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News: all updates for our software and apps

This is CLZ Alwin, with the very first CLZ Newsletter for 2024.

We started off with a bang, with the introduction of our new “Club CLZ” support forum. This is now THE place-to-be to get support for the software, the apps and our Core online databases.
Read on below for full Club CLZ info and sign up instructions.

As for software releases, we did two big updates for Connect. No updates for the mobile apps yet, as the mobile dev team is still working on the upcoming huge 9.0 update for CLZ Movies. Taking a bit longer than planned, mainly because we decided to add more improvements than originally planned. Full details below.

The Core content team is as busy as usual, with all the weekly new releases, plus our ongoing project of checking and improving all video game cover images in Core.

A summary of today’s topics

  • Club CLZ is live, come join our new support forum!
  • App and software updates:
    • Comic Connect: New Check Value screen
    • Connect: now available in Portuguese, Danish, Serbian and Slovak
    • Coming up any day now : CLZ Movies 9.0
  • CLZ Core updates:
    • Core for Games: update on our “Wrong Covers” project
    • Core for Comics: New Comic Book Day summary

Club CLZ is live, come join our new support forum!

Club CLZ is our own forum, running on our own servers. It’s not on Facebook, not on Discord or Reddit or anything. It is “just” a regular website that you log in to, running on our own servers.

You can find the Club CLZ forum website at https://club.clz.com. You can use the forum using any web-browser, on your computer, on your tablet or on your phone. And, for easy access, you can install it on your phone as an app too!

Just click the link above (or enter club.clz.com in your browser’s address bar) to browse around a bit, see what’s going on. Then if you want to join a discussion or post a question yourself, sign up for an account.

How to sign up for a Club CLZ account

To sign up for Club CLZ, go to club.clz.com with your browser, then click the Sign Up button top right and create an account.

Note: on small phone screens, the Sign Up button is not visible. In that case, just tap the Log In button, then tap the link that says “Create your account”.

Important: you cannot log in to Club CLZ with your existing CLZ account. You actually have to create a separate account for Club CLZ!

Tip: Install Club CLZ as an app on your phone

For easy access, you can install Club CLZ as an app on your phone’s home screen, with a nice Club CLZ icon. After that, it functions as an actual full screen app, including app notifications and everything you expect from using a modern social or community app.

This is how to add Club CLZ as an app to your phone/tablet:

  1. Go to club.clz.com with your device’s browser
  2. Tap the button showing a square with an arrow pointing up (on iOS) or the 3 dots button (on Android).
  3. Choose “Add to Home Screen” (on iOS) or “Install” (on Android)

Now you have a blue Club CLZ icon on your phone’s home screen. Use it regularly to check the latest posts, to join discussion, or to post questions or Core reports yourself!

App and software updates:

Comic Connect: New Check Value screen

Up until this month, the CovrPrice integration in Comic Connect has been all about getting values for the comics in your collection. Super useful of course, but… since launch (back in October 2022), a common question from CovrPrice subscribers has been:

“How can I quickly check the value of a comic that is not in my collection?”

And they’re right. There’s other situations in which you may want to check a comic’s actual value, e.g. when you are looking at a comic you may want to buy.

So here’s our solution: the Comic Connect software now includes a new “Check Value” screen, that lets you quickly check a value of a comic. Two ways to do so:

  • Check value by Issue: Enter (part of) the series title and the issue number (e.g. “Amazing 300”), then pick the one you own.
  • Check value by Barcode: use our CLZ Scanner app to scan the comics’s barcode and bam, there’s the value!

Check out some Check Value screenshots here

BTW: this feature is also available in the CLZ Comics mobile app, since version 9.0.

Connect: now available in Portuguese, Danish, Serbian and Slovak

Yep, all the work to make the Connect web-based software translatable is starting to pay off!

Thanks to our translators Fernando Carvalho, Frank Silas Kesia Jensen, Milan Sobat and Brano Mazari, the Connect web-based software is now available in 4 extra languages:

  • Portuguese
  • Danish
  • Serbian
  • Slovak

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

Coming up any day now : CLZ Movies 9.0

This has become a bigger project than originally anticipated. But we are really enjoying being able to work on a big update for the CLZ Movies app again, so new ideas for improvements keep popping while we work on it. And we have decided to just let that happen and create the best version of the app that we can think of right now.

The release is imminent though. Here’s what will be included in v9:

  • Improved Add Movies screen: big cover images for 4K/Blu-ray/DVD releases, search results now include actor names, filter releases by format.
  • Collection tabs: easily switch between collections using tabs at the bottom
  • New: tap an actor name in details to show all your movies with that actor
  • Better screens for reporting “unrecognized barcodes” and adding them anyway
  • Many new icons for digital and streaming formats

Visit this Club CLZ post for full details and some sneak preview screenshots

CLZ Core updates:

Core for Games: update on our “Wrong Covers” project

A common complaint from users of our game apps has been about not always getting the correct cover image when adding games by barcode. The problem varied from not getting the exact cover for your limited/collector’s edition, or a getting the cover for the wrong regional release, or just bad images in general, like slanted covers, tiny images, fuzzy images etc…

So we decided to finally resolve this problem. A huge project that Martin, Senno, Sytske and myself have been working on for the past 3 months: checking and fixing game cover images, to make sure the cover image actually matches the exact edition (by barcode).

We work on this by popularity (most commonly owned releases first) and by recency (recent releases first).

The metric we use to measure our progress is what we call “Cloud Coverage”, that is, the percentage of game releases in the CLZ Cloud that can be “covered” with a checked cover image.

And today, we just reached a Cloud Coverage of 70%, meaning that for an average game collection, at least seventy percent of cover images should be the correct image for that barcode.

We expect to be working on this for at least 3 more months, but… the effects of our work should already be noticeable now, especially for current and recent platforms: PS5, Xbox Series X, Switch, PS4, Xbox One, Wii U, Wii, PS3, PS2, etc….

Are you still getting the wrong cover image when adding a game by barcode? Then please report it to us, in the special “Wrong Game Covers” subforum at Club CLZ”

Core for Comics: New Comic Book Day summary

A weekly challenge for our content team is getting all new new releases into our Core comic database. For comics, all releases happen on Wednesday, commonly called “New Comic Book Day” or NCBD for short. The number of NCBD releases vary between 400 and 700 per week (!!), so you can imagine the craziness at the CLZ HQ on Wednesdays 🙂

Since September 2023, we have been creating NCBD overviews on our blog (and now at the Club CLZ forum), with weekly highlights of new issues, new series and cool exclusives.

Here’s an overview of this month’s NCBD posts:

You can find all past NCBD posts on our blog here.

Hope to see you on Club CLZ soon!