What's new in CLZ Books? (page 9)

Sharper images in Cover View and Card View

This week, we have implemented several changes to the cover images that are shown in Cover View and Card View, making them much sharper/crisper, less blurry.

Also, on computers with a 4k / Ultra HD screen, both the Cover View and the Card will automatically switch to even higher quality images, with twice the resolution!

The difference is huge, check out the screen shots below. But the best way to experience the sharper images is to log in to your own account and look at your own collection!

Other improvements to Cover and Card View

At the same time, we made other improvements to the Cover and Card views, to make them look nicer and to make the scrolling experience smoother and faster:

• While scrolling, the images now load faster.
• Scrolling the view while images are loading is now smoother, less “choppy”.
• The Images view now has black background for a more classy look.
• In both Images and Card View, while scrolling, it does not first load a placeholder image anymore, it just show the background color until the actual image is loaded, also resulting in a less choppy scrolling experience.

It is important to have your book entries linked to the corresponding entries in our Core online book database, because that is what gives you all automatic book details, like subjects, genres, Dewey, plot description, cover art, etc..

All book entries you add through the Add Books screen, by searching our Core, will of course automatically be linked to Core.

However, if you imported a list of books, e.g. from a CSV file or from a competitor product, some/most of your entries may arrive “unlinked”, especially if you did not import ISBNs.

Previously, linking those unlinked entries to Core was a one-by-one job, slow and cumbersome. But we fixed that once and for all, with the new smart Link Books tool!

This new Link Books tool automatically finds best matches in our Core online book database, based on author, title and publisher in your list. Then, it lets you auto-link all “high match score” books, saving you loads and loads of time and clicks!

Great news for all users of our book database solutions, on any version (old or new), on any platform (Connect, Windows, Mac, iOS and Android):

Our Core online book database now recognizes 97% of all ISBNs searched!

In the past few weeks, our web-developers have been working on several improvements to our Core online book database system, which has increased the success rate for ISBN searches to 97 percent!

Basically, this means that on average, for every 100 ISBNs you scan into the Add Books screen, our Core online book database will recognize 97, leaving only 3 as “unrecognized”.
(in the past, the success rate has always been around 89% to 90%.)

Note that this 97% is a world-wide average, over all users from all countries.

For US and UK books, the results are even better, at 99%. In other countries, the hit-rate will be slightly below 97%. But for everyone, it will definitely be better than before!

How can you start enjoying the improved ISBN searches?

The above is a “server-side” change, so you don’t need to do anything 🙂

You can now instantly experience the benefits, in the Book Connect web-based software, the Book Collector desktop software (Windows or Mac) and the CLZ Books mobile app (iOS or Android).

Whatever version you have! No update needed, no payment needed!

Two updates for the Book Connect software and the CLZ Cloud viewer today. One a big step forward in usability, the other a nice cosmetic improvement:

Book Details now integrated in main screen

Up till now, when you clicked a book entry to see its’ full details, you were taken to the book details page, that is, a new page in your browser. One had to click “Back” to get back to the book list again. Often resulting in an annoying back and forth clicking, each time causing you to lose your position in the list.

But not anymore! Starting with today’s update, the book details are now integrated in a panel within the main collection view:

No more back and forth clicking. Just click a book entry to see its’ details, click another one to see that book’s details. Nice and easy, never lose your spot again.

Choose from two Layouts:

• Horizontal Split: folders on the left, list on the top right, details on bottom right
• Vertical Split: 3 panels side by side, folder, list and details

In either layout, the 3 panels are fully resizable by dragging the black “splitter bars” between the panels, so that you can customize the layout to your own liking.

The book details panel comes with its’ own “action bar”, with the main actions you may want to take on the selected book (Edit, Share, Delete, Duplicate, Loan and Link with Core).

Improved Cover View and Card View

At the same time, we made some small tweaks to both the Card View and Cover View, so that they’re making better use of your specific screen width. Both now use a “fully justified” layout, with the Cards auto-resizing to fit your screen width and the Cover distributing over the width, both resulting in a cleaner, less “jagged” view.

