News & updates
It is Feb 28, so here’s the February 2025 edition of the CLZ Newsletter.
For the mobile apps, instead of diving headfirst into the next cool feature to build, we decided to take a step back and work on several maintenance builds to enhance device compatibility, security and performance.
When those are all completed, we’ve got two big updates planned for CLZ Books (automatic pricing!) and CLZ Games (ToysToLife support).
Read on below for more details about recent and upcoming updates.
For the CLZ Web software, web-developer Joe has done two nice feature updates for CLZ Comics Web (Hide Owned) and CLZ Movies Web (Unrecognized barcodes).
However, the re-design project that I announced earlier has been delayed a bit, as web-developer Sven needed to work on several server-side projects to support the recent and upcoming mobile app updates.
We expect to be back on the re-design soon though.
Today’s topics:
- CLZ mobile apps:
- All Android editions: Edge-to-edge support
- All: Security updates, with 2FA support
- Coming up, CLZ Books 10.2: Automatic book pricing / values
- Coming up, CLZ Games 10.0: Toys-to-Life support (Amiibo’s, Skylanders, etc..)
- Coming up, performance related updates.
- CLZ Web cloud-based software:
- CLZ Movies Web: Better screens for reporting “unrecognized barcodes”
- CLZ Comics Web: New: “Hide Owned” toggle on Add by Series tab
Mobile apps:
All Android editions: Edge-to-edge support
Edge-to-edge is a new feature on Android that lets apps use your entire screen, in particular, all vertical space available. It’s not automatic though… app developers need to actually make changes to all apps screens to make it work.
So this month, Android developer Pim has worked through all screens of all Android apps to enabled Edge-to-Edge. This gives you more screen real estate to (for instance) view more of your collection list in your main screen.
Screenshots: CLZ Movies / CLZ Games / CLZ Comics / CLZ Music / CLZ Books
All mobile apps: Security updates, with 2FA support
We are currently releasing security updates for all 5 apps, for both the iOS and Android editions:
- 2FA support: if you have 2FA enabled on your CLZ Account, the app will now ask you for the 2FA authenticator code when you log in to the app
- Several other changes to better secure your account
- New “Change email address” link in the CLZ Account screen
These updates are now live for CLZ Games, CLZ Books and CLZ Music. Coming up early next week for CLZ Comics and CLZ Movies.
We recommended everyone to update their apps, to better protect your account.
Coming up, performance related updates
In line with with the above compatibility and security related updates, we are looking looking at some areas where we can improve the speed / performance of the apps, including areas where we can clean-up / re-write our code.
Faster start-up, faster syncing, faster image downloads, that kind of stuff.
Coming up in the next few weeks.
Coming up, CLZ Books 10.2: Automatic book pricing / values
A secret project that we have been working for months… I am happy to finally announce it in public: automatic pricing / values for your books!
With the new update, for both mobile and web, our CLZ Core will provide MSRP pricing (Retail prices), NEW values, and USED values.
Our calculations, based on cloud data, show that the new system will be able to provide MSRP pricing for about 82% of the average user collection and used values for around 75% of your books.
This may improve slightly over time. However, the system uses the ISBN as the identifier, so there will be no values for pre-ISBN books. You *will* be able to manually enter a value into the My Value field for your books, to get a better estimate of overall collection value.
Coming up, CLZ Games 10.0: Toys-to-Life support (Amiibo’s, Skylanders, etc..)
This has been a common request from CLZ Games users over the years:
support for cataloging Amiibo’s, Skylanders, Disney Infinity and other “Toys-to-Life” figures.
So let’s do it! Coming up in version 10.0 🙂
CLZ Web cloud-based software:
CLZ Movies Web: Better screens for reporting “unrecognized barcodes”
This update is all about improvements to the screen for dealing with “unrecognized barcodes”. You know, the screen that you get when try to add a movie by scanning a barcode, but… the barcode is not recognized by our Core online movie database.
This update includes a re-design of the screen for reporting barcodes for single movies, but more important, it introduces a complete new system for reporting barcodes for movie box sets, that even lets you report which movies are included:
When you scan an unrecognized barcode for a box set that contains multiple movies:
- In the first popup, choose “Box Set”
- Enter the name of the box in the Box Set Title box
- Then, one by one, add the movies that are in the box, by using the title search
- Click “Next” and pick a cover from the image search
- Finally, indicate the Format of the edition you have (4K, Blu-ray, etc…)
Thank you for your help improving the Core barcode recognition!
Some Unrecognized Barcode screenshots here
CLZ Comics Web: New: “Hide Owned” toggle on Add by Series tab
This was added to the mobile app a while ago, but never made it to the Web version yet. As of laste week, it’s available for web too!
In the Add Comics by Series screen, you can now hide all issues that you already own, so that you can focus on your missing issues more easily:
Just click the “Box” button at the top to “Hide Owned” comics, click it again to show all issues again.
Some Hide Owned screenshots here
