Newsletter August 2009

We made it! We actually managed to get the August newsletter out in August!
And it's a long one. So make yourself a coffee (or a stiff drink if you want), then sit down and dive in.

** Movie Collector Connect updates **

First, I would like to thank everyone who provided feedback on Movie Collector Connect. We received some great suggestions and feature requests!
Of course, Sven and Robbert got right on it and now, 4 weeks later, they have already implemented most of them:

* New A-Z bar in Browse views for quick first letter filtering.
* Filter your movie list by Genre, Format, Region, Collection Status and Seen It, using cool "tag-cloud-like" pop-ups.
* Improved look and layout of movie info pages and edit pages.
* Added new Title Sort field, also synced from Movie Collector
* New Online Manual and What's New pages
* Improved performance

See the new features in action here:
http://connect.collectorz.com/users/demo/movies

Of course, we'll keep improving Movie Collector Connect. And you can enjoy these enhancements without downloading and installing new builds (or paying for upgrades). Just login to your account and find that your software has been updated with new features. Those are the joys of online software :-)

** What else is cooking ? **

Well, a lot actually. Here's a quick list:

* Ronald is working on Music Collector 9 for Windows
* Robbert and Sven just started on Book Collector Connect
* Dinh is creating 1.1 updates for all iPhone apps
* AJ is creating demo videos showing the coolness of cataloging your stuff by scanning barcodes.
Check out the ones he already finished for
Movie Collector: http://www.collectorz.com/movie/
and Book Collector: http://www.collectorz.com/book/

** Ins and outs **

Then, some changes in the Collectorz.com team:
This month, we said goodbye to Patrick. He has worked on our Mac apps for over a year, 2 days a week, spending the rest of the week on freelance Mac projects. Which is what he will now be focusing on fulltime.

Our comic guy Mark is going back to school. He will still be working here part-time, continuing his work on our online comic database and part of the Connect front-end programming.

Dinh is going the other way. He worked here for 2 days a week, while still at university. But he's now a full-time member of the team, and will be taking over the development of the Mac OS X applications. Next to that, Dinh handles the iPhone development and some back-end programming for our online databases and Connect.

And we have a new team member: Chris Davidson. Chris is our new support dude and a native english speaker, or native irish to be more precise :-) AJ and Sytske are now bringing him up to speed with our software, support ticketing system, online databases and everything.

Remember Alain? He worked on our online movie database during the summer of 2008 and he returned this year. He has been assisting Rowdy and Martin for the past six weeks, checking and completing movie entries, adding new movies and barcodes and processing your submissions.

So our movie database has made a big jump in both quality and completeness.
Still missing movies? Report em on our forum here and Martin will make sure they are added ASAP:
http://www.collectorz.com/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=13426

Which seamlessly brings us to our monthly Meet The Collector topic:

** Meet the Collector: our own Metal Martin! **

"My name is Martin Keur and I'm the Content Manager for Music and Movies @ Collectorz.com.

My addiction started a long time ago. It all started in my school days when I was riding my bike past a small record store in my hometown Haarlem. I had just received my allowance and the record store had a big music sale. I really had no idea what to buy and really didn't know any of the bands displayed in the sale section.

So I just took the albums from the rack with cover art I really liked. I ended up with 17 albums in total, Manowar, Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden and more gory covers with swords, monsters and demons on them. When I arrived at home I put one of the albums to my player and from the moment I hit the play button I knew this was going to be my new life METAL!!! and my collection addiction started.

I skipped classes to spent my money in a record store in Amsterdam. It started with once a week and soon I was spending most of my free time in the record store, listening to all the new releases and buying lots of albums.

When browsing the web I ran into a job advertisement as buyer/seller for the metal department in my favorite record store, wrote a letter and got the job. From this point on my collection started to grow bigger and bigger every day. All new albums were in my hands on release day and I could listen to music all day long. And of course buying and ordering, mainly obscure import albums, came with a big employee discount. The record store had huge departments with other musical genres, and movies too! So next to music I started my movie collection. I worked in this record store for 8 years and bought DVDs and CDs on a daily basis.

Unfortunately the record store closed down at the beginning of 2008. Luckily for me I saw the job advertisement from Collectorz.com. And here I am. This job made the collecting bug even worse. (And that's a good thing!)

Thanks to Rowdy, AJ and Alwin I was forced into a new addiction too ... video games!

Also, when reviewing submissions it's easy for me to see which albums and movies I'm still missing. So thank you all!!

My collections really grew out of shelving space and I was 'forced' to change one of my bedrooms into my personal Music/Movie/Game Room

I still haven't entered all my music into Music Collector so I'm not really sure yet but I guess my collection contains over 10,000 items (this includes Vinyl, DVD and VHS), and is still growing.

Some pics of me and my collection:
http://www.collectorz.com/about/martin.php

Happy Collecting, Regards (Metal) Martin"

That's all folks, hope you enjoyed it!
(BTW: did you already give your friends the "CLZFRIENDZ" $10 discount coupon?)

Alwin
Collectorz.com