Over the last week Joël from team Connect worked on splitting the settings into more logical places, and added new tooltips to explain what all the buttons do. The full what’s new:

Added tooltips

Hovering your mouse over the various buttons will now show tooltips to explain what the buttons do! Hover your mouse over the buttons to see what they do.

Split the settings

All settings used to be together in one screen, but they weren’t easy to find so we decided to split the settings up into their own logical pages. You can now find them by opening the menu (top left), and look for:

• Field Defaults: to set up default field values for new items
• CLZ Cloud Sharing: to set up all your CLZ Cloud sharing options
• Settings: with just the behaviour and display settings

A cool user interface update for your Book Connect software today, in which we makes it easier to select books and easier to perform batch actions on the selected books.

Select using checkboxes

To select books, just click the checkboxes on the left of each book entry in the list. Checkboxes are also available in Card View and Images View, just hover your mouse over an item.

No more need to go into “Select Mode” first. The Select Mode is automatically activated as soon as you checkbox the first book, clearly indicated by the blue Batch Action Bar that replace the regular toolbar.

Batch Action Bar

While in Select Mode, the blue Batch Action Bar is visible, always showing you the number of selected books. Also:

• Use the “Select all” checkbox to select all books in the current list in one go
• Use the “x Cancel” button on the right to leave Select Mode
• And of course, use any of the action buttons (Edit, Delete, Print, Export, Duplicate and Loan) to perform an action on the selection books

New for the Add Books screen:

• Add button is now bigger and easier to spot (some new users missed the little round “+”).
• Add button now “remembers” your collection vs. wish list selection. No need to pick from the Collection/Wish List popup menu every time you add anymore.
• Remove from queue button is now bigger and easier to spot. Tap and hold on a barcode in the queue to select barcodes you want to remove.

Fixed:

• Accented characters in sortnames/titles were sorted incorrectly.
• Main screen: the over-sensitive quickscroll bar in the thumbnail view has been fixed.
• Edit: ‘Done’- button doest not scroll from screen on manual scroll.
• Edit: New ‘Unsaved changes’ dialog.
• Cloud sync: Sync reporting ‘invalid xml’ in rare cases.

If you’re a new user or thinking of moving your collection from the program “BookCAT” to Book Connect, good news: we’ve just added a new “BookCAT” import tool in Book Connect!

You can find the “BookCAT” import tool under the menu top left, then choose “Import Data”.

If you’re a new user or thinking of moving your collection from the program “Delicious Library” to Connect, good news: we’ve just added a new “Delicious Library” import tool in Connect!

You can find the “Delicious Library” import tool under the menu top left, then choose “Import Data”.

New for the Add Books screen:

• Add button is now bigger and easier to spot (some new users missed the little round “+”).
• Add button now “remembers” your collection vs. wish list selection. No need to pick from the Collection/Wish List popup menu every time you add anymore.

Fixed:

• Crash when sorting on Index field when a book didn’t have an index value.
• Already added barcode results could reappear in the ‘add by barcode’ queue.
• Adding a book would clear the collection status filter in the main screen.
• The sorting option screen would sometimes not fully show the chosen sort option when opened.
• iPad: Main screen: the details view did not refresh after changing the details template.
• iPad: Main screen: the ‘edit my rating’ pop up was rotated when in landscape mode.

A small user interface tweak today:
The Add Books screen is now a pop-up screen that lays over your book list.
(previously it was a separate full screen page)

Looks cooler, feels more “snappy” and while adding books, you can actually see the new additions appear in your book list in the background!

Persistent barcode queue

Barcodes scanned on the add page are now remembered! This means you can scan your barcodes into the add queue, leave the page, return later and still add the barcodes you scanned.

If you wish to remove barcodes from your queue, use the Edit button top right of the list of barcodes!

We’ve added new fields to sort on to change the order in which your books are displayed in your list. Your book list will adapt to sort and show the field you’re sorting on. On top of that we’ve redesigned the Select Sort Order screen to make it more clear what you’re choosing.

