In Depth: 5 of the best collection managers for Linux
Collecting things is human nature. The things we collect change over time, but the process never stops. It was cuts and bruises when you were seven, cards when you were a teen and, although no one will admit it, those sweet wrappers with the free tattoos made an appearance somewhere too.
So, a moment of thought will likely conjure up a few collections that are still growing under your tender care. Whether it's books, movies, coins, cards, wine, or souvenirs from the fancy restaurants you've been in, you've probably got plenty of stuff but no structured record of it.
That's where collection mangers come in. These days, most are equipped with a slick GUI that can pull information from the internet to help you with cataloguing your collection. Moreover, they'll often enable you to tag the items in your collections, search through your stuff and even export the information to another system.
While you're not exactly spoilt for choice, the tools available are split into two different camps. There are expansive managers with veritable hordes of built-in templates and support for various types of collections, and their lightweight counterparts, which enable you to control the data fields that are associated with each different collection you enter.
However, a slick graphical interface doesn't automatically make these programs any more efficient than a classic leather-bound ledger or a modern man's text editor. So which, if any, of these data collation apps can you trust with your collection of precious treasures? And what do they provide that a paper record can't?
Tellico - this old timer still has what it takes
Written for KDE, but just as at home on your Gnome box, Tellico is perhaps the oldest collection manager that's still going strong today.
It comes with built-in support for many different types of collections, such as books, movies, music, video games, comic books, coins, stamps, trading cards, wines, board games and more.
Yet instead of using databases to store all this data, Tellico relies on the XML format. Tellico's website provides a detailed illustrated guide in addition to the extensive documentation, but the drawback to having extensive built-in support is the in-your-face interface that comes with it, although this is more than offset by the program's features.
When filing our comic book collections, we honestly don't want to enter the date we purchased the book, so we find it irritating that Tellico expects us to. Even though you don't have to fill in all, or even most, of the fields, the result is unappealing.
The dialog boxes you use to fill in the information for an item are crowded, but there are also all the ugly empty spaces from fields you didn't fill in. Fortunately, then, despite this dodgy start point, you can control what fields are associated with each of the built-in collections.
You can also change the parameters for existing fields. For instance, if you don't want a Purchase Date field for any of the collections, you can individually edit them and delete that field. Alternatively, you can add a new field to any of the templates if you notice something missing, such as a text box to write about the emotional value attached to an item.
Monitor loans
Tellico is also an effective way to keep tabs on your items, since it can record whether you've loaned an item in a collection to someone. You can quickly generate reports about item data too, which can then be printed or exported to HTML if you like, and there are various templates for the reports, including a Loan view.
Finally, Tellico supports many different internet sources that you can use to retrieve information about an item in your collection. These include IMDB; ISBNdb (an online book database); CrossRef for academic articles and bibliographic texts; and the SRU servers, which many libraries use to provide access to their data catalogue. As a bonus, external scripts can be used to search for data on other information sources.
Apart from a simple search, you can create filters based on any of the fields for the collection. Once saved, these filters can then be used to list all items in a collection with a few mouse clicks.
Verdict
Version: 1.3.5
Website: www.periapsis.org/tellico
Price: Free under GPL
The design makes adding data simple and the templates are editable, but the interface could look better.
Rating: 8/10
GCStar - this beta has more promise than many full-blown apps
With GCStar's 1.5.0 beta release, the version of the app residing in the software repositories of most distros has become a relic fit for retirement. But the recently released beta isn't just better than its forerunners, it stands tall among its adversaries too.
Like Tellico, GCStar comes with built-in templates for various collection types. These had been stagnant for a while, but the beta freshens things up by offering you the option of compiling a repository of TV episodes and a collection of mini-vehicles as well.
In fact, the thing that shines through as soon as you start using GCStar is the attention to detail that's gone into each of the templates.
Attention to detail
Since there aren't any websites that offer a community-contributed list of mini-vehicles, however, you have to fill in all the details yourself. That's a shame, but the template is still a boon if you've got a lot of mini-vehicles to catalogue.
For its other new addition, GCStar can connect to the TVDB website to fetch information about your collection of TV episodes. The website contains user-contributed data, so there's a risk that the information is incomplete or inaccurate, so you might have to fill some information in manually.
