What's new in CLZ Games Web?
Three weeks ago, we did a huge “more compact design” update. Today, we are continuing with another update that improves the design, layout and performance of your game details panel.
Here’s what has changed:
- Flexible layout: the layout now fully adapts to the width of your details panel.
- Fields moved: we moved some fields around, to make sure the most important fields are at the top. For example, the Index field has been moved down to the “Personal” block.
- New (or updated) Platform icons: Platform icons are now available for a lot more platforms and are now displayed on a white background to make them stand out more.
- Youtube trailers: trailer videos now show up as a video thumbnails that links to the video on the Youtube site. No more embedded videos, as these often did not work (embed not allowed) and made the details panel load very slow.
- Faster loading: the details panel now loads much faster, as it now delays the loading of the backdrop and because the trailer video is not embedded anymore
Good news for CLZ Games Web users who collect amiibo, Skylanders, Disney Infinity or other Toys-to-Life (TtL) figures. The CLZ Scanner app has been updated to support scanning TtL barcodes into the Barcode queue of your Add Toys from Core screen.
Here’s how to add toys by scanning their box barcodes with CLZ Scanner.
Catalog your Toys-to-Life figures: amiibo, Skylanders, Disney Infinity, etc…
It’s live, the promised big update for your CLZ Games Web web-based software. You can now finally use the software to catalog your Toys-to-Life figures! The app comes with full support for:
- amiibo
- Skylanders
- Disney Infinity
- Lego Dimensions
- Starlink
- Rumble U
- UB Funkeys
This has been quite a project. First, our content team has worked for many months to create our own Toys-to-Life database in Core, including images of both the loose figures and the boxes. Nicely grouped into series for easy cataloging and browsing. When that Core database was close to completion, the development team started on the online search engine, the Web software and the mobile apps. And today, we can finally release the big new updates and show it to you all!
If you are into amiibo figures, or Skylanders or any other toy type, I am sure you will love this update.
Here’s what’s new:
A huge update for your CLZ Games Web software today, which dramatically improves the look and usability:
- A new, more compact, design and layout, so that you fit more data on screen
- Improved layout of the “game details” panel, with better support for back covers
Our web-based software has been around since 2009, first called “Connect”, but renamed in Oct 2024 to simply “CLZ Web”. The Web software is currently the most popular solution for use on your computer, far exceeding the number of users of the legacy “Collector” desktop software.
However, through the years, there is one particular piece of feedback we kept receiving from both new users *and* from users who switched from the desktop software, but phrased in different ways:
“It is all so BIG!” or “I can’t fit a lot of items on my screen”
And they’re right. CLZ Web has been designed to be “big and bold”, as is common with web-based software. Large fonts, big buttons, etc… It looks nice, but the side effect can be that you can fit less collectibles in your on-screen list. Especially when:
- Using a low-res laptop screen
- Using a tablet device
- Using several layers of toolbars in your browser
To resolve this, we were initially planning to introduce an optional “Compact View” or “Compact Skin”.
But when we starting working on that, we liked the results so much that we decided to make it THE new look of CLZ Web for everyone. It looks so much better, more compact, more items on screen. But never too small to read.
Here’s what we did:
- New font style to fit the new CLZ styling
- Slightly smaller fonts everywhere
- In the main screen, we combined toolbars and made them “lower” overall
- Lower list rows in List View, by slightly reducing the spacing
- Reduced the height and width of all input boxes in the Edit screens
- Reduced the height of the screen titles of all popup screen
- Reduced the height of the collection tabs at the bottom
This new compact look is going live for CLZ Web within a few weeks. But today, I can share more sneak preview screenshots of the most important screens, with a nice BEFORE (left) and AFTER (right) comparison. Enjoy!
Main screen
Edit screen
Today, a big update for your CLZ Games Web software.
For this update, we have done a complete re-design of the Add Games screen. The 3 main goals here were to:
- Make it easier to find the actual game and release you own, when adding by Title
- Make the search results more compact and nicer looking
- Make it all fast and snappy
These are the new big video game releases for this week!