Open the Select Sort Order screen by tapping the menu top right, then tap “Sort order”.

All available sort fields:

• Author
• Title
• Publication Date
• Number of Pages (New!)
• Order of Entry (New!)
• Index
• Reading Date (New!)
• My Rating (New!)
• Purchase Date (New!)
• Purchase Price (New!)
• Current Value (New!)
• Quantity (New!)
• Dewey (New!)
• LoC Classification (New!)
• Series / Volume (New!)
• Series / Issue (New!)

All fields can be sorted either ascending or descending. Tap the field you wish to sort on, then tap “Apply” to confirm.

Last week we updated the field selection popup for Connect and CLZ Cloud, and this week we bring that same field selection popup to your “Export to Text” and “Print to PDF” pages.

The update also includes an update Preview box for Export to Text, and an updated way for dragging/dropping fields for your columns or sort order.

Open up your Export to Text or Print to PDF screen via the menu top left in Connect.

New field selection popup:

Updated “Export to Text” page:

With new preview panel:

Updated “Print to PDF” page:

The ability to select your own Columns for the List View is an important customization feature of Book Connect. The same holds for selecting the Sort Order fields.

However, the “field selection” screens for doing these customizations were a bit outdated and finding a field could be tricky. So we decided to re-imagine the field selection screens to make them easier to understand, easier to use and better to use on mobile devices too.

Redesigned Field Selection screen:

• Available fields are now grouped, like the tabs in the Edit screen.
• Easily find the field you want with the search box top left.
• Use checkboxes on the left to select fields.
• Use the “x” button on the right to remove fields.
• Drag and drop fields on the right side to change the order.
• For sorting: use the ASC/DESC button to change the sort direction of that particular field.
• Works great on both your desktop and mobile browsers!

Select Columns screen:

Select Sort Order screen:

Fixed:

• Crash in the Add Books screen on tablet devices.

We’ve added new fields to sort on to change the order in which your books are displayed in your list. Your book list will adapt to sort and show the field you’re sorting on. On top of that we’ve redesigned the Select Sort Order screen to make it more clear what you’re choosing.

Open the Select Sort Order screen by tapping the menu top right, then tap “Sort order”.

All available sort fields:

• Author
• Title
• Publication Date
• Number of Pages (New!)
• Order of Entry (New!)
• Index
• Reading Date (New!)
• My Rating (New!)
• Purchase Date (New!)
• Purchase Price (New!)
• Current Value (New!)
• Quantity (New!)
• Dewey (New!)
• LoC Classification (New!)
• Series / Volume (New!)
• Series / Issue (New!)

All fields can be sorted either ascending or descending. Tap the field you wish to sort on, then tap “Apply” to confirm.

What’s new in the Add Books screen?

• Single Search Box: Just one box for search (e.g. like Google or Amazon). No more separate Author and Title boxes. Just enter (part of) the author’s name and (part of) the title and you will get the best matching results. (see the screen shot below with “crichton jurassic” results”).

• Search by Publisher and Year: Getting a lot of results? Filter down to the book edition you’re looking for by adding the publisher and/or publication year to your search! (see screen shot below)

What’s new in the Add Books screen?

• Single Search Box: Just one box for search (e.g. like Google or Amazon). No more separate Author and Title boxes. Just enter (part of) the author’s name and (part of) the title and you will get the best matching results. (see the screen shot below with “crichton jurassic” results”).

• Search by Publisher and Year: Getting a lot of results? Filter down to the book edition you’re looking for by adding the publisher and/or publication year to your search! (see screen shot below)

Fixed:

• Custom written plots could be overwritten with the default plot when books were updated from the online CLZ Core for Books database.
• The app did not open the details page when a search result was selected in the quick search box while the [All Books] folder was active in phone mode.

We had several reports from users about a crash when searching for an item in the collection. This crash has been reproduced and now fixed in the latest build!

Fixed:

• Crash during a search in the device’s database.

