dealio

The "Check For Updates" menu item doesn't work for me either. It launches a dialog box that looks right, it runs (green progress bar completes quickly), then says the update application has been updated and a restart is needed. After the restart of HomeManage, running the check again produces the same results. No update check is ever completed -- only updates to the update application. The exact message says: "The update application has been updated and must restart in order to continue." I attached a picture of this box.

Are any of these features on your roadmap for any future version of the application?

I've got a lot of my home items cataloged in the Home Inventory application and it does a great job of tracking most information. I think it could be even more useful if there were a counterpart app on iOS so that I could take my database with me in my iPhone. There are a couple reasons I think this would be good. 1) Getting detailed information like item numbers, serial numbers, UPC numbers or collection names is sometimes hard to get without going back to the vendor. And when it comes time to find replacement parts, that information can be critical on, say a furniture set that is several years old. Having pictures and other tracked info available on the iPhone would make it easy to show a dealer/vendor the product and perhaps get better identification information for it. 2) Having my inventory available on the go would also be helpful for avoiding duplication in buying products. It would also be helpful in the opposite case when you want to ensure that you're buying a matching duplicate (if for example you wanted to add to the set). 3) Having the database on iPhone (or in iCloud) would serve as a good backup for the data as well. 4) Showing your product to a friend who might be interested in acquiring it is not possible unless you're at home. But with the database on iPhone, this becomes a possibility. Are there any plans to build an iOS version of the application that works in conjunction (with the same dataset) with HomeManage 2018, 2019, 2020, etc.? David

Steve, My copy does this too (greyed out Lookup button) and I don't know why it does. However, I've found that when I scan some barcodes, the lookup automatically fills in information in a few fields; otherwise it uses the word "null". David

That's a great question. I haven't seen a changelog, but would be nice to. David

I went to check HomeManage 2018 for updates by using the menuitem under the Help menu "Check for Updates...". When I clicked, nothing happened. The normal application that runs to check for updates did not appear on screen, and there was no error message or dialog box -- absolutely nothing happened. Ultimately I checked the home folder for the application and found what appears to be an outdated application called CheckForUpdate_HM2017.exe. I wondered how that happened, but figured it may be because I installed the 2018 version on top of the 2017 version. So I renamed the .exe to .exe_SAVE and the associated .dat file to .dat_SAVE and reinstalled the application. After reinstallation, I found CheckForUpdate_HM2017.exe and CheckForUpdate_HM2017.dat in the home folder. I launched CheckForUpdate_HM2017.exe and it as expected. I clicked through the NEXT buttons to check for an update, and it reported that "You already have the most recent version of HomeManage 2017 installed on your system." Is it checking for version 2017 or version 2018? David

I opened the Preferences dialog box (Tools>Preferences) and went to the Field Names tab to check on some fields I had added some time ago. While there, I noticed something odd. There are duplicate entries for some (many) text fields. The duplicate names are in the "Property" column, not the "Value" column. For example, I found 2 rows each for these fields: User Field 10 (both of these have the exact same entries in the Value field - a value I entered) User Field 11 (one of the duplicate rows has an entry in the Value column that I entered; the other is blank) User Field 12 (one of the duplicate rows has an entry in the Value column that I entered; the other is blank) and User Fields 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 (one of the duplicate rows has an entry in the Value column that I entered; the other is blank) Even odder, there were no duplicate fields for any User Fields higher than User Field 12. I also noticed that all of the duplicate fields except 10 have one Value entry that I entered and the other is blank; see the attached picture for examples. The fields are also not sorted by number -- as you can see in the picture, User Field 2 comes after User Field 19. It looks like they're sorted like text. The sorting is not a critical matter, just an oddity. David

Great idea. There are several ways to compartmentalize the images, including using the asset number as a folder. If that's done, then you could include attachments in the asset folder for each asset. For example, PDF of the warranty or user manual for a purchased device or appliance.

Thanks! Glad you guys are thinking ahead.