You can also control what information is displayed for each of your collections, so if you'd rather not see the Comments field or a cast list, you can remove them. Changing the displayed data also changes the input dialogs, so you won't be asked for redundant information either.
A list of websites you can retrieve data from for each collection type is built into GCStar and you can request more in the active community forums. You can also configure whether or not you're asked to select a source every time you add a new item and even set a source site for each individual field.
The GCStar borrower system is neat too, enabling you to send emails to borrowers when the item is due back.
One of the biggest caveats to using GCStar, though, is that it doesn't yet have printer support. This means that in order to print, you'll need to export your data to HTML and then print it using your browser. Alternatively, you can export the data to XML or as a tarball compressed archive.
Verdict
Version: 1.5.0.beta1
Website: www.gcstar.org
Price: Free under GPL
This is great – new templates, a handy interface and decent documentation in one package.
Rating: 9/10
Data Crow - this program does everything, but is it a victim of trying too hard?
First released in 2003, Data Crow has grown over the years to become one of the most popular cataloguing software tools around. Released under the GPL and based on Sun's Java, it offers features entirely unheard of in similar tools.
It can generate reports, retrieve data from the internet to help you quickly catalogue your collection and provides loads of handy wizards to guide you through pretty much everything, be that adding new items or editing its built-in modules.
Not only that, but it can draw charts to help you graphically represent the make up of your collections and you can change its appearance to suit your desktop with its many different themes.
Also on offer are extensive search and filtering options and a clever interface. But perhaps it's too clever for its own good.
While striving to be the top tool for cataloguing data, Data Crow has become quite a complex beast. At least Data Crow requires no installation. Once you've extracted the files from datacrow_3_4_12_zipped. zip, all you need to do to launch it is run
java -jar datacrow.jar
When you run Data Crow for the first time, you'll be asked if you're a Beginner or an Expert user. Don't worry too much about this choice: you can change your status from the Experience Menu at any time.
The difference between the two is that beginners can't create new custom modules or edit the built-in modules, such as Books, Music, Films and so on. Surprisingly, there's no built-in module for comic books, though – a staple for many collection managers.
Internet magic
From here on in, it's a case of building up your collections, and for this you can enlist the help of one of Data Crow's many handy wizards. Just enter some keywords or type in the ISBN number for a book and Data Crow will check online to find appropriate matches. Only when nothing is found will you have to resort to typing in data manually.
Data Crow can extract data directly from your music discs too, which makes cataloguing a music collection much simpler.
Pleasingly, it can also create charts for each of your collections based on one of the data fields and keep track of what you've loaned. To do the latter, you'll need to enter your friend's details into the Contact Person collection, but then you can use the loan management feature to track which items are on loan and to who.
Our major gripe is that there's no documentation on the project website and Data Crow only comes with a barely decent help function that you can access by clicking Help > Help. The lack of helpful tooltips was sorely missed throughout our time with Data Crow.
Verdict
Version: 3.4.12
Website: http://datacrow.net
Price: Free under GPL
Tries to do a little too much, which results in a complicated interface that could definitely use tooltips.
Rating: 8/10
StauffKeeper - versatile, nuanced and capable, but a serious time investment
Designed to be so versatile that it can catalogue just about everything under the sun, StuffKeeper meets that goal with aplomb. Which is impressive, considering it's still awaiting its first stable release.
However, this is a Marmite program, and what we love, you may hate. Contrary to most collection managers that provide pre-built templates with a horde of defined fields, StuffKeeper requires you to set up the collection fields yourself.
This may seem like a handicap, but the result is a cleaner collection that isn't burdened by empty fields. Plus, you'll be able to enter items quickly, because you'll have a better grasp of what data you'll need.
You can create as many fields as you like for each collection, but note that the interface is fairly basic and requires some getting used to. And while there's a basic tour to help you get acquainted with StuffKeeper on its website, the lack of detailed documentation makes this program ideal only if you're willing to devote plenty of time and energy to it.
To help you sort through your entered data, you can create tags for items in your various collections and search using these tags just by typing them into the search bar. Additionally, you can search for data entered in any of the fields for your collection and, best of all, you don't have to be exact.
For instance, you can search for all Liam Neeson movies in your collection by typing Liam in the search bar, which looks for that keyword in text fields as well as any related tags. Finally, it's worth noting that StuffKeeper creates a database for each of the collections and enables you to back up all your stored data in compressed tarballs.
