CanDB Version History
Google the children’s story “Give a moose a muffin”, or maybe “Give a mouse a cookie”. Someone asked a simple question on the Rusty Bunch forum “What cans were produced by the Heekin canning company?”. Simple enough, I have all that data in my CanDB Michigan Beer Cans project. However, no option to actually search, and then no option to display the results!
One thing led to another, while I liked the progress being made, I needed more, and then more, and then still more to truly implement what is now fully searchable, fully displayable, and fully shareable with other collectors. So many hours and so many late nights writing/testing new code! I love the final results, CanDB 5.0.0 is now general released, and same discounted price point of FREE! I hope to see some custom pages shared on the Rusty Bunch forum.
· New standalone “CanViewer” window. Dynamically create your own custom USBC style pages. Fully integrated with the CanNavigator, individual CanEditor tabbed items and the optional ImageViewer.
· Fully configurable for what/how to display, including 0..25 labels, format and style, under each Item image
· Fully searchable, now both “Search Quick” and “Search Detailed” options. You want to type something as quick as “regal”, or very detailed where you want only items that have the letters [A-B] as the third letter of the brand name, completely up to you.
· New Print options to print the CanViewer content to single large PNG, N individual reasonably sized PNG files, wrapped all together in a nice multi-paged PDF document, or yes, the old-fashioned paper printer. Your call.
· Handful of very detailed new help topics, review and update of others. Please see the updated Help Index.
· Major effort programming, testing and documentation, but I haven’t had this much fun coding in years!!!
· The CanDB program is distributed FREE to use, no licensing, to help collectors catalog their collections. However, please register your copy so I know who is using the program. Thank you.
· The “View -> Run Search” can now integrate with the “View -> View Items”. However, instead of displaying items for the currently selected brewery, this integration can display only items matching your search pattern. From there, the items dialog in the bottom button bar will also have a “Search For” text box, from which you can refine your search. This is now the Run Search default, though you can still display search results in a table like dialog or write results to static HTML file.
· The entire view content dialog is now much more responsive, with loading and scaling of images now done in a background, non-GUI thread. If you are displaying a large number of items, or you have chosen to maybe scale to a large pixel size, this simply takes time. The window will show “Loading images…” in bold/red toward the bottom right, to be replaced with appropriate counts once complete. Much faster to not scale and instead use default image size. However, more fun to see items big and bold.
· The ImageViewer has new right-click popup menu to choose the default image type. No more hardcoded “Front”. For example, if you want to view lid variations, just right click and choose “Top Lid”, and this will be the default image type of all item mouse hover events. The selected value is stored persistent, and will be the default if CanDB is stopped/restarted. Easy to change it back to your preference.
· The View Items content dialog now has mouse hover for the images. If you have both View Items displayed and the ImageViewer enabled to the image type you desire, this makes for very fast viewing of your collection. These are my new favorite CanDB features, with simple “search pattern” and mouse hover and ImageViewer, I can quickly view exactly what I want.
· The Run Search now accepts “*” (asterisk) for wildcard, match all. This is a quick way to view ALL items in the current project. For small projects like my Suntory or Granges cans, this is fast. For large projects like my Michigan cans, it simply takes time, but I enjoy viewing the results.
· Tool tips for these new features have been improved. Simply let your mouse hover over a text box or button for the tool tip.
· New “View” menu. As part of the topic of “searching” caused me to also think about “viewing”. Yes, intent is to still generate HTML pages able to be viewed in any browser, on any device. However, for casual viewing and initial data entry, there is no reason to do that in two steps, and run a separate browser program just to view content. There are new View menu items of “View Items”, “View Breweries”, and “View Projects”.
· The new view content dialog can display all CanDB projects, breweries within a project, or items within a brewery. The dialog is interactive, simply mouse click on a given image and CanDB will jump to the correct tab.
· The previous “Tools -> Run Search…” and “Tools -> Enable/Disable ImageViewer” have been moved under View.
· Forgot to add the “Tools -> Run Search…” to the possible key board accelerators. The new View menu items may also have an optional keyboard accelerator defined.
· All windows/dialogs should now include small CanDB icon/image in the top window frame, not generic Java. Vanilla 101 GUI programming I simply missed.
· New “Tools -> Run Search…”. Provides simple search for a keyword across all items in a given project. Current implementation just considers one keyword, hardcoded fields that it compares, and hardcoded format of the generated matching HTML. Maybe future versions will have finer grain control/formatting?
