Libra - organize your stuff, beautifully.

The main change in this update is in the "My Info" panel, following feedbacks from the forum. In particular, it now behaves like the "Details" panel, in which you can edit multiple items' "My Info" together. This allows you to easily add custom fields to multiple items with a single edit. When items with different "My Info" fields are selected, their common fields are shown.

This is actually a fairly big update, despite the 0.0.1 revision. The following issues/enhancements are fixed/made:

1. Rewrite shelf rendering logic to overcome the 16-bits coordinate limit (and u think 16-bits is a thing of the past) on Windows. This fixes the issue of shelves not displaying beyond a certain huge number of items.
2. Fixed startup crash on some WinXP setup due to changes in locale settings for date/time display.
3. Sorting of items by different common fields is now possible (eg. sort books by price and DVD by title simultaneously).

We've just put up version 0.9.0. The most significant changes are:

1. Added CSV text export format, to cater to those without Excel installed.
2. Title sorting now ignores "a" and "the" at the beginning of the title. This is configurable from the "config/base.xml" file, should you be needing a different behavior (eg. on non-English setup).

We've bumped up the version number for this release to indicate that it's closer to the final 1.0.0 release. Bug reports have died down lately, indicating that the product is reaching stability.

The following bugs are fixed in this release:

1. Amazon returns incorrect large physical sizes for some items. This resulted in other items having a very small size that approaches 0, which then crashes the rendering. This condition is now caught.

2. DVD's now ignores the physical sizes returned from Amazon. The aspect ratio is still respected though.

Enhancements:
1. Added the ability to import generic text files (can be CSV text files as well). Like its generic Excel counterpart, this works by detecting UPC/ISBN/EAN codes within the text file.

We have just uploaded Libra 0.8.4. The main highlight of this release is the much lower memory that Libra consumes, especially when you have a huge library. Here are the detailed changes:

1. Reduce memory footprint drastically. Huge libraries now takes up much lesser RAM.
2. Date entry can now go back to 1582.
3. CueCat scanning is now keyboard hands free.
4. AutoUpdate could be loading a old EXE download from IE's cache. Fixed.
5. AutoUpdate fails to launch installer on XP when user doesn't have admin rights. Fixed.

We just put up version 0.8.3, which fixes the following:

1. LibraryThing import crashes when empty ISBN's are encountered.
2. Tags are not sorted when items are added via import.
3. Some Amazon sites do not support UPC/ISBN13 searches. These are now detected automatically and converted accordingly.
4. Some Amazon reviews are crashing the Javascript parsing.

Enhancements:
1. Import of library from 3rd party applications is now wizard based.
2. Added import plugin for DvdProfiler version 3.

We've decided to release a nifty tool named LibraCam, which allows you to use your webcam to scan barcodes for ANY application. This is helpful for some of the online cataloging software, or any others that do not have integrated webcam scanning support.

It works as follow:

1. Launch LibraCam, and then click on where you want the barcode to be entered in the target application.
2. Point your webcam towards any barcode. When it's detected, LibraCam will send keystrokes of the barcode to your target application (just like you've typed it in yourself).

We've just put up version 0.8.2, which fixes many issues that have been reported over the last few days. The following bugs have been fixed:

a. Print omits the last page sometimes, due to the incorrect pagination.
b. Play action wouldn't launch if filename has a space.
c. UPC-A code has "0" prepended, resulting in Amazon lookup failure.
d. Fix non auto-update due to IE caching.
e. URL in ABOUT box not clickable.
f. Clicking on "sort order" causes export to show inconsistent behavior.
g. Most DVD's are rated "G", due to Amazon's change in the rating strings.

We know it has just been a couple of days since 0.8.0 was released, but we decided to put up version 0.8.1 so that folks can test out the web export feature. The web export will output your library to HTML and image files, together with some supporting Javascript files for the lightbox animation effect. Do test it out... it looks pretty cool.

So here it is. After many months of lazing around hard work, we're proud to release the 1st public beta of Libra to the world, and it's FREE (for non-commercial use).

Libra (short for Library) is a desktop application for managing collectibles, and it does so beautifully. For a start, you'll be able to manage Books, DVD's, Music and Games, but we have plans to extend it to manage anything under the sun eventually (as they say in "Lord of the Rings", one library to rule them all).