Verdict
Version: 0.11.1
Website: http://www.stuffkeeper.org/index.php/Main_Page
Licence: Free under GPL
The tags are great, but having to create fields is sure to divide opinion.
Rating: 7/10
Moll - are you better off with a text editor?
Possibly the only command line tool of its kind, My Collection Manager (commonly known as Moll), is barely useful enough to share the ring with the advanced graphical alternatives on this list.
In fact, all it truly offers is large empty text boxes that you can fill with data about each item.
The interface is pretty basic, but it comes with built-in documentation that can be accessed by pressing the F1 key. Unfortunately, when using Gnome Terminal to access Moll, pressing F1 will launch the terminal's help instead of the program specific help, which is awkward.
Creating a collection is an equally unrewarding affair. It's customisable only in that you can enter some text to describe the collection, which is displayed in one of the many panels that make up the collection-choosing interface. For each item in a collection, Moll also enables you to write a short description.
There's a cap on the number of words you can use for this, so you'll need to keep it simple. Everything else you wish to record about the item – such as the author, title, publisher, cast and so on – goes into the larger Description box. And that's the extent of Moll's features.
There's no search and no way to filter the collection. You can't sort items and you can't export the data you've entered either. Frankly, it's not much better than using a text editor to file your collection and the only real benefits of using it are that you can create different collections each containing any number of items, and it connects with the Berkeley database to store the data you enter for all the items entered.
Verdict
Version: 0.60
Website: http://sourceforge.net/projects/moll/
Licence: Free under GPL
Bare bones and barely more use than a text editor – avoid.
Rating: 3/10
The winner - GCStar - 9/10
When it comes to the world of collection managers, it's clear you shouldn't just settle for yesterday's innovation. These humble cataloguing apps are getting significantly better with each new release and as they've matured, they've raised a pertinent question: how involved do you want to be in collating the data about your collections?
The default stance is to make the process quick and painless with internet databases and pre-built templates, but if you want to be more involved, there are plenty of options on offer.
Our view is that you should seek the best of both worlds, preferably with plenty of pre-built structure to handle everything you want, but something that you can still garnish with your own touches.
As such, Moll is the least impressive collection manager here. It can't store anything more than basic information, doesn't support search or tags and doesn't give you any way to export your data. Still, it deserves some praise for having good documentation and a simple but useful interface to browse your collection.
Meanwhile, StuffKeeper is too extreme in its customisability, so it's best suited for niche users who want to control every aspect of their collection management. There's plenty to like if you have the time and the inclination to really get into it, though, so don't dismiss it completely.
Which leaves us with three similar programs from which to choose a winner: Data Crow, GCStar and Tellico.
Best of the bunch
At first glance, Tellico seemed like the obvious winner of the bunch. It's got built-in templates, it's configurable and provides good documentation. The design is elegant, if not pretty, but it's been superseded by a superior program, one that's pushed the heights of what a collection manager can be.
Meanwhile, Data Crow washes up in third place because of its overwhelming interface. There are just too many fields cramped together and not enough help when you're trying to sift through the various options. That said, it does everything competently, has some brilliant features you won't find elsewhere and it's the most themeable program here, but it's too eager to do everything, which cost it the win.
Finally, there's GCStar, which really impressed us with its vast array of plugins for connecting to various source sites to retrieve item data. In addition, it has the cleanest interface of all, especially when it comes to editing an item in your collection.
While most tools require you to double-click the item you wish to edit and then hack away at the comprising fields in a different dialog box, GCStar enables you to edit the fields without too much faffing around.
It has a lively website, with users actively participating in the forum boards, so if you factor in the number of developers and contributors, you've got one attractive and active app.
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Interview: The brains behind the Mint web stats app
Shaun Inman is in a great position right now. When his web stats app Mint took off four years ago, he was able to leave his career in client services behind.
Today his projects make enough money to sustain him financially, which is pretty rare, especially given that he usually starts out building things purely for his own interest.
His secret? People simply adore the stuff he comes up with.