· Now can do "Check For Updates" with auto restart, no more need for CanDB-UPDATER.exe once 4.1.3 is installed. The new logic is CanDB runs a non-GUI Java program which sleeps three seconds, main CanDB.exe exits (releasing all locked files), updater wakes up and renames any temporary files, and then will auto start CanDB.exe! Nice and clean.
· At this point not sure if there will be any new CanDB software releases unless new features are suggested or bugs reported. All features/issues that either myself or others have wanted have been implemented.
· Added “Tools -> Options -> Restore project/brewery/item selection on CanDB restart”. If this is checked (default is true) then CanDB will attempt to automatically re-select the last previously selected project, brewery and/or item from previous CanDB session. This gives a better feel starting back where last left off. This may be defeated if you don’t like the feature.
· The “Tools -> Enable Image Viewer” or “Tools -> Disable Image Viewer” will be shown depending on state of the ImageViewer. If enable but window is not open, will be opened on the currently selected item. If disable and window open, it will be closed.
· The ImageViewer window now has button named “Disable”. This is quick action that does the same as “Tools -> Disable Image Viewer”.
· The image selector dialogs now allow either *.jpg (default) or *.png to choose from existing images. While all image data is imported and stored as JPG files, the source images can now be either JPG or PNG.
· Initial testing with Java 17. While current requirement is at least Java 8, that version is reaching end-of-life.
· Added right click menu items to the left navigator tree. New menu items of “Expand Below” to expand all tree nodes below the selected, and “Collapse Below” to collapse all tree nodes below and including the selected. For large projects, the set of expanded tree nodes can sometimes get out of hand.
· Added MacOS icon set, so CanDB will show a different image in the system tray than BMV. Once again MacOS has same icons as Windows platforms.
· Fixed bug when starting the program (or completely new install) and there is no Project selected, the Images tab buttons must be disabled until a project has been selected/created.
· The “Project” tab has new “Advanced” button. This will open a dialog window allowing configure of some custom HTML files that get integrated into the generated HTML. The MBC project uses some custom Table of Contents as well as number of additional pages which have indexes into the given images. Supports both $(HREF and $(IREF tags in inbound files.
· The “HTML” tab has new “TopLevel HTML” button. Unlike “Generate HTML” which will regenerate ALL HTML pages, the “TopLevel” button skips all brewery/item pages. There is no reason to repeatedly generate brewery/item web pages when working on custom pages. Only need to run “Generate HTML” before final version release.
· The “HTML” tab has new “Extra Pages” check boxes of “Grouped By Sizes” and “Grouped By Types”. CanDB can now optionally generate pages based on item size (e.g. small/standard/large) or item type (cone/flat/tab/other).
· Added “Tools -> Register Your Copy”. CanDB remains free to use, no copy protection, just would like to know if anyone else but me is using this program…
· With the above changes I was finally able to fully generate all MBC – Michigan Beer Cans HTML. Please see www.mbcinfo.com for both MBC and CSS content generated by CanDB.
· Added help topic documentation for the Item tab “right click” popup menu for actions Adjust, Clear, Restore, and added new action “Clear Orient” to remove EXIF orientation property from existing images. Note the “Clear Orient” will apply to ALL images for the given item, not just the slot for Face, Back, Left, Right, Lid.
· Major rewrite similar to BMV, now using my own GUI framework on top of SWT. This makes much simpler to build/package, and no longer dependent on any given version of Eclipse RCP.
· New packaging, simple ZIP. No longer bundles a Java Runtime Environment (JRE). All modern computers have at least Java 1.8 installed or it is easy to download/install yourself. CanDB now requires at least Java 1.
· Added CanDB-UPDATER.exe. Again, similar to BMV, this allows for future versions of the program to change and still use the “Tools -> Check For Updates” to download.
· Tabs which have a “Clear” button now attempt to set cursor focus to the first logical location for keyboard entry. The “Versions” tab Clear button is now actually enabled!
· All text and combo widgets now have Cut/Copy/Paste/Select All right-click popup for standard editing. The accelerators Ctrl-X, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-P, Ctrl-A also work. All tabs in CanDB were updated to set right-click listeners.