- LEGO Horizon Adventures
- Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake
- Farmer Simulator 25
Now available in CLZ Core, for easy adding to your app, complete with:
- Barcodes
- Cover images
- Backdrops
- Descriptions
- Trailer videos
Two weeks ago, on Oct 7, we changed our company name to CLZ and moved our website to clz.com.
On top of that, 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
Today, we implemented the next step and also moved the CLZ Web editions to their new home 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.
In today’s Game Connect update, a smart tweak to the “Title” tab of the Add Games screen that will save you a lot of typing.
When you start typing in the Title box, it has always showed you a dropdown with 5 matching game suggestions to pick from. But in today’s update, we added a new “Search for …” entry at the top of that dropdown, with a smart auto-completed search suggestion.
Click that box (or hit down arrow on your keyboard, then Enter) to do a search for that auto-completed search term.
This update to Game Connect brings a noteworthy enhancement to your barcode scanning feature. With a complete redesign of the “Unrecognized Barcode” screen, you can now easily add games to your collection even if a barcode is not recognized by the Add Games screen.
Note that this Unrecognized Barcode screen not only makes your life easier, but also strengthens the CLZ Core!
In the next few weeks, we will be revamping the Add Games screen. But instead of doing one big update with all changes, we will be working on this bit by bit, in several smaller updates.
This week, we started the project with something that has needed a redesign for quite a while, the platform picker, that is, the tool for selecting the platform to search in. Previously a simple drop-down, we made the platform picker into a nice pop-up screen now, that lets you select your own favorite platforms to be listed at the top!
In today’s update, we improved the behaviour after searching using the search box top right.
Previously, when you selected a game from the “suggestions dropdown”, the software would take you to a separate full screen page showing the details of that game. This behaviour was a bit annoying as it would take you away from the main screen and you needed to click “Back” on the top left to get back to it. Also, the main screen would then show you the full collection again and would be scrolled back at the top again. Meh..
A big update for your Game Connect web-based software today, which is all about pick list fields.
Pick list fields (and the pick lists behind them) are an important part of your game database. These are the fields in the Edit screen that let you pick from a list of possible values, with that list being fully configurable by you the user.
Examples of pick list fields are Location, Owner, Genres and Tags (both multi value pick list fields), but also Platform, Developer and Publisher.
Now, a lot of the questions we usually get about Game Connect are related to pick list fields and can usually be answered with:
“Just use the Manage Pick Lists screen”
Renaming Locations, Merging duplicate Genres, fixing series sort problems, fixing typos in Platform names, etc… it is all done in the Manage Pick Lists (MPL) screen. An important and powerful screen, but… not so easy to find if you don’t know where to look or don’t even know what to look for.
With today’s Connect update, we are making this a lot easier: We have improved the Manage Pick Lists screen itself AND made it more accessible / discoverable:
In short:
- Improved Manage Pick Lists (MPL) screen
- Easy access to the MPL screen right from the folder panel
- Refreshed Edit Comic screen, with better pick list fields and direct MPL access
Thanks to our translator Peter Stickler, the Connect web-based software is now available in Swedish!
If you are interested in translating Connect to your language, let us know!
The main translations we are looking for at the moment are:
- Norwegian
- Italian
Thanks to our translator Frank Silas Kesia Jensen, the Connect web-based software is now available in Danish!
If you are interested in translating Connect to your language, let us know!
The main translations we are looking for at the moment are:
- Norwegian
- Swedish
- Italian
Thanks to our translators Fernando Carvalho, Milan Sobat and Brano Mazari, the Connect web-based software is now available in 3 extra languages: Portuguese, Serbian and Slovak!
Thanks guys!
If you are interested in translating Connect to your language, let us know!
The main translations we are looking for at the moment are:
- Danish
- Norwegian
- Swedish
- Italian
Here’s the latest results from our endeavour to improve the UI/UX of all Connect features and screens. Today, we made further improvements to both the “Manage Collections” tools and the new Edit Multiple tool.
The Edit Multiple feature is an efficient tool for making changes to multiple (or all) of your database entries in one go. It has been part of the Connect web-based software for many years (since May 2015!). For the CLZ mobile apps, this “batch editing” ability was introduced much later, in July 2020.
