Collectorz.com Newsletter May 2008
Dear collector,
In this newsletter:
- News: New Windows versions
- News: Improved Media Center Support in Movie Collector
- News: More new people joining us
- Top Tip: How to swipe barcodes with the CueCat
- Meet The Collector: Syd Bolton
News: New Windows versions
Early May we have released updates for the Windows versions of Music, Movie and Book Collector.The biggest new feature for all three is the New Screen Layout setting, offering six different layout configurations of Tree, List and Details panel.
Download the new versions on our Download page or use the Check for Update option in your current version.
News: Improved Media Center Support in Movie Collector
The most important change in version 5.5 of Movie Collector is the completely new viewer for Windows Media Center, created by Brian Baskerville of mcezone.com.We are happy that we have reached an agreement to include Brian's great MCE software with Movie Collector. We think the new viewer is a great improvement over the MCE support of previous Movie Collector versions, especially when used under Vista.
New in Movie Collector MCE (Note: some features are only available under Vista)
- Cool new look and feel in several different views (Large Covers, Thumbnails and Titles)
- Search by Title, Genre or Rating right from the MCE viewer
- Use the on screen keyboard to find movies starting with a specific letter
- Order your movie list by Title, Year or a Custom order (defined in Movie Collector in Tools | Options | Media Center)
- Define a Filter for MCE data in Tools | Options | Media Center
- No exporting to MCE necessary, the MCE viewer always uses an up-to-date data set
Visit our forum for your feedback.
News: More new people joining us
As said in our previous newsletter, our search for a new content manager for music and movies resulted in us hiring not one but two of them: Martin and Rowdy. We have already introduced Martin to you, now it's time for Rowdy.
Rowdy Peetam is our new content manager for games and movies. He is a gamer himself and owns several consoles including some relics like NES, SNES, the MegaDrive 32x but also new ones like Wii and Xbox 360. His taste in movies is ‘everything’, which is a big asset for us.
Visit his profile for more info.
Our web development team has grown too: Quang Dinh Le joined Sven and Mark.
Dinh works parttime next to his Computer Science study at the University of Amsterdam. Currently he is working together with Sven to improve our content management systems for our online databases. Check him out and visit his About page.
Top Tip: How to swipe barcodes with the CueCat
The CueCat is an easy and affordable way to start cataloging using a barcode reader. The often returning question we receive is "How slow or fast do I have to swipe for the CueCat to read the barcode?"
Some basic tips for scanning using the CueCat scanner
Hold the CueCat between your thumb and forefinger like a pen or pencil. Place the CueCat's nose on any side of the code but not within the code itself; it does not matter if you scan from left to right or vice versa.
Align the cat's 'paws' with the bottom of the code and tip the CueCat vertically so that its nose is in direct contact with the surface of the DVD, CD, book or game.
Move the CueCat smoothly from left to right (or right to left) across the code in one fluent motion. Try not to scan too slowly, the Cuecat works better if scanning is done in a rather quick fluent motion.
Keep the CueCat in contact with the code throughout the swipe for an accurate reading, don't wander off to one side.
The result of the reading shows up in your Collectorz.com screen and the software does the rest: searching and adding the scanned item to your personal database.
Click here for more info about the CueCat.
Meet The Collector: Syd Bolton
"My name is Syd Bolton and I’m from Brantford, Ontario, Canada (near Toronto). I’ve been an avid computer gamer and software developer since I was 10, and at 36 I’ve had 26 years to collect computers and games and I’ve been busy. So busy in fact that I started my own computer museum – The Personal Computer Museum.I started collecting video games and got to a point where I carried around pieces of paper with tick marks representing my collection. I knew there had to be a better way and being a developer I seriously thought about writing my own program when I discovered Collectorz.com. I’ve always used the software with a barcode reader and have therefore focused on my collections that are coded. The really old games don’t even come with barcodes, or they are loose cartridges where I’d have to type the names in. Being a busy person, this is the part of my collection I have left until the end.
My current database shows just over 4,200 games and I have not even touched my Atari 2600 or Nintendo NES collections which together will put me well over 5,000 games. I have 1,050 PS2 games alone which I believe represents one of the biggest collections out there. A picture of me purchasing my 1000th PS2 game is here.
Collectors are a certain breed and very often they collect more than just one thing. Over time, my DVD collection has grown to over 750 titles and the Movie edition of Collectorz.com has been helpful here as well.
At the Personal Computer Museum we use a custom collections management system we developed in-house but the ease of use of the Book Collector software (and the portable offered by installing it on a laptop) has led us to use Book Collector to scan the books and then using the export features, we’ve merged the data with our custom management solution. It’s a win-win for us, and has our made our jobs much easier. Although the final count of computer books is up in the air, it’s already approaching the 350 mark."
- Happy Collecting -
The Collectorz.com team,
Alwin, Ronald, Patrick, Sven, Dinh, Mark, Henk-Jan, Alain, Martin, Rowdy & Syts
Any ideas for future newsletters or do you want to suggest a topic? Contact us here, we love to hear your thoughts.