What's new?

Here it is, version 6.0 of the CLZ Movies mobile app!
In this major update, we finally bring you THE most requested feature: being able to Edit Multiple Movies in one go. But there’s more, as we took this opportunity to completely re-design the Edit Movie screen and to implement super useful Crop and Rotate tools for movie cover images.

Here’s the full list of what’s new in version 6.0:

NEW: Edit Multiple Movies in one go!

Finally make changes to multiple (or all) movie entries in one go.
Here’s how:

• Tap and hold on a movie in the list to enter Select Mode
• Now tap more movies to select them.
• Tap the menu button on the bottom right and choose “Edit [x] Movies”.
• In the screen that appears, select which fields you want to edit.
  
  (Tips: use the search box to find fields, tap the heart icons to set Favorite fields)

• Tap Edit at the top right.
• Now set values, or leave fields gray to clear them.
• Tap Done at the top right to save the changes to the selected movies.

Warning: the Edit Multiple feature is a very useful and powerful features, but… remember what Uncle Ben said: With great power comes great responsibility!

IMPROVED: Edit Movie screen

A new look for all edit boxes and a more compact layout, making it much easier to edit your movie entries, without scrolling through long lists of fields.

• The cover image is now on its own tab, so the main tab starts with the most important edit fields at the top.
• Fields are now laid out side-by-side, making it easier to edit all fields without endless scrolling.
• More compact look and user interface for all text edit fields.
• More compact display and editing of multi-value pick list fields like Authors, Genres, Subjects and Tags.
• Date fields: enter year, month day manually or use calendar icon to use date setter popup.

NEW: Built-in Crop and Rotate tool for cover images

In the Edit Movie screen the Cover is now on its own tab, with new Crop and Rotate tools for instant rotating and cropping of self-made cover photos or downloaded images.

IMPROVED: Folder Field selection screen

Yep, another update of this screen, to make it fully consistent with the Select Edit Fields screen.
It now includes a search box at the top for quickly finding the field you want, plus the ability to create your own Favorites (just tap the heart icons).

The Manage Pick Lists screen is one of the most important screens of your Movie Collector software. This is the screen you need for:

• Merging duplicate actor entries
• Correct a Director sort name
• Fixing typos in Genres, Tags, Locations, etc…
• Removing unused pick list entries
• etc… etc…

But… judging from daily questions in our support channels, many users don’t even know of its existence. (Hint: it can be opened from the Edit menu). So with today’s update we are aiming to increase the awareness the Manage Pick Lists screen and to make it easier to access from anywhere.

From the main screen folder panel

In the main screen, you can now easily access the Manage Pick Lists screen for the selected folder field. Just click the new button right above the folder panel:

From the Edit Movie screen

The Edit Movie screen now has a big Manage [..] List button at the bottom, that automatically changes to match the field you are currently at:

From the Add/Edit item screen

Fixed:

• User Defined Yes/No fields are now available as options for the folder panel.
• Edit Multiple: Updating date fields wasn’t always working correctly if you only filled in a year.
• Edit in List: Editing the Collection Status field did not work.
• Folder panel: “Collection Status” folder option has been moved to “Personal” heading.
• Movie files: Episodes wouldn’t play if % was in the file path.

A big update for the Movie Collector software today, with several improvements and fixes, all based on the daily feedback we are getting from our users.

Changing your folder field is now much easier

The folder panel is one of the most powerful tools of your Movie Collector software. However, in our support conversations with users, we are finding that most users are always leaving their software on the out-of-the-box Format folders and never use anything else.

Which is sad, as they are missing out on a great tool. The folder panel instantly lets you group and filter your database on other fields too, e.g. by Director, by IMDb Rating, by Release Year, by Location, etc.. Super useful and fun!

Now… I must admit that changing your folder panel to a different field was not very easy or obvious. As you had to create a “preset”, add your desired field(s), give the preset a name, save it, then finally activate the new preset in the folder panel.

So… we decided to make this all *much* easier, especially for single field folder settings.

• You can now directly select any folder field for the folder panel, without having to create a preset first. Just instantly pick your desired folder field under the “Folders” heading in the menu of the Folder button.
• Presets are now called Favorites.
• You can still create your own Favorite folder options, e.g. for multi-level folder settings (e.g. Genre, then Movie Release Year), or just to make a specific 1-field setting easily accessible.
• Your Favorite folder settings are listed at the top of the menu, under the Favorites heading.
• New: no more need to manually name your Favorites. Sensible names are created automatically (the selected fields separated by slashes).