However, when we did that, we were forced to completely re-design the feature’s user interface, to make it work well on the small phone screen. And a strange thing happened: the UI/UX we ended up with, turned out be much better than the original Edit Multiple design of the Connect web-based software and the Collector desktop software 🙂
So today, we are bringing that new Edit Multiple setup to the Connect web-based software!
This update is all about the Pre-fill screen, you know, the screen that appears when adding items and lets you pre-fill fields while adding, like Location (= Storage Box for comics), Owner, Purchase Date/Store/Price, etc…
This Pre-fill screen was introduced in Dec 2020, with a fixed set of fields. Then a year later, in March 2022, it was made completely user configurable, so that *you* could choose which fields appeared on the screen.
This screen turned out to be a popular tool, but we’ve seen one problem with it:
Sometimes, users pre-fill a field for a specific movie (e.g. Purchase Price or Quantity), then forget to CLEAR it for the next items they add. Causing lots of items to be added with that same field set incorrectly.
So today, we are making another tweak to the Pre-fill screen:
The Link with Core screen is a tool in the CLZ Cloud site and the Connect web-based software that is used to link entries with CLZ Core. E.g. items that you added manually, or items that you imported. The Link with Core tool is mostly used by users coming from other software and are switching to CLZ.
Today’s update is a “behind the scenes” update, to make the Link screen faster and to improve search results.
Improved
- The search now uses our elastic search engine, giving you better and more meaningful results for your unlinked items.
- Better uses of indexes and the elastic engine makes everything much faster too!
On top of that, we’ve improved the search results in the Link with Core screens for some Connect flavours specifically:
- Comic: Now takes series popularity into account.
- Movie: Now now also digs into our vast library of “alternative” and foreign titles for movies to obtain a result that matches your movie.
- Music: Now also uses Discogs for finding results.
What is Linking with Core?
Connect is built around our central online database: Core. All factual data and cover images are used and shown directly from Core. If you have been using the Add screen to catalog your items, then most, if not all of your items will already be linked to Core.
If you’ve added some items “manually” or if you’ve imported a list from CSV (or from somewhere else), there will not be a lot of data in them.
To automagically fill in data for your items, the items need to be linked with Core. If you have unlinked items, you can link them to Core using the Link with Core screen which is found in the menu top left!
Earlier this year, we updated our Connect software to make it fully localizable / translatable. Shortly after, we went live with Dutch and German version of Connect.
Today, after the hard work of three loyal CLZ users, three more language options went live on the site:
- French
- Spanish
- Hungarian
Thank you, Philippe, Rafael and Pető!!
Continuing with our quest to revamp and re-design features and screen of the Connect web-based software. Today we took on the Import from CSV/TXT screen.
Connect and CLZ Cloud users often ask us about printing or exporting only a part of their collection, e.g. “how do I print just my wish list?” or “how do I export a list of just one platform?”.
Now, this was possible, but it took a few steps that were not intuitive for many users. You had to:
- Make the selection in the main screen first, e.g. by using folders, the collection status filter or the search box
- Checkbox all games in the selection, using the checkboxes in the list
- Then use the Print or Export button on the special blue action toolbar above the list
With today’s update, we are making this a lot easier. And while we were at it, we also freshened up the user interface of the Print to PDF and Export to CSV screens.
Great news for all our German-speaking customers: starting today the Connect web software is also available in German!
Our programmers have been working for months to make the Connect software available in other languages (other than English). This meant:
- Make the Connect software translatable, to ensure that all interface texts come from a translation database.
- Making a nice and easy translation tool for our translators, so that they can translate all texts efficiently and also maintain the translation when new functionality is added.
- And of course, to do the actual translation.
And today we can take the next step: Connect is now available in German!
A nice update for all Connect users who use multiple collections, especially for those who have a LOT of collections.
New in this re-design:
- Single row tab-bar. No more lost screen estate caused by multiple rows of tabs.
- Got more tabs than fit on screen? Scroll the bar horizontally.
- Or use the next/prev buttons on the right to jump page by page.
- Alternatively, click the menu icon on the bottom left to pick a collection from a menu.
- The menu also provides quick access to the Manage Collections screen.
- Drag tabs to change their order.
- Double click a tab to rename a collection.