· When using tab “Items” for beer cans, the USBC1/USBC2 text boxes have been changed from max seven characters to max ten, and “blank” is now allowed. This allows for the BCCA online supplement numbering of format “2 032 00 5”. There are definitely no issues with CanDB storing or displaying larger numbers in the generated HTML files, but I have not yet tested the built in $HREF type logic that is basing on older page-item type numbering.
· Added beer can modifier tags for IRTP, Withdrawn Free, Opening Instructions, and Test can. Check boxes added to the Item tab and attempt to imply values based on short text description during import. Appears as “Mods” in the filters and variation controls.
· Now uses ImageMagick “-auto-orient” when importing images. Many digital cameras don’t actually do the pixel processing when changing camera orientation but instead just store an “Exif Orientation” tag with the file. Not all software recognizes this Exif tag and images may appear rotated when displayed in browsers. Use of the “-auto-orient” option causes CanDB to auto rotate if necessary so pictures are displayed correctly regardless of older or newer web browser.
· Fixed import of Excel CSV files with respect to values with embedded double quote characters.
· Fixed defect of creating a new item and immediately doing a “Delete” without ever saving the item. CanDB was attempting to move file(s) from disk which had never been saved to disk.
· Changed the tray icon such that different from the BMV (Beer Magazine Viewer).
· Now automatically generates a top level "Projects.html" web page. This page includes images and links to each defined project, and makes it easier to bookmark just a single URL, linking all projects together.
· Improved "Import From Excel". Can now create breweries based on multiple columns (e.g. Name,City). Also now does more to attempt to map both "Type" (e.g. Flat, Pull, Zip, etc) as well as "Seam" style to CanDB terminology.
· No longer forces image size for the generated Cover page. Now uses whatever image user has created "as is".
· Added "Rarity" input combo box and display for Beer Can projects.
· Now allows user to select between 0..5 possible properties to display on the generated HTML pages. The default is still "Date" and "Price", but user now has ability to configure the set of properties.
· Internal changes only, now sharing some common source code with the BMV project.
· Added “Tools -> Check For Updates” to simplify future program updates. New revisions will now be web hosted both “zipped” and “unzipped” so possible for CanDB to update itself by simple HTTP GET requests based on differences between local computer and the web hosted image. For example, if only three files changed, only need to update three files. No need to download the entire JRE or all the help topics each time.
· Added new “Edit -> Variation Controls” for user control of what constitutes a variation. There are program built in defaults (e.g. for beer cans these are Can Company, Can Code and Seam) but user may now configure these to be any of the selectable properties.
· Beer can "Types" and “Seams” are now both editable lists (user configurable). Use the “Config” tab to dynamically add/rename/delete selectable choice of either (right click to edit).
· Added new “Lid” property in the Item tab for beer cans. While this is limited in length, you can now enter some form of coding system and filter on this value or use in the variation controls. The HTML configuration tab also has a “Display Lids” checkbox (default is still off) to include some Lid information in the generated HTML. I am still experimenting with a good display format to show all four images of the can and the two images of the top and bottom.
· Number of beer can faces may now be 1, 2, or 3. A three-faced can is displayed similar to a one-faced.
· CanDB goes international!!! What started out with a collecting friend from Brazil asking about CanDB support for Portuguese has resulted in nearly every file in CanDB being modified to support multiple languages. With this latest major release, CanDB can now support languages English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. The program, all help topics, menus, tool tips, labels, etc now dynamically adjust to the selected language.
· “Tools -> Options” now has a combo box selector to choose language of choice, with the default still being “English”.
· The “Config -> Can Sizes” is now user extendable. Previous versions allowed enable/disable of built in sizes, but for international support and a variety of international can sizes, users can now add any desired sizes.
· Added “HTML Image Controls” to the HTML tab. This option is NOT enabled by default, but I use this for all my CSS and MBC generated HTML. Please read full details in the HTML tab help content.
· Added control for “Number Of Digits” when renumbering Brewery or Item references. For example, if you prefer to have items numbered with leading “0’s” to always have three digits, then choose “3”. If the given item number would normally be assigned “5”, the formatted value would be “005”.
· Fixed several bugs with the project type “Sheets”. I rushed this into 2.0.0 but discovered some issues when I imported all my flat sheets.
· Changed generation of “Grouped By Brewery” page to use table/tr/td HTML tags instead of straight image references. This results in the images with consistent padding and alignment, producing slightly better looking web pages.
