks!

CLZ Core updates:

Core for Games: “Check Covers” project: FINISHED!

After many months of work, we have completed this project: We have checked and fixed all game cover images for all game editions in our database!

So in general, when you add a console or handheld game by barcode, you should always get the correct cover image. Still seeing a wrong image? Please report it on the Wrong Covers section of the Club CLZ Forum here.

New Core for Games project: a better Hardware database

This is CLZ Martin’s new project, adding more hardware entries to our Game Hardware database, including their barcodes. So we’re adding lots of extra consoles, handhelds, controllers, etc.. etc…

Core for Movies: “Check Covers” project, 81.75% cloud coverage!

Still making progress here, even though the in-house content managers were focusing on finishing the game covers project. And that is because of enthusiast CLZ user Martin Ede, who is working on the Core movie covers every day!

But with the game covers done, CLZ Kelvin can now also focus on DVD, Blu-ray and 4K covers full-time, so you can expect a nice speed-up here!

Core for Comics, New Comic Book Day summary: 2,493 new releases!

This month, our CLZ content team added 2,493 new comic books to our Core, on 5 NCBD wednesdays.

Check out this month’s NCBD posts on Club CLZ:

You can find all past NCBD posts on our Club CLZ forum here.

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