After a little over a month in development, bookTome 2 is continuing to progress well, although I expect it to still be several months before enough will be done to release a preview version. I've also decided that there will be one more final update to bookTome 1, which will just fix a few minor bugs and changes.

 

The screenshots below show the current progress of bookTome 2, although please note that the user interface is continually changing and may look different later on.

 

Add/Edit Author:

 

 

Add/Edit Book:

Major new features include multiple author support and improved eBook support.

 

 

Main Window:

Major new features include collapsible/expandable sections in the viewer, scrolling in the viewer when they don't fit on the screen, dynamic resizing of the items shown in the viewer which will all help with large and small screen resolutions. The details view will also be more customizable and flexible.

 

 

Amazon Import:

Please note that this part has only just been added and will change before the preview release. Major new features include multiple book import, the ability to change the Amazon Location and Number of Items on the fly and better progress feedback.

 

I've just completed the migration of this website, along with the taskTome, bookTome and Bug Tracker websites to a new hosting provider. This was done with no downtime and if you are reading this message then you are on the new server now. Although there aren't any visible changes, the new provider is a little more reliable and stable, and will allow me to do more in the future with the software sites. For those interested, the new host is Cove (and is hosted in Sydney), while the old host that I was having trouble with was Jumba.

After putting this move off for quite a while, I have in the past two or three weeks started development on bookTome 2. This is a complete rewrite, from scratch, of bookTome in a newer development environment. The life span of the old environment has simply ended and in order to move to the newer one, a rewrite was needed.

 

I expect that this will take about 9-12 months, although I will be releasing a preview/beta version before this as development continues. I'm undecided if there will be any more releases of bookTome 1.x during this time, if work goes well on bookTome 2 I may just move straight to the beta release.

 

The first version of bookTome 2 will not see any major changes in terms of features. Most of the work will be put into reconstructing the existing features. Having said that, it will be well worth it. bookTome 2 will include full unicode support, will support changing data locations, have an improved user interface, improved importing and exporting, full eBook support and various other changes. It should also be much faster than bookTome 1 in certain areas.

 

The screenshot below shows the Add Author dialog box I've worked on the past few days. Due to books now supporting multiple authors, you'll need to add authors to the database using this dialog now. Note that the user interface will most likely be tweaked as development continues. It will also support different color schemes, if you don't like the blue.

 

 

I'll continue to post updates here every once and a while with the progress.

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