The switch to producing apps happened accidentally – he was just tinkering in the early hours. In fact, Shaun says, everything he does revolves around tinkering:
"It was surprising when Mint took off and demanded enough of my time to allow me to turn down the client work. It was mostly just me scratching my own itch, then other people [began] finding the things I was giving away at the time. I built up a base of people who were interested in the same things as me and they went to support my decision."
Getting the Fever
Shaun's latest major project, self-hosted recommendation-engine-come-feed-reader Fever, followed the same model.
"I was dissatisfied with the available solutions out there and overwhelmed by the number of feeds I'd accumulated over the years by participating in the web standards community. I know I wanted to make a feed reader for myself in order to address the shortcomings [I'd experienced]."
Fever sold as many $30 licences in its first week as the original Mint had in a month. After just two months, more than 2,000 people were using it, 10 per cent of Mint's total user base.
The release was also accompanied by a largely favourable TechCrunch post, although it questioned the lack of a demo or trial version.
"It's for the same reason I don't offer a demo trial version of Mint," Shaun explains. "The apps are written in PHP and MySQL, so once you have the source code, anybody who is moderately familiar with PHP can go and rip out the activation. I could do a feature-limited version but then I have to maintain two code bases, and I probably wouldn't use a hosted version.
"There are plenty of free, hosted feed readers out there but none of them has ever appealed to me," Shaun continues.
"One of the main reasons is that I don't like a third party observing my behaviour and profiting off it by selling advertising and market analysis and all that junk. And also, I went to school as a graphic designer and I'm a self-taught programmer, so creating a scalable, multi-server MySQL database through an application doesn't really appeal to me. I don't have the technical background to pull it off. I like being able to touch all the bits myself and I'm not really interested in putting together a team to build something like that."
So, for now, Shaun will continue to support his customers personally. "If I paid somebody to do support, they wouldn't have that personal attachment, that personal stake in making sure the customer is happy. I'd have to educate them. As a developer it's better to have direct contact with your customers because you get first-hand experience of what problems they're having and which you need to take care of first."
That personal attachment is also the reason Shaun hasn't sold off any of his applications. "These projects are part of my personal brand," he says. "I've never set up a company name to operate under. I'm not sure I could part with that. It would be like selling off your child to another couple. I'm not motivated by money, and I'm not sure that retaining some sort of creative control would be enough or whether it would make it worse because I'd be stuck to maintaining it without having directorial control. Maybe you could try and pry them from my cold dead fingers …"
iPhone apps too
Shaun tackles both the design and development single-handedly and reckons his time is spread 60/40 in favour of development time. Whenever he hits a dead end and gets tired by one side, he hops over to the other. The process involves a lot of trial and error and, as Shaun puts it, results in a fractured workflow, but he always makes it through in the end. The trick is to stay focused.
"Knowing that at any time you can just hop over can get you into a trap where you actually don't solve any problems. You just start hopping back and forth," warns Shaun. "But there are also a lot of positives that come from doing both sides. When you're designing something, you can anticipate implementation problems. And when you're developing, you're a little bit more sensitive to the nuances of the design that you're eventually going to be producing on top of that code base."
Recently, Shaun's also started dabbling in iPhone app development. His first effort, Horror Vacui, is an 8-bit two-player strategy board game. It secured Shaun a grant from a local organisation in Chattanooga to work on the next one, a Metroid-Vania side-scroller.
Since he was a kid, he always wanted to make video games and simply loves the idea of being able to get a game on a popular portable device. For Shaun, the hardest challenge when developing for the iPhone was working with libraries and frameworks.
"I don't like magic," he says. "I like knowing how things work. I don't like taking things for granted because if magic breaks, you don't know how to fix it, unless it's your own trick. I'm sure the Apple Objective-C frameworks solve a lot of problems that developers had for years, but as a new developer I haven't encountered those problems and I feel like I'm jumping through hoops that are actually there to protect me and save me trouble in the long run."
When things become a bit hairy, Shaun, who's also a musician, picks up the guitar. He's been in talks with other web developers about putting together an album of covers produced in their own special way. And of course, Shaun also initiated Scalable Inman Flash Replacement (sIFR), a typography technique that enables you to replace text elements on screen with Flash equivalents.
The method was later refined by Mike Davidson and Mark Wubben, who's taken over its development. For a while, Shaun lost interest in the web typography issue but now that the space is heating up he's getting back into it, switching his own site over to Cufأ³n.
