The Readerware Newsletter

Readerware 1.60

You can always download the latest version from the Readerware web site, http://www.readerware.com. You will find three download links, one for the full US install, one for the full international install and another for the upgrade. the upgrade can be applied to either the US or international versions. The easiest way to upgrade Readerware, is to download the upgrade file. This is a self extracting file, just double-click on it after you download it to begin the upgrade. Make sure you pick the same directory as you installed Readerware in originally and then click the Unzip button. Your existing Readerware 1.50 or higher installation will be upgraded to the latest version. If you prefer you can download the full install instead.

It is recommended that all users upgrade to Readerware 1.60.

What's New

In addition to the features described in this edition of the newsletter you will also find a number of improvements in the extraction process. Web sites change their formats and Readerware has been upgraded to work with all the latest web site formats. In particular Readerware does a better job of importing from Powells. In our tests we often find Powells has data for books that no other site has so it can be useful site to include in your auto-catalog runs. Multi-line titles are now imported correctly from The Library of Congress. Additionally Readerware now imports images from more web sites.

As more sites expand beyond books, the home page links used by Readerware now point to the book home pages rather than the main home page.

There are a few bug fixes, image files are now named correctly, they used to always have a GIF extension even if they were JPG images. This could cause problems if you tried to open the images in programs other than Readerware. Problems switching between the table view and the fish eye view have been fixed.

New Default Search or Browse Mode

Readerware 1.60 now includes a new browse mode or default search feature. When you run Readerware 1.60 for the first time you will notice that the contents of your database are displayed rather than the normal blank page. All titles are listed by author. You no longer have to do a search after starting Readerware.

Firstly, if you prefer the old way, simple go to the Database Options Dialog and uncheck the "Run Default Search on Open" option and Readerware will operate as before.

What if you like the idea of displaying your collection immediately Readerware starts but would like a different search? No problem, simply run the search and the select "Search->Save as Default Search" from the menu bar. For example you could decide to display all titles in a specific category or all unread books etc. Simply define your search and save it as the default search.

The default search is also run when you open a new database. You can run it at anytime by clicking on the Default Search icon in the toolbar.

The main reason for implementing this feature was because some new users didn't realize that you had to do a search before seeing the database contents. After running an auto-catalog they couldn't find anything in the database. Hopefully this new option solves that problem and provides some benefit to all users.

Easier Navigation

It is now a lot easier to navigate through your collection. If you click on an item in the results table, you see the detail display for that book. What if you want to view the detail page for the next book? You used to have to go back to the results table and select the next book. No more! Now simply use the previous/next buttons to scroll through your collection a book at a time with the full detail display, including cover art. To return to the result table, simply click on the new up and back icon in the toolbar. In the results table the previous/next buttons will page you through the table as they did before.

You can of course update any book as you go. Simply make the changes, hit update and then click on the next or previous buttons to view/update another book. This can make viewing and maintaining your collection a lot easier and faster.

When you hit the previous/next buttons in the detail display, you are scrolling through the entries in the search results table, not the full database. This can be very useful. Suppose you just ran an auto-catalog. Do a search by date entered with today's date and the results table will now display all the books you just cataloged. Select the first entry to see the detail display for the first book. Now keep hitting the next button. You scroll through all the books you just catalogued and can clean up the data as you go.

New Comments Search

You can now search your collection using the Comments field. As usual the asterisk is the wild card character. So to search for all books that contain "a great read" somewhere in the comments, you would search for "*a great read*", (without the quotes).

This new feature can be put to great use. The comments field is a generic field that you can use for whatever purpose you like. For example suppose you wanted to implement a loan scheme where you tracked the books you have loaned out and to whom. You could define your own comments format. For example you could decide to use:

The comments field provides an easy way to store just about any information about a book. But this is only part of the story. Suppose you want to find out which books you have on loan. You can simply use the Comments search feature and search for "On Loan To*". This tells Readerware to search for books that contain a comment that starts with On Loan To. If you want to search for that string anywhere in the comment, you would enter "*On Loan To*". You can use this with the new default search feature described above to make this your default search. Then checking for books on loan is a snap.

You can use the comments to implement a number of different features.

New Command Line Option

You can now specify the name of the Readerware database to load on the command line. This can be a real time saver if you have multiple Readerware databases and want to switch between them. Simply set up multiple icons for Readerware and change the command line on each icon to load the required database. For example you might change the command line to:

C:\Readerware\readerware.exe /db E:\Library\Library.RWD

Export Enhancements

For those users who use Readerware for capturing data to import into another program, there are a number of enhancements.

There are two new display types available. "Internal by Author" and "Internal by Title". This list the book details along with the full cover art image file name. This enables you to easily match the image file to the book. Also the all data display types now include the row number, you can easily use this also to determine the image file name.

A new export option has been added, Split Title/Subtitle. Some sites will include a title and subtitle separated by a colon. For example "Child's Play : A Dalziel/Pascoe Mystery". If this option is checked Readerware will export this title format into two separate fields, the Title, ("Child's Play") and the Subtitle, ("A Dalziel/Pascoe Mystery").

International Distribution

Users in some countries experienced problems installing the new Readerware 1.50 base release. Some files required to localize the product were not included. Beginning with this release, there are now two distributions available, the US version and the International version. The international version is only really required in countries that use double byte character sets or Cyrillic fonts etc. It you were able to install the earlier version, there is probably no need to switch.

Regardless of which version you install, Readerware is only available in English, we do not have translated versions available yet.

There is only a single version of the upgrade available, the same upgrade file can be applied to either version.

Support Readerware

You can support Readerware and ensure that the new features keep on coming. Use Readerware when making your online purchases. If you order using the Readerware browser or shopping cart, Readerware normally receives a commission from the vendor. The Readerware browser uses the same encryption technology as the major browsers so you can order online, safely and securely using Readerware. Plus it ensures continued development of Readerware.

Thank you.

Your Feedback

We welcome your feedback on Readerware. We have received a lot of comments from users since Readerware was released. So please let us know what you think of Readerware so far. E-Mail feedback@readerware.com.

Thanks for your support.