Most times when I'm inventorying an item, only one or two photos is needed to show the item. However some products come with multiple parts/items and a picture of each critical item is useful to have in the list of pictures. And when the product is new, I will easily recall which picture goes with each item in the product. However after years have passed, I may not recall what's what. Allowing the pictures to have an optional caption would make identification of the items faster and more accurate. It would also make referencing a particular item in, say the notebook, clearer so that whatever note is added, the meaning of whatever activity was taken is clear. It's not a major thing, but would be nice to have. Also, on the primary UI screen, I would show the caption for quick identification that the caption has been entered correctly for each item. Thanks for your consideration! David

Thank you for this work-around. I tested it and it works, but I don't know what else I broke with this change. I hope you will fix this issue in the next update to HomeManage. I still see it as an issue (and your suggestion as a work-around) for this reason. If there are other applications on my machine that are like HomeManage, this change may break them. If the application is built around a specific date format rather than using the system date format, this issue will always be there. Currently I know of no applications that this will break, but since the change is at the operating system level, it is system wide and can affect all applications, so I'll need to be on the lookout for problems in other applications. Thanks, David

I noticed the format in your snippet above is yyyy-MM-dd. See my snippet for comparison (it is M/d/yyyy). I see no place to change this formatting. I attempted to enter the same dates in your example above, April 12, 2011 and November 21, 2017, but using the M/d/yyyy formatting expected in my application. See the pics below for the final result. What happens is the month placeholder will only accept 1 digit, even though the cursor can be moved 1 place in the field, demonstrating that there are 2 places in the field. So for April 12, 2011, I tried entering digits in this order with no spaces: 4122011. The day field only accepts the first digit, then the cursor jumps to the year field, where it places the 2 in 12 followed by the first 3 digits of 2011. I got an error beep on the last digit of 2011. Afterwards, I entered the Received Date typing the following digits with no spaces: 11212017. I got the error beep on the last two digits, 17. Below are the results:

After closing and restarting the application, I noticed that all 4 images of the House location now appear in the images tab just as they should. I also noticed that the application allowed me to add the same 3 images to the Shed location that I attempted to add above, this time without improperly rotating any of the images.

When I clicked the properties of the House location, a dialog with tabs General, Attachments, Item Picture(s) and Notebook appeared. My goal was to add some lawn maintenance that I had done recently to the Notebook. That task worked well, but I decided to add images of the house -- didn't realize that I could. Adding the images to House worked as expected. I then went to add images of the shed behind the house to a location I created called Shed. I added 3 images in the order they appear in the app, 1, 2, 3. The first two images worked as expected and the images appeared in the dialog as expected -- no surprises. However, the third image appeared rotated 90 degree CC, even though I took the image on an iPhone in portrait mode (all the images of the shed were taken in portrait mode). I then clicked the Edit button thinking the app may allow me to rotate the image, but nothing happened. So while viewing the 1 rotated image, I pressed the Clear button to clear it so I could try re-adding the image. Re-adding the image worked (I used drag and drop to add all images) but the image appeared with the same rotation problem. I cleared the image. When the image addition failed, by habit I clicked on image 2 and image 1 just to check them. They both appeared to be missing (blank all white panel) -- a surprise since I only intended to clear the one image. So the issues so far are: 1) the app rotated an image improperly 2) the app appears to have cleared all images for the location when I only intended to clear the one mis-rotated image 3) the Edit button did nothing I then went back to the House location properties to check the images there. They all appeared to be correct with no rotation problems, even though of the four images of the house I took, 2 were in portrait mode and 2 were in landscape mode. I selected one of the images, then clicked the Edit button just as a test to see if it would fail again. The Edit button opened MS Paint! Without editing anything, I closed Paint and went back to the Shed to attempt adding all the images again. There were still no images showing on the shed, so I used drag-n-drop to put the same images in the same placeholders. Although there were no errors triggered, and the drag-n-drop operation appeared to work as normal, no images showed up in the locations. The Edit button was grayed out. I went back to the House location to view the images there, and the last image (image 4) was missing, and the other three appeared all black -- completely black with no shades of any color. I clicked on Edit and the actual image appeared in Paint. Without editing the image I closed Paint and the House properties dialog box. As I'm trying to figure out what's happening here, I went back to the Shed and House locations a few times just to check what was visible. Ultimately, all the house images seem to have disappeared even though I never edited any of them, and I never clicked the Clear button (no need to -- all 4 images were perfect). Since I know where the application stores the images, I went to that location in Explorer. All 4 images of the house were present with names like Location184(1).jpg, Location184(2).jpg, etc. None of the pictures of the Shed location were present. Note that all the image manipulation buttons are active in the House properties dialog box, which makes sense since the images all exist; you just can't see them in the pplication image boxes. However, all of the same buttons are grayed out for the Shed location, which also makes sense since the images no longer exist. What doesn't make sense is not being able to re-add the images to the Shed location. 4) So even though the shed images were not present, the application would not let me add images of the shed 5) Even though the images of the house are still present, the application doesn't show them in the properties dialog box for the House location There appears to be plenty wrong with the way the application manages images. I can't figure it out. All images added in this exercise were in JPG format from an 8MP iPhone camera. - David

Thanks. Looking forward to the fix. I've noticed several issues with how the application handles images. I'll be posting an additional one or two today that I just came across.