"It came along and didn't have the Flash requirement, which is great. And it even works on the iPhone because it uses Canvas. That's pretty sweet. But I'm not a fan of those commercial font-hosting services. They're interesting but I have the same reservations about them as I do about other third-party hosted solutions. One, they can analyse your traffic. Two, what happens if a couple of sites on a particular font licensing network get slashdotted or digg'ed, what happens to other sites on that service?"
Now, a CMS
Shaun's latest project is a little content management system called Less, or the Less Broadcasting System, inspired by Twitter. It came to Shaun when he realised that he'd abandoned his personal site in favour of Twitter's single little text area – that creating a blog post had suddenly become much too complicated.
"But what if your content management system was a single text area, I asked myself. So I'm building something that uses a slightly modified version of John Gruber's Markdown. It allows you to create posts and links from a single text area and is smart enough to parse out a title and tags or categories, like a custom slug for a URL for that particular person. The idea is to reduce the barrier to expression on your personal site down to a level that Twitter has achieved with their service."
During the development, Shaun's created a personal URL shortening service called Lessn that adheres to the same minimal aesthetic as Less, both in terms of UI and infrastructure.
If the success of Mint and Fever is anything to go by, the CMS will be a smash.
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Microsoft plans for Windows 8 in 2012
If you're just getting used to Windows 7, then it may be time to pull out the diary and pencil in a date in 2012 for the upgrade to its successor, unsurprisingly codenamed Windows 8.
The news that the next version of Microsoft's flagship operating system will arrive in 2012 comes from the Microsoft Kitchen fansite, which has obtained a roadmap showing the Redmond giant's plans.
Windows Server?
Apparently, Windows 8 will fit with Microsoft's plans to keep significant OS releases four years apart. The previous major release seems to be not Windows 7, but Windows Server 2008, we're supposed to believe.
While the roadmap is almost certainly the genuine article, the fact that Windows Vista doesn't even appear on the diagram suggests it's aimed at the enterprise IT buyers and has a point to make in making Microsoft look reliable and punctual with its OS releases.
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Barnes & Noble Nook e-book sold out in US
Anyone intent on buying an e-book reader for Christmas now has a very limited choice, after Barnes & Noble joined Sony in saying its machines had sold out already.
The bookseller's Nook e-book reader is now out of stock in the US, the only market where it's even supposed to be available. It joins Sony's Reader on the sold-out list, leaving only Amazon's Kindle among the mainstream options.
Amazon to reap rewards
Barnes & Noble said it had miscalculated the level of demand for its Android-powered book reader. It explained: "While we increased production based on the high consumer interest, we've sold out of our initial Nook allotment available for delivery before the holidays."
It added that some Nooks are still available in its larger shops, but that orders already placed are unlikely to be fulfilled until January.
In contrast to last year, when Amazon experienced similar supply problems, both Kindle models are in stock and ready to ship.
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Major game developer abandons Android ship
In an unusually pessimistic move, French game developer Gameloft has said it isn't terribly keen on creating new titles for Android phones.
Although the platform is relatively immature, with few handsets available so far, Gameloft says it's already unhappy with the infrastructure in place for it to sell its products.
Nobody making money
"[The Android Market] is not as neatly done as [the App Store] on the iPhone. Google has not been very good to entice customers to actually buy products. On Android nobody is making significant revenue," said the company's finance director, Alexandre de Rochefort.
Consequently, Gameloft is reducing its investment in developing Android software and looking elsewhere.
While iPhone titles accounted for 13 per cent of Gameloft income in the last financial quarter, Android games brought in 400 times less, according to de Rochefort.
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AOL to shed jobs and split from Time Warner
Troubled internet giant (and how often have we used that phrase recently?) AOL took a step closer to the end of its partnership with Time Warner this week when it announced a huge round of job cuts.
The company said it would lose 2,500 staff in the next few weeks as part of its plans to separate from the parent body entirely by 9 December.
Independent company
After the shift down from 20,000 employees in 2004 to 4,400 when this latest move is complete, AOL will become an independent company; a considerable change from the heyday of 2000, when it essentially bought Time Warner.
At the heart of the downsizing is the fundamental shift in AOL's core business of selling dialup internet access. Subscribers are currently deserting for broadband at a rate of around 200,000 a month in the US.
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