| December 01, 2024 |
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BMV 4.3.0:
Neil Kanetzke memorial Rustlings edition. RIP my friend
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Scanned nearly 1000 pages of Pabst Blue Ribbon News content. Approaching
45,000 total pages of BMV content. There was a Facebook Marketplace with
some missing issues but not going to pay $40 asking price PER issue. Also,
the TOC/search is incomplete, not sure will ever finish ability to search
"mary sue peoria plant baking competition".
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Updated content for Rustlings, Foam Matters and Rainier through end of 2024
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Clayton found me some missing Can-O-Rama issues. Pretty sure I am
still missing the first issue(s)
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Added scans of some Dick Adamowicz dumping envelopes/albums. Under
Rustlings/Adamowicz
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Moved the RB year books and memorial to dedicated Rustlings/Extra
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New "Magazine -> Cover Thumb Nails" to display all cover pages for a given
magazine. Nice to see snapshot of all Rustlings or BCCA magazines.
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Optional printing support using newer ImageMagick 7.x. Java does not have
a very powerful API for converting images or creation of PDF, but the public
domain program ImageMagick sure does! While this is bundled with CanDB, not
BMV, with this release users can optionally install ImageMagick for more
printing logic (multiple PNGs, merge pages into single PDF).
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| September 01, 2024 |
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BMV 4.2.0:
Full content of Bob Myers "Beer Can History" website now formatted as BMV
magazine "digital pages" content, fully keyword searchable. Updated BMV
tools to generate "book form" index pages for single large "book PDF", all
268 full color pages!
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Introduces "The Brewery-Ana Gazzette". Mark Benbow graciously loaned me his
ancient paper copies, 1971-1976, now fully digitized. While rough typewritten
content, still some interesting reads of early days of our hobby.
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Fixed minor issue with using the new, much larger format for "Year" display.
The old format used already packaged 125 pixel tall images. The new format
takes the much larger 400 pixel tall Month image. Well, if BMV has not downloaded
content for a given month, it was displaying "No image available". This release,
if no image available, falls back to the "Run Check For Updates" to download
missing content.
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| May 14, 2024 |
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BMV 4.0.0:
Piggy-backing on the CanDB 5.0 major release, BMV 4.0 is now officially available!
Please see new help topics BMV 4.0 Details and
Behind The Curtain for more information,
but summary of BMV 4.0 changes:
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New "Show Page Thumbnails" for the lists and search results. Nice to see
pictorial of cover pages instead of just text.
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New "Tools -> Options" dialog for some user customization.
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New "Right-click" popup navigation choices.
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New magazine content. There are now "synthetic" magazines of Canning
Companies, Advertisements, and
Sponsors. Hope you find
this new content enjoyable viewing.
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Complete replacement of the "Printing" code to use common logic with CanDB.
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Major performance improvements for thumbnail Image pixel scaling. Additional
tweaks based on JProfiler and review of all resource allocation with Sleak.
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Now using my own compiled SWT software for Windows32/Windows64. Simply allows
for better debugging and optimization if I can see *inside* the GUI code.
The MacOS and Linux are still supported using pre-packaged SWT JAR.
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| June 23, 2023 |
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BMV 3.2.0:
Added American Brewer content to the BMV! The Hagley Digital Archive has a
large quantity of digital content, of which includes digital scans and PDFs of
almost 30 years of the publication American Brewer. I asked for permissions to
include content 1935-1942 (years covering the Beer Can) and received a quick
"YES" reply, only requirement to include citation to the source of the content.
Absolutely, and thus BMV version 3.2
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Added citation/links to source of the digital content, or at least the
publisher's web page. These are "live" HTML references, so not only displayed
by BMV, but just click on them to open browser for the given location. The
citation information is now shown on multiple BMV windows as well as when
printing to printer or file PNG.
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Added couple of missing months of Rainier Brewings news letter
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Fixed mouse wheel scrolling. I broke this when adding mouse wheel listener
for the "Print Preview" dialog.
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Fixed several bugs with less used features. Resizing individual page windows
now properly recalculates scroll bar height. When looking at a "list" window
such as Search, Features, etc, if filtering by specific magazine, now will
print only the filtered content, not the original list
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While updating help topics, I realized that older BMV used to support
keyboard mnenomics (e.g. Alt F). Re-added this feature.
