What's new in Book Collector? 2020

We had tested our software on Big Sur betas before the actual Big Sur release and did not find any problems. However, as soon as Big Sure went live, users started reporting crashes in various areas of the program, mainly when syncing and after adding or editing entries.

With the help of these users, and after trying several test builds with them, we have finally resolved all known crashes, which has resulted in today’s v20.2 Big Sur compatible release.

If you are using Big Sur, we strongly recommend updating to this v20.2 version.

Finally, if you still see problems on Big Sur with this new version, please us know, so that we can fix any remaining bugs.

Fixed:

• Editing a local file link popped up an error

The Manage Pick Lists screen is one of the most important screens of your Book Collector software. This is the screen you need for:

• Merging duplicate author entries
• Correct an Author sort name
• Fixing typos in Genres, Tags, Locations, etc…
• Removing unused pick list entries
• etc… etc…

But… judging from daily questions in our support channels, many users don’t even know of its existence. (Hint: it can be opened from the Edit menu). So with today’s update we are aiming to increase the awareness the Manage Pick Lists screen and to make it easier to access from anywhere.

From the main screen folder panel

In the main screen, you can now easily access the Manage Pick Lists screen for the selected folder field. Just click the new button right above the folder panel:

From the Edit Book screen

The Edit Book screen now has a big Manage [..] List button at the bottom, that automatically changes to match the field you are currently at:

From the Add/Edit item screen

Fixed:

• User Defined Yes/No fields are now available as options for the folder panel.
• Edit Multiple: Updating date fields wasn’t always working correctly if you only filled in a year.
• Edit in List: Editing the Collection Status field did not work.
• Folder panel: “Collection Status” folder option has been moved to “Personal” heading.

A big update for the Book Collector software today, with several improvements and fixes, all based on the daily feedback we are getting from our users.

Changing your folder field is now much easier

The folder panel is one of the most powerful tools of your Book Collector software. However, in our support conversations with users, we are finding that most users are always leaving their software on the out-of-the-box Author folders and never use anything else.

Which is sad, as they are missing out on a great tool. The folder panel instantly lets you group and filter your database on other fields too, e.g. by Publishing Year, by Genre, by Subject, by Location, etc.. Super useful and fun!

Now… I must admit that changing your folder panel to a different field was not very easy or obvious. As you had to create a “preset”, add your desired field(s), give the preset a name, save it, then finally activate the new preset in the folder panel.

So… we decided to make this all *much* easier, especially for single field folder settings.

• You can now directly select any folder field for the folder panel, without having to create a preset first. Just instantly pick your desired folder field under the “Folders” heading in the menu of the Folder button.
• Presets are now called Favorites.
• You can still create your own Favorite folder options, e.g. for multi-level folder settings (e.g. Year, then Author), or just to make a specific 1-field setting easily accessible.
• Your Favorite folder settings are listed at the top of the menu, under the Favorites heading.
• New: no more need to manually name your Favorites. Sensible names are created automatically (the selected fields separated by slashes).

Columns and Sorting

• For Columns and Sorting, “Presets” have been renamed to “Favorites” too.
• For Sort Favorites: no more need to manually name your Favorites. Sensible names are created automatically (the selected fields separated by slashes).

Edit Book: add multiple authors, credits, etc.. in one go

The Select screen for adding authors, credits, characters, etc… now includes checkboxes, so that you can multiple in one go. No more need to go back and fort between the Select and Edit screen to add multiple.

The new checkboxes for selecting multiple values in one go are now available in the Select screen for the following fields:

• Authors
• Credits
• Characters
• Genres
• Subjects
• Tags

Fixed:

• Using “Select All” in your list was very slow. Super fast again now 🙂
• Print screen: “Field ID 221 has no XML tagname” error, when printing the Collection Status field as a column.
• Removed the annoying “beep” when searching in the Add Books screen.