· Code review of all source files and minor code cleanup and simplifications. Basically some code changes I wanted to include into 2.0.0 but didn’t want to hold up the 2.0.0 release.
· User configurable HTML filters for three custom HTML pictorials. Want to produce a pictorial of all your 12 oz cans, bottom opened, cost greater than $$$? Want to generate a pictorial of all cone tops that start with the letter “A” and high profile? As long as you have the data in CanDB, you can easily generate your own custom pictorials without knowing anything about writing HTML.
· Added Project Types. From the Project Tab there is now a “Breweriana Type” combo box from which you can define a given project to contain Cans (the default), Coasters, Trays, Sheets, or general purpose “Other”. The Item tab, Configuration, Import content, and HTML generation will adjust based on the project type. It is easy to program additional built in CanDB project types so anyone that wants to help define criteria for a new breweriana type, lets discuss.
· Features “File -> Import From File” to import data from tab separated file (Excel) and “File -> Import From Canventory” to import data from binary Canventory files. New help topics have been added for each import feature.
· New “Tools -> Renumber Brewery References” and “Tools -> Renumber Item References” to automatically renumber lists based on user specified increments. This may be useful if you didn’t leave gaps and need to enter new data between two existing items.
· New “Tools -> Disable Image Viewer”. While the Image Viewer introduced with Version 1.1.0 makes it nice to view a more detailed image with simple mouse hover, while entering quantity of new data the automatic popup of the viewer may get annoying. Simply use this menu item to toggle on/off the user of the Image Viewer.
· Added new “Tools -> Cost to Price Report” which generates a report of your given projects/items with quantity, cost, price, and differences. Some of the totals in terms of $$$ spent to acquire your items may be a bit shocking!
· Added ability to “drag and drop” items with the CanNavigator tree. Note that you can only drag items with no variations, a variation to become a standalone item, or a standalone items as a variation of an existing item. Item references and short/long names may adjust automatically. Note that if you drop onto an existing item, the selection becomes a variation of that given item. If you want to move an existing item to a different brewery, or a variation to a standalone item, drop the selection on the brewery entry.
· Added a sixth image for Beer Cans so room to also include picture of bottom lid.
· Changed the BCOM (Beer Cans of Michigan) reference to Lilek (Opening Instructionals). Simply because there are many more OI collectors than the few Michigan.
· Added some “when feature used” popup help topics to address some of the common questions from CanDB users. Specifically, discussion of when the Add and Save buttons enable only after unique values have been entered for reference, short name and long name.
· On the Item tab, right click popup on a given image now allows you to “Adjust” those images. This is more important for “Import From Canventory” and possibly swapping images for Front, Left, Back and Right for a given item/can.
· Updated help topics and lots of miscellaneous code cleanup and GUI layouts. While I liked the original program structure, there is now a much better generalization using Java interfaces and reflection.
· Port to MacOS X 10.9 (Mavericks). While the Windows version in one form or another has been around since 2003, I was reluctant to purchase a MacOS system. While I do like the Unix core to MacOS X, I do now understand why majority of developers (including myself) stay with the Windows operating systems! That said, end users for some reason like Apple products so CanDB will now be supported for both major operating systems.
· Now provides both standard download which assumes user's computer has a version of Java 1.6.x or later installed, or a "bundled package" which is reasonably larger but contains a Java JRE (Java Runtime Environment) for CanDB private usage without user needing to download Java. Would be so much easier for developers if Microsoft, Apple and Oracle would stop suing each other...
· Added help topic for the "Tools -> Preferences" dialog. Another round of review and minor changes to other help topics.
· Added use of the ImageViewer when making selections in the Navigator tree, as well as added Rotate/Cancel buttons to the bottom of the ImageViewer. This makes it much easier to see details about a given beer can image without need to be running a web browser.
· Fixed bug introduced just before 1.0.0 released that would enable/disable buttons per state. The "Clear" button was incorrectly left off and was left disabled.
· First external release November 11, 2012. While code existed as far back as 2003 for generating HTML for web hosting Michigan Beer Cans content, a user interface for capturing the beer can information/images did not start until late July, 2012 based on desire to put together GRAPHICAL composites. While Excel spreadsheets are one way to capture composite information, it is so much nicer to view detailed images than read line after line of text!
Document last updated: Tuesday, April 16, 2024 11:37:35 PM