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BMV 3.2 main Index.dat and all monthly TOC.dat files are no longer
compatible with previous BMV versions due to extra citation data. If someone
does a "Check For Updates" and updates to 3.2 without "automatic restart"
(added in BMV 3.1.1) or run the BMV-UPDATER.exe (on Windows platforms) the
previous software will fail to load the files.
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| June 01, 2023 |
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BMV 3.1:
Semi-major update. Reworked the logic for marking a given window as "needs redraw".
All Java classes now follow consistent updating of layout. Gone is some of the
annoying screen flashing (e.g. on View Search Results would redraw all the
radio buttons EVERY time). Not perfect, but this version just feels smoother.
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Return of a feature I must have broken in 3.0 rewrite.
Now, just hitting the
Space bar will have BMV do the "next/prev logical action". For example, if on
search results 1..25, just keep hitting the space bar to cycle through the set
of matches, jumping to page, jumping back to search on next item, repeat. There
are just a few places in BMV where might be necessary to type a space character and
that still allows them.
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Added two new features, "Tools -> Show Content Statistics" and
"Tools -> Show Author Statistics". BMV generator was modified to
keep track of unique authors and their contributions. I think a nice addition!
From these dialogs it is possible to fire off actions to other windows.
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Fixed issue of BMV not re-opening in Maximized mode if that is what the
user was in when BMV previously exited. While the upper left screen location was
correctly being saved as (0,0) and the size correct display bounds, you
can't actually reset full sized by width/height, but must put the window
in Maximized mode! I did not know about this until just a few days ago...
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Reminder the website registration information was reworked. If BMV shows
"Not Registered" please do so again. Apologizes but easier than for me to
merge server data.
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| May 04, 2023 |
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BMV 3.0.1:
Full content update through end of April 2023. This includes Rustlings,
Foam Matters, Guzzelette, Rainier Brewings and BCCA. The BMV now contains
just under 33,000 pages covering seventeen different publications!!!
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New:
Couple of publications from Robert Meyers. Also make sure to visit his
www.beercanhistory.com
website with tons of great hobby history, especially for some of the more
unique/rare beer cans.
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Fix 1: Added BMV-UPDATER.exe for Windows to be able to update BMV.exe
or Java JAR files that were "in use" and couldn't be renamed during a
"Tools -> Check For Updates".
At least run the BMV-UPDATER.exe one time after updating from BMV 3.0.
This should be used without BMV running,
and there is no harm using this program multiple times. BMV-UPDATER.exe
will display what files were renamed.
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Fix 2: Now detects download of new magazine content and will reload
month/page images.
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Fix 3: Annoying bug when using the Back button would
always jump scroll bar of the previous window back to top. Now remembers
previously scrolled position so it can be restored.
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| August 01, 2020 |
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BMV 3.0:
This was a signifcant code change, replacing the Eclipse based RCP logic with my own GUI
framework on top of SWT. This allows BMV to be independent of Eclipse versions and run under
pretty much any version of Java.
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The BMV 3.0 program is NOT backwards compatible. If you have
an earlier version installed, you will need to download a new ZIP package, and either unzip into the same
folder as before, or create a new folder and then copy your magazine content. The 12 GB of magazine content is fully compatible
so you don't need to update any existing downloaded data.
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Again supports MacOS (High Sierra), as well as new support for Linux (Centos and RHEL)
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Added "Tools -> Accelerators" for user defined menu/keyboard actions. I have mapped my Space
bar for "Next Action", Ctrl-Space for "Prev Action", and much easier to view next/prev items.
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Fix 1: The Windows 10, November 2019 patch changed/broke something in a lower level Windows DLL that
has broken the SWT API ability to have a SWT control "print itself" to an Image, and then allow
the Image to be saved to file or actually printed. While request for SWT code change has been
submitted by development community, no idea how long this will take to deploy, if ever. As
such, I have re-written the entire BMV printing mechanism to have BMV "draw" into an Image,
so can once again "Print To File".
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Fix 2: Some links to individual pages were using numbers that collided with
web browser URLs. The BMV Href mechanism has been changed to avoid these conflicts.
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Fix 3: Hopefully all BMV windows/dialogs now correctly add a MouseWheelListener
so possible to scroll up/down using a mouse with a wheel. Nicer for viewing so don't
have to drag a scroll bar.
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