Columns and Sorting

• For Columns and Sorting, “Presets” have been renamed to “Favorites” too.
• For Sort Favorites: no more need to manually name your Favorites. Sensible names are created automatically (the selected fields separated by slashes).

Edit Movie: add multiple Studios, Actors, etc.. in one go

The Select screen for adding studios, cast, crew, etc… now includes checkboxes, so that you can multiple in one go. No more need to go back and fort between the Select and Edit screen to add multiple.

The new checkboxes for selecting multiple values in one go are now available in the Select screen for the following fields:

• Studios
• Crew
• Cast
• Tags

Fixed:

• Using “Select All” in your list was very slow. Super fast again now 🙂
• Print screen: “Field ID 221 has no XML tagname” error, when printing the Collection Status field as a column.
• Removed the annoying “beep” when searching in the Add Movies screen.

Last week we implemented several small improvements to the Connect software, based on suggestions (and complaints) from you all, our loyal users:

Configurable Date Format for Edit screen

Two months ago, we introduced a Date Format setting to control how dates are displayed throughout the Connect software. But the date editors in the Edit screen still always used “yyyy-mm-dd” as the format. Which could be confusing to some users.

So in the Settings screen, under Editing, we have now introduced a new setting, specifically for controlling the order of the year, month and day boxes in the Edit screen:

New “Year” options for folders, colums and sorting

Some dates were already available as Year-only options for folders, columns and sorting (like Release Year, Publication Year, etc…), but we have now updated the available options to include ALL date fields as Year-only options, for example:

• Added Year
• Purchase Year
• Seen it Year
• Read it Year

Improved Auto-Capitalization feature

Small tweak for the Auto-Capitalization tools: it now correctly auto-caps letters that follow a parenthesis, bracket, square bracket, single quote or double quote.

More Totals in Statistics screens

The Statistics screen has been updated with more Totals at the top, e.g. for Purchase Price, Current Value.

Version 6.0 is coming up for all five CLZ mobile apps:
CLZ Books, CLZ Music, CLZ Movies, CLZ Comics and CLZ Games (probably in that order).

For “Vee Six” we decided to finally implement THE most commonly requested feature:

Editing Multiple entries in one go! (aka: Batch Editing)

At the same time, v6 will come with completely re-designed Edit screens. Check out some sneak preview screenshot below. More information about app-specific v6 features and improvements will follow later!

Finally: Edit Multiple entries in one go!

This has been the most common feature request for many years: How can I edit (or clear) the Grade/Location/Owner/etc… for many of my database entries in one go?

And in v6, it will finally be possible:

• Just select the entries you want to edit (using tap and hold), and choose Edit from the menu.
• Then select which fields you want to edit (or clear).
• Finally, set the values you want to set and click Done.

Some screenshots:

(These screenshots have been taken from the iOS edition of CLZ Comics, but the other 9 apps will look very similar):

Edit screen re-design

Also new in v6: completely re-designed Edit screens, to make them clearer, more compact and nicer looking.
No more long lists of fields, one per row. In the new screen, fields are placed side by side where possible, with the Cover on a separate tab. Resulting in a more compact screen, requiring less scrolling. Especially on tablet devices!

Some sneak preview screenshots:

(These screenshots have been taken from the iOS editions of CLZ Books and CLZ Music, but the other 8 apps will look very similar):

At customer support, we were regularly receiving questions about the Edit Multiple screen, so in today’s update we made several changes to make it clearer.

• The checkboxes (for unlocking fields) have been replaced by clearer “lock” icons. Click the lock icon to unlock a field for editing.
• Or, just click on a lock field and you will receive a popup asking you to unlock it.
• An extra notification at the top explaining the unlocking and clearing of fields.
• Save button now indicates the number of movies that are being edited.
• Extra warning when saving “You are about to change data for 4 movies. This can not be undone. Would you like to continue?”

Using “Edit Multiple”

Quick reminder how to use Edit Multiple:
In the main list, use the checkboxes to select some movies, and click “Edit” in the blue action bar that appears above the list.

Fixed:

• If no rating was set, it would show with rating “0” in the rating column. It now shows “nothing” in the column again.
• If no rating has been set for a movie, it would show in a “0” folder, and now shows in a “[None]” folder in your folder panel.

Fixed:

• In some case, new entries added through Add from Core would get images with .tmp extensions, instead of .jpg.
• Editing pick list items directly from the folder panel did not work anymore.
• Dragging items between folders did not work anymore.

Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger!

Here’s another big update for your Movie Collector software, with two further performance improvements:

Faster image downloads

We were able to make several improvements to the way images are downloaded (covers, posters and backdrops), making it much faster than before.