Quick Search: Search-As-You-Type suggestions

Instantly find and select a particular book in your local database:

• In the Quick Search box, just start typing the first few letters of the author or title you are looking for.
• While typing, a drop-down list will appear, showing the first five matching books.
  (for most books, it only takes 2 or 3 letters before it shows up.)
• Once you see the book you were looking for, tap it to bring up its detail page
• TIP: Tap the search button on the keyboard or tap “View All Results” to perform the normal search.

Quick Search now searches more fields

Now also searches in:

• Subtitle
• Series
• LoC Classification
• LoC Control Nr
• Dewey
• Plot
• Tags
• Notes

Full list of fields that are now searched:

• Title
• Author
• ISBN
• Publisher
• Subtitle
• Series
• LoC Classification
• LoC Control Nr
• Dewey
• Plot
• Tags
• Notes

Fixed:

• Faster loading of details screen.
• Crash within a few seconds of opening the app.
• Crash when pressing ‘Change account info’ in the sync screen.

Up until today, the quick search box in Book Connect (and the CLZ Cloud viewer for books) only searched in the Title, Author, ISBN, Year and Tags fields. Pretty limited, but necessary for performance reasons.

However, with the new search engine we created last year, it became possible to search more fields while keeping the search super-fast. So lets use that capability!

From now on, if you use the search box, it will also search in many more fields. The complete lists of fields that are now searched:

• Author
• Title
• ISBN
• Year
• Tags
• Subtitle
• Dewey
• LoC Classification
• LoC Control
• Publisher
• Series
• Notes
• Plot

Example: searching for “langdon” will return all Dan Brown’s “Robert Langdon” books, because the name appears in the plot summary:

Live today in your Book Connect software: a completely re-designed Edit Book screen with an improved look, layout and usability!

New look and layout

We’ve moved some fields around and to have them grouped and placed more logically. You’ll notice that we’ve also updated the look of certain buttons so it’s all easier on the eye, and there’s only one big blue important “OK” button to save your changes.

Updated dropdown and pick list fields

The pick list fields have been updated so they’ll only show options from your own collection instead of all available options in our online database. This makes it a lot faster to quickly pick something from a pick list that you used before!

You can just start typing to filter to the pick list entry you want to use, or open up the dropdown to scroll and pick.

Multi value pick list fields such as the Author field, have a blue plus button to pick an author from your author list. Click it, and either start typing or just pick an author from the list.

New Pick List fields

We’ve updated the following fields from plain text fields to “pick list” fields. This means that those fields now have a dropdown which you can click to quickly pick an existing pick list entry for that field.

The following fields haven been updated from plain text to pick list fields:

• Location
• Condition
• Purchase Store
• Owner

These field now all have a dropdown to pick an entry. You can also type into them to search or create a new entry for that field.

Panel with personal fields on all tabs

At the bottom of the edit screen we added a “sticky” panel that you can see on all edit tabs. This panel contains some of your most important personal fields so you can always edit them quickly.

New Find Cover pop-up

The Find Cover pop-up has been updated to the latest version we introduced in the Add Screen. Check it out:

We’ve just updated Book Connect to introduce an easy way to deal with “Unrecognized ISBNs”.
A new screen that not only helps you to add the book to your database anyway, but also helps your fellow Book Connect users by instantly adding the missing ISBN to the CLZ Core central online book database.

(this feature was introduced for our Windows, Mac, iOS and Android versions earlier, and in the meantime, people have used this new tool to add over 180 thousand new books to our Core!)

• In the Add Books screen, when a scanned or typed ISBN is not recognized, a new “Unrecognized ISBN” screen will appear.
• In this screen, just enter the Author, Title, Publisher and Year (and find a cover if you want) then click Add to Collection.
• This will:
  1. Add the book to your own database, with the information you filled in.
  2. Add the book to our Core central online book database.

The result: for the next user who searches for this particular ISBN, it will be recognized 🙂

Fixed:

• Secondary author could not be found in the quick search.
• App shortcut not working in the Android launcher.

You may need to re-add your app shortcut to your launcher screen by tapping/holding the app in your list of apps!