Fixed:

• If cover downloads were disabled, the program would still download a cover URL
• If no rating was set, it would show with rating “0” in the rating column. It now shows “nothing” in the column again.
• If no rating has been set for a book, it would show in a “0” folder, and now shows in a “[None]” folder in your folder panel.

Fixed:

• In some case, new entries added through Add from Core would get images with .tmp extensions, instead of .jpg.
• Editing pick list items directly from the folder panel did not work anymore.
• Dragging items between folders did not work anymore.

Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger!

Here’s another big update for your Book Collector software, with two further performance improvements:

Faster image downloads

We were able to make several improvements to the way images are downloaded (covers), making it much faster than before.

This change affects all places where images are downloaded from our servers, that is, when Adding Books from Core, when Updating from Core and when down-syncing from CLZ Cloud.

Faster Update from Core

On large collections the old Update from Core feature was quite slow, as it updated your books one by one, that is, doing separate requests to our server for each and every book.

So for this update, we also complete rewrote the Update from Core feature to do the updates in batches of 100 books at a time, making it much much faster! (roughly 4 times as fast).

Remember: Update From Core can be used to update your local book entries with possible extra data from our Core online book database. To use this feature, select some books, right click, then choose Update from Core.

Fixed:

• Add Books from Core: when adding by ISBN and the ISBN is not found, it now automatically pops up the Unrecognized ISBN screen, so that you can 1. add the book anyway and 2. report the missing ISBN to our Core.
• When using My Rating as the folder field, the “0” folder was missing.
• When using multiple levels of folders in the folder panel, sometimes the displayed counters were wrong.
• Images View: it is now possible to change thumb size using Ctrl + mouse wheel.
• Templates: Audio book length was missing in certain situations.
• Templates: Better visibility of authors that have a wiki-link if a book has multiple authors

New:

• When using the X button top left, the program will now “quit” instead of “suspend” so that when you restart the program your database will immediately open again.

Fixed:

• It wasn’t possible to add pseudonyms to authors through the Manage Pick Lists screen.
• Manage Pick Lists screen could hide behind the Edit Content screen when opened

Fixed

• Images View: Improved spacing between thumbnails
• Images View: Mouse over on images didn’t show the title of the item
• Cover Flow: Now uses big sharp images instead of the small thumbnails
• Find Cover: Could give an Access Violation when finding GIF images
• Templates: Improved visibility of authors if a book has multiple authors

When users send us screenshots during support conversations, we are seeing that many of you are using the Shelves View when browsing your collections. And we can’t blame you, that IS a cool looking view 🙂 However, it *could* be a bit slow and jerky, especially when displaying many cover images in one list.

So our Windows guy Joe has spent several weeks to make this Shelves View faster and smoother. At the same time, our in-house graphics man AJ has created two new Shelf styles. Here’s what’s new:

• Images are now loading a lot faster.
• Scrolling is faster and smoother.
• Shelves background is smoother, no more visible tile edges.
• Shelves now always continue over the full width, even when a row is not full.
• Two new Shelf Styles are now available: White and Concrete.

TIP: here’s how to get to Shelves View:
in your program’s book list panel, click the vertical Images tab on the right, then from the toolbar above the list panel, choose a Shelf Style. Use the slider to control the size of the images.

The new “White” style:

The new “Concrete” style:

Fixed:

• Fixed several issues with AutoSync that could cause Access Violation errors

Faster CLZ Cloud syncing!

We have made several structural changes to the CLZ Cloud syncing, making it much much faster than before, especially when syncing large amounts of entries up to the CLZ Cloud or down from the CLZ Cloud.

To enjoy the faster syncing, you need to use the actual Sync with CLZ Cloud screen.
(The Auto-Syncing in the background is also slightly faster now, but if you need to sync many entries up or down, please use the Sync with CLZ Cloud screen.)

Fixed:

• Link to Core: changing the search criteria could crash the program
• Add screen: changed the “already in collection” font color in dark skin to be more readable
• Main screen: The “Rating” column could not be moved to a different place
• Improved cover scaling for syncing

Faster CLZ Cloud syncing!