This change affects all places where images are downloaded from our servers, that is, when Adding Movies from Core, when Updating from Core and when down-syncing from CLZ Cloud.

Faster Update from Core

On large collections the old Update from Core feature was quite slow, as it updated your movies one by one, that is, doing separate requests to our server for each and every movie.

So for this update, we also complete rewrote the Update from Core feature to do the updates in batches of 100 movies at a time, making it much much faster! (roughly 4 times as fast).

Remember: Update From Core can be used to update your local movie entries with possible extra data from our Core online movie database. To use this feature, select some movies, right click, then choose Update from Core.

Fixed:

• Add Movies from Core: when adding by barcode and the barcode is not found, it now automatically pops up the Unrecognized Barcode screen, so that you can 1. add the movie anyway and 2. report the missing barcode to our Core.
• When using My Rating as the folder field, the “0” folder was missing.
• When using multiple levels of folders in the folder panel, sometimes the displayed counters were wrong.
• Images View: it is now possible to change thumb size using Ctrl + mouse wheel.

Fixed:

• Images View: Improved spacing between thumbnails
• Images View: Mouse over on images didn’t show the title of the item
• Cover Flow: Now uses big sharp images instead of the small thumbnails
• Find Cover: Could give an Access Violation when finding GIF images

When users send us screenshots during support conversations, we are seeing that many of you are using the Shelves View when browsing your collections. And we can’t blame you, that IS a cool looking view 🙂 However, it *could* be a bit slow and jerky, especially when displaying many cover images in one list.

So our Windows guy Joe has spent several weeks to make this Shelves View faster and smoother. At the same time, our in-house graphics man AJ has created two new Shelf styles. Here’s what’s new:

• Images are now loading a lot faster.
• Scrolling is faster and smoother.
• Shelves background is smoother, no more visible tile edges.
• Shelves now always continue over the full width, even when a row is not full.
• Two new Shelf Styles are now available: White and Concrete.

TIP: here’s how to get to Shelves View:
in your program’s movie list panel, click the vertical Images tab on the right, then from the toolbar above the list panel, choose a Shelf Style. Use the slider to control the size of the images.

The new “White” style:

The new “Concrete” style:

New in the Cover tab of your Edit screen: built-in Crop and Rotate tools for your cover images!

Super useful for fine-tuning images that you uploaded or found through the Find Online tool. You can even Crop/Rotate images that you received from Core, in which case they will be automatically turned into a custom image.

To use the new Crop/Rotate tools, open your Edit screen go to the Cover tab and click the “Crop/Rotate” icon on the top right above the Front or Back cover image:

Then:

• Click the Rotate icon to rotate the image 90 degrees to the right.
• Drag the blue crop rectangle to indicate your desired crop area.
• Click Apply to apply the changes.

Adding Actors as folder option has been on our ideas list for a long time, but it was never implemented because of performance problems.
After all, on large collections, the list of actors can get HUGE.

But during the past few weeks, our mobile team has been working to improve the performance of the folder lists, including the recently introduced folder list search.

Soo… today we can finally introduce Actors as a folder option!
(BTW: the performance improvements we made will also make your other folders faster!)

New folder options for Actors

With this update, we’re introducing an Actors folder option:

IMPORTANT: for correct sorting of actor folders, you first need to use Update from Core on all your movies. Here’s how:

• Go to your All Movies list.
• Tap and hold on 1 movie to select it, then choose Select All on the top right.
• Now tap the menu icon on the bottom right, then choose Update from Core.

Redesigned Select Folder Field screen

Through the years, the number of available folder fields has grown enormously, making the Select Folder Field screen a bit “unwieldy”. And with todays addition of yet another folder option, we decided to come up with a better solution.

That is why version 5.5 also includes a re-designed Select Folder Field screen, with all folder options nicely grouped under sensible headers, and the most popular options (Format, Director, Actor, Location, IMDb Rating) instantly accessible at the top (see screenshot above).

Faster Update from Core

The Update from Core feature has become essential in this update, so that you can retrieve the correct sort names for your Actors from Core and get nicely sorted Actor folder list.

However, on large collections the old Update from Core feature was quite slow, as it updated your movies one by one, that is doing separate requests to our server for each and every movie.

So for this 5.5 update, we also complete rewrote the Update from Core feature to do the updates in batches of 100 movies at a time, making it much much faster!

Fixed:

• Sorting on Release Date could be off within the same year

Enjoy!