Allowing us to resize the Preferences and Item Properties and Notebook dialog boxes would make it data entry easier, quicker and more legible. Also would like to see different behavior for the Enter and Return keys while the cursor is in description fields. These keys should not trigger the OK button and close the dialog box when the cursor is in long text fields where using carriage returns helps to clarify item descriptions and Notebook descriptions.

With the large screens that are affordable and available now, the size of the font in the application is difficult to read (for example on 4K monitors). This request is to allow users to manually choose font size of the screen text elements in the UI and to allow dialog box re-sizing of special popups like the Preferences, Item Properties and Add Items dialog boxes. This will ease or eliminate eye strain on higher DPI monitors.

I've noticed that often the thumbnail images of assets in the asset list pane (top pane on the right) will have black bars added above and below the thumbnail image, though the image that I supplied to the application does not contain those black bars. These black bars never overlay the thumbnail, but they obscure the image so much that sometimes its difficult to tell what the image is. Note that I have noticed black bars on the left and right sides of thumbnail images as well, though the original images had no such bars. The combination together makes for a screen of thumbnails that are hard to discern. Also, the thumbnails are very tiny on my 4K monitor, but that's another matter (feature request: allow specifying the size of the thumbnails in Preferences, or auto-size them using monitor DPI).

With the prominence of modern large screens and high DPI, screen real estate is no longer so limited. When running the application full screen, there is plenty of room to allow selected fields (non-memo, non-comment fields) to auto-size themselves so that word-wrapping or word-clipping is not necessary, and excessive space used for smaller fields is wasteful. But a feature that auto-sizes the columns based on content would be very helpful in reviewing the database contents within the application asset panel.

Another issue with images related to this one happens when I use work-around #1 above. Sometimes the application creates a new thumbnail image that is smaller than the original thumbnail was, despite the fact that the image I'm using to replace the old image is higher quality and larger (more pixels) than the older image. The only work-around I've found for that issue is to delete the THUMB image file from the image folder and let the application recreate it.

Occasionally when adding assets to the database, I use a low quality image with the asset just to complete the process of adding the asset to the database. Later I may find a higher quality image that i would like to replace the lower quality image. Sometimes the application will not let me delete this image, if it is the first image for the asset. I haven't seen an issue deleting second, third, fourth, etc. images, just the first one. And the issue is sporadic, so it doesn't always happen. My work around is usually one of two methods: manually delete the image file from the image folder, then add the high-quality image to the asset through the app interface manually delete the image file and rename the high-quality image file using the old image's filename (the app is closed while doing this)

I should also mention that I am not sure how there are 2 "User Date Field 1" entries above.

I've created 2 user-defined date fields to capture shipped date and received date in HM 2017. When adding an asset I attempted to put a two-digit day in the day part of the field and when pressing the second digit of the day, the cursor advances to the next field (year) and places the number I typed in the year field. The same phenomenon happens when I try to use a two-digit month -- the second digit of the month gets placed in the day field. Is this a bug or something about the configuration I have created? TIA David

As a secondary request -- a feature request rather than bug check -- it would be nice if it were possible to associate some user-defined fields in such a way that the value for one field is used as the label for the the associated field. For example, in the example above this would mean that when an asset is selected that uses the associated user-defined fields described above, in the preview window below the selection pane, the value in the "Field 1 Name" would appear as the field name, and the value in the "Field 1 Value" would appear as the value that field. To make it concrete, suppose an item has these values for the user-defined fields, and say "Field 1 Name" is an associated field of "Field 1 Value" and so on. The the data below would appear in the application preview window like standard fields do:

I use several user-defined fields to track information about my assets. Of them, I use 6 text fields to allow me a choice for unique field names per asset. For example, I have created the following user-defined text fields: User Field 20 is labeled "Field 1 Name" User Field 21 is labeled "Field 1 Value" User Field 22 is labeled "Field 2 Name" User Field 23 is labeled "Field 2 Value" User Field 24 is labeled "Field 3 Name" User Field 25 is labeled "Field 3 Value" When creating a new asset, fields 20 - 24 above show up in the "Custom Fields" tab (which I renamed from "User Fields") of the Item Properties dialog box, but field 25 does NOT show up. This appears to be a bug. Can you verify or point out what I'm doing that's causing the issue? TIA David From the screenshot above, you can see that "Field 3 Value" is missing from the input dialog box.