We have made several structural changes to the CLZ Cloud syncing, making it much much faster than before, especially when syncing large amounts of entries up to the CLZ Cloud or down from the CLZ Cloud.

To enjoy the faster syncing, you need to use the actual Sync with CLZ Cloud screen.
(The Auto-Syncing in the background is also slightly faster now, but if you need to sync many entries up or down, please use the Sync with CLZ Cloud screen.)

Improved stability when using Auto-Syncing

At the same time, we have resolved several issues with the Auto-Syncing in the background, problems that could cause Access Violations in some situation. So this 20.1 version should provide a more stable experience too.

Fixed:

• Some statistics weren’t shown correctly on screens with higher DPI settings.

In this update a re-design of the Tag editing interface and faster and more stable cloud syncing through our brand-new dedicated Sync-server.

Edit Book: improved interface for adding/editing Tags

In version 20, we changed the user interface for adding/editing Tags to a checkbox list. Of course, we did so thinking we were improving this, making it easier for you all. Instead of having to type in the box, just checkbox from your existing tag list, quick and easy 🙂

Boy, were we wrong here. After the v20 release, we received complaint after complaint about this change. Most users were very upset about not being able to copy/paste tags in anymore, others criticized having to scroll through long tag lists to find the ones they want, yet others, found it way too difficult to add new tags (some even missing the possibility) and finally some even reported it as a serious database corruption that they now suddenly saw all tags in all their books (which was of course not the case).

Anyway, to cut a long story short, we made a big boo-boo there :-).
Our sincerest apologies!

So in today’s v20.0.2, we have again re-designed the tag adding/editing interface, to take away all complaints, to resolve all problems. We are convinced that with the new design, we are giving you the best of both worlds:

• Clear overview of which tags are currently set.
• Easy adding of existing tags, using the Add Tags popup screen, which lets you:
  • Find existing tags using a search box,
  • Checkbox tags to add them.
  • Even lets you checkbox multiple tags in one go.
• The big “paste-box” is back for easily adding multiple tags by copy/pasting.

Now uses our brand-new CLZ Cloud Sync-server

Previously one big server was handling the Connect website, the CLZ Cloud website AND the CLZ Cloud syncing from the desktop programs and the mobile apps.
But this week we have set up a brand-new dedicated Sync-server to handle just the CLZ Cloud syncing.

In today’s update, Book Collector has been updated to sync through this new server, which should result in faster syncing and a more stable syncing experience during high load times (weekends).

Fixed:

• Add Books: Region settings weren’t included in the search.
• Solved several different “Access Violation” errors.
• Statistics:
  • Added number of pages.
  • Author count could be of because of books with multiple authors
  • Changed colors of statistics screen for Light Skin.

Now uses our brand-new CLZ Cloud Sync-server

Previously one big server was handling the Connect website, the CLZ Cloud website AND the CLZ Cloud syncing from the desktop programs and the mobile apps.
But this week we have set up a brand-new dedicated Sync-server to handle just the CLZ Cloud syncing.

In today’s update, Book Collector has been updated to sync through this new server, which should result in faster syncing and a more stable syncing experience during high load times (weekends).

Fixed:

• For some users, the database conversion of version 20.0.3 caused the loss of data in their User Defined Fields. This problem has been resolved now.
  
  If you lost UDF data, please contact us so that we can help you get the data back.

This update fixes an issue with the sync where it would always re-upload the custom front/back covers if such a book had any change at all. This resulted in many unneeded re-uploads of custom front/back covers.

Important: After updating to this version:

• the program will run a process to index your custom covers
• all books with custom front/back covers will re-upload

Both processes might take a while!

Fixed:

• Custom front/back covers were re-uploaded too often
• Quick Search: using arrow buttons and clicking results wasn’t working correctly

We are 2 weeks into 2020, so it’s time for Book Collector 20! Today in v20, we’re bringing you 2 super useful and time-saving improvements for the folder panel, plus a brand new Statistics screen.

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