Fixed:

• In the Add from Core screen, when adding a game that is already in your app as ‘On Wish List’ or ‘On Order’, the app will now offer to change its status to ‘In Collection’
• When scanning barcodes the “beep” sound would only sound on the first scan
• Set Data language is now also used during syncing
• Search on own collection could be forgotten during scrolling/browsing your collection

Enjoy!

Adding Actors as folder option has been on our ideas list for a long time, but it was never implemented because of performance problems.
After all, on large collections, the list of actors can get HUGE.

But during the past few weeks, our mobile team has been working to improve the performance of the folder lists, including the recently introduced folder list search.

Soo… today we can finally introduce Actors as a folder option!
(BTW: the performance improvements we made will also make your other folders faster!)

New folder options for Actors

With this update, we’re introducing an Actors folder option:

IMPORTANT: for correct sorting of actor folders, you first need to use Update from Core on all your movies. Here’s how:

• Go to your All Movies list.
• Tap and hold on 1 movie to select it, then choose Select All on the top right.
• Now tap the menu icon on the bottom right, then choose Update from Core.

Redesigned Select Folder Field screen

Through the years, the number of available folder fields has grown enormously, making the Select Folder Field screen a bit “unwieldy”. And with todays addition of yet another folder option, we decided to come up with a better solution.

That is why version 5.5 also includes a re-designed Select Folder Field screen, with all folder options nicely grouped under sensible headers, and the most popular options (Format, Director, Actor, Location, IMDb Rating) instantly accessible at the top (see screenshot above).

Faster Update from Core

The Update from Core feature has become essential in this update, so that you can retrieve the correct sort names for your Actors from Core and get nicely sorted Actor folder list.

However, on large collections the old Update from Core feature was quite slow, as it updated your movies one by one, that is doing separate requests to our server for each and every movie.

So for this 5.5 update, we also complete rewrote the Update from Core feature to do the updates in batches of 100 movies at a time, making it much much faster!

Fixed:

• Sorting on Release Date could be off within the same year

Enjoy!

New in Connect today: We have added several keyboard shortcuts to the most commonly used features:

For the Main screen:

• Navigate through your items with your arrow keys (works in List, Images, Shelves and Card View!)
• Use c + a or c then a for Add from Core
• Use c + m or c then m for Add Manually
• Use c + h or c then h for Add Hardware from Core (Game Connect)
• Use c + j or c then j for Add Hardware Manually (Game Connect)
• Use c + e or c then e for Edit Selected Item

For the Edit screen:

• Use cmd/ctrl + s to Save and close
• Use cmd/ctrl + j to Save and go to Previous item
• Use cmd/ctrl + k to Save and go to Next item

CLZ Core is our central online movie database, that is the database that you search by Title or by Barcode in the Add Movies screen. In general, the movie information delivered by Core (cast, crew, release year, runtime, plot, etc…) is quite complete and correct, because of our official IMDb content license.

However, for some releases the edition specific information (cover image, edition, format, distributor, subtitles, regions, screen ratios and audio tracks) may be incomplete or even incorrect.

As of today, *you* can help us improve that, using the new Submit to Core feature!
Just fill in the correct data in your own entry, then select the movie and choose Submit to Core from the toolbar above the movie details:

Which takes you to a form the core.collectorz.net site, where you can see our Core data on the left and your own data on the right. Now use the green arrow icons to use your data to correct and complete our data. Then finally, click the big green Submit Changes button on the bottom:

Thanks for your help!

Fixed:

• Fixed several issues with AutoSync that could cause Access Violation errors

Fixed:

• Add Movies / ‘Search for’ – popup did not show up right on devices with large font.
• When downloading new entries from CLZ Cloud, previously cleared fields could get filled in.
• In the Add from Core screen, when adding a movie that is already in your app as ‘On Wish List’ or ‘On Order’, the app will now offer to change its status to ‘In Collection’.
• Box set images were not downloaded.
• On devices with intermittent internet connection, app could revert to trial mode
• After down-syncing update cover images, the list could still show old cover.
• Improved error messages in case of core search problems.

Faster CLZ Cloud syncing!

We have made several structural changes to the CLZ Cloud syncing, making it much much faster than before, especially when syncing large amounts of entries up to the CLZ Cloud or down from the CLZ Cloud.

To enjoy the faster syncing, you need to use the actual Sync with CLZ Cloud screen.
(The Auto-Syncing in the background is also slightly faster now, but if you need to sync many entries up or down, please use the Sync with CLZ Cloud screen.)

Fixed:

• Link to Core: changing the search criteria could crash the program
• Add screen: changed the “already in collection” font color in dark skin to be more readable
• Report missing movie to Core wasn’t working correctly
• Main screen: The “Rating” column could not be moved to a different place
• Improved cover scaling for syncing

Previously, the “Add to …” button in the Add screen let you choose between “Add to Collection” or “Add to Wishlist”. But as of today, you can now choose from ALL possible Collection Status option directly. For instance, this lets you add an item as “On Order” straight from the Add screen!

Now, the possible choices are:

• In Collection
• For Sale
• Wish List
• On Order
• Not In Collection

A big update for Movie Connect again, in which we introduce many new settings for further customizing your software to your own liking.
And while we were at it, we updated the Settings screen with clearer grouping and naming of settings.

Here’s what’s new:

Auto Capitalization

This is a completely new feature, for automatically capitalizing your movie titles.
Auto capping can be done:

• when adding movies from Core. This is OFF by default as our Core delivers nicely capped movie titles in general.
• as you type titles in the Edit and Add Manually screens, very useful when adding movies manually
• by clicking the AutoCap (aA) button above the Title box in the Edit screen

The Settings screen lets you choose between 4 Auto Cap methods:

• First Letter of Each Word with Exceptions
• First letter only with exceptions
• UPPER CASE
• lower case

The Auto Cap Exceptions list comes pre-filled with a sensible list of common exceptions, but is completely user configurable.

Date Format

Choose how date formats are displayed throughout Connect.

Timezone

Choose your own timezone and all Date Added and Date Modified fields will be displayed according to that timezone. (previously these all showed in UTC time)

BTW: also new today: new column options Date/Time Added and Date/Time Modified, for showing the full added and modified timestamps.

Sorting

Two new options that control the sorting by title and how titles are displayed:

• When sorting, ignore sort titles: check this if you prefer to ignore all sort title when sorting and just have the software sort on the regular Title field.
• When displaying, show sort title: when sorting by title, showing the actual sort titles that it sorts on can make your list a bit “easier on the eye”.

Movie length display

Control how movie lengths are displayed (in list, in the details panel, etc…). Choose from:

• HH:MM, e.g. “1:57”
• Minutes, e.g. “117 minutes”

Show trailers in Details View Panel

If, for whatever reason, you don’t like the trailer videos in your movie details panel, switch them off here.

Fixed:

• Add by IMDb didn’t yield any results

Faster CLZ Cloud syncing!

We have made several structural changes to the CLZ Cloud syncing, making it much much faster than before, especially when syncing large amounts of entries up to the CLZ Cloud or down from the CLZ Cloud.

To enjoy the faster syncing, you need to use the actual Sync with CLZ Cloud screen.
(The Auto-Syncing in the background is also slightly faster now, but if you need to sync many entries up or down, please use the Sync with CLZ Cloud screen.)

Improved stability when using Auto-Syncing

At the same time, we have resolved several issues with the Auto-Syncing in the background, problems that could cause Access Violations in some situation. So this 20.2 version should provide a more stable experience too.

A very nice cosmetic update for your Connect software today: a new “Shelves View”!

Shelves View is a fourth view for your movie list, similar to Cover View, but with your cover images standing on a nice shelves background. You can even choose between 6 different shelf styles using the Shelf Style selector:

• Wood Light
• Wood Dark
• Glass
• Metal
• Carbon
• White

Also new, for both Shelves View and Images View, as “Size Slider” to control the size of the images.

Toolbar tweaks

Because of the introduction of the new view, the Shelf Style selector and the Size Slider, we have also made several changes to the various Connect toolbars:

• A new “View” toolbar right above the list, with 4 buttons for switching between the 4 views (List, Card, Cover and Shelves), the Size Slider and the Style Selector (for Shelves) and finally the Sort Order button (on the far right).
• The new “View” toolbar replaces the “Filter” toolbar that was in that spot.
• The “Filter” toolbar now only appears when a filter is actually active, and now has a pale yellow background to make it super-clear that you are looking at a filtered list.
• The number of movies indicator has been moved (back) to the center of the top toolbar.

Faster CLZ Cloud syncing!

We have made several structural changes to the CLZ Cloud syncing, making it much much faster than before, especially when syncing large amounts of entries up to the CLZ Cloud or down from the CLZ Cloud.

To enjoy the faster syncing, you need to use the actual Sync with CLZ Cloud screen.

(The Auto-Syncing in the background is also slightly faster now, but if you need to sync many entries up or down, please use the Sync with CLZ Cloud screen.)

New design for Sync with CLZ Cloud screen

While we were at it, we decided to do a quick make-over for the Sync screen, with a new look and layout and a direct link to your CLZ Cloud page online.