TurboSystemsCo, LLC Blog

When you add your first user under the security menu you were asked to enter your first name, last name and a login. For example you enter MyLogin for the login when you created your first user. When you login to the program after creating the first user you will be prompted for a login and a password. Enter the information that you entered for login when you created the first user for both the login and password. In the example I used you would enter MyLogin for both the login and password. You can change the password to something else after you login by selecting Security>Change Password.

If you forget the login you used when you created your first user contact us a turbosystemco@att.net for a method to re-create your first user.

Just a couple of short tips to prevent problems when using Auto Expense Manager 2009

1. The first time you use the program click on the maximize button on the top of the screen to to maximize the screen size. After you do it once, the program will remember and open maximized. If you don’t maximize the screen and open another window the program will sometime lockup.

2. The first time you add trip information to the program do not use the trip button at the bottom of the screen..this can also sometime cause the program to freeze.  The first time you want to add trips to the prgram, highlight your vehicle, click the edit button, click the Vehicles for Trips tab, then add your trips.  After you’ve entered the initial trip in the system you can add additional trip information using the trip button at the bottom of the screen.

To Print photos in reports select the following from the main menu.

Report>Custom Report

On the Report Designer window click the Expand all button

Highlight the report “Inventory Item with Photo”

Click the Print Button

This will generate the report to the screen and you can print the report to your printer, by clicking the print option.   You can also print the report to PDF, HTML or Txt by following the instructions below:

At the top Right of the toolbar are three buttons that you can click to print to PDF, HTML or Txt

Once you click the PDF, HTML or Txt button you need to Click the X in the upper right corner to close the Print Preview Screen

You will then see a window that you enter the name for the file and you can also change the location.

Click the save button and the report is generated.

I have had one user report that the program locks up when he attempts to print this report to pdf, but had no problem printing the report to HTML.  I have not been able to duplicate
the problem, but it may be related to the size of the picture files.  If you experience any problems printing the photo report to PDF let me know about it as it may help me figure out the problem

As of May 3, 2011 Video/Movie Librarian cannot download information from the allmovie.com web site as it no longer exists.

We discontinued sales and development of the program after 24 years  in May of 2010 and many of you are probably wondering why.  TurboSystemsCo, LLC is a business and as a business we need to turn a profit.  If you don’t turn a profit for so many years and continue to operate, the IRS will classify your business a hobby and won’t allow you to take any business expenses write offs and that
would be disastrous for us.

For the past few years the Video Librarian sales has declined significantly. In 2009 the last full year of sales we only sold 19 programs and only 4 in 2010 before we discontinued sales in May.  You may be wondering why we decided not to release the program as freeware as we did with several of our other programs.   The primary reason is cost.  It cost us a lot more to develop and maintain
Video Librarian Plus than it did for the other programs we released as freeware.  We have to use and pay and outside developer to write the download module for us that connects to a website, downloads the movie information , parse that information and store it in a the Video Librarian database.  The  outside developer we use rates are much less than most for this type of work, but it still is expensive for a program that is generating few sales.

Since the initial release of the program with download capability we’ve had to have the download module re-written twice due to changes in the websites that we access.  Sales of the program have not been enough to cover the expense of the first rewrite and we had to pay for a second.  It seems like about every two years the web sites change forcing a new rewrite of the download module.

Last year while contemplating the fact that download module would eventually require a re-write again I made a business decision to discontinue the program.  This was a very hard decision to make as Video Librarian was the first commercial program I wrote and I really enjoy using the program and I’ve heard from many of you who continue to use and enjoy using the program, some as far back as 1986.

Before I decided to discontinue the program I looked into licensing the actual data used by allmovie.com and IMDB.com so I would not have to access the data from their web sites.  The minimum
yearly license fee  to obtain their databases were $12,000 and $15,000 respectively and again that was a yearly fee. So no way could we afford that.

About 3 weeks ago I started contemplating releasing Video/Movie Librarian Plus as a freeware program again.  I’d actually started working on some small enhancements and I was planning to release the program again with the disclaimer that if the download module stopped working it would not be  updated.  However the download module quite working prior to me releasing the program again.

I’ve talked to several people who said they plan to continue using the program even without the download module working.  Based on this I’ve decided that I will release the program as freeware in the future without the download module.  I expect to release the freeware version in the next few weeks.  I know this will not be satisfactory for most uses and many have asked me to recommend a replacement program.

I can’t recommend any particular program, but there appears to be many good looking shareware and freeware programs available.  There is a lot of competition out there and that is the reason for the significant decline in Video Librarian Plus sales.

If you click on the link below this will take you to the CNET download.com web site where you can find several movie cataloging programs.

http://download.cnet.com/windows/home-inventory-software/?tag=rb_content;main

If you find any particular movie cataloging program you like, feel free to comment here or let me know and I will post the information here.

At the very beginning of this blog I stated that we are business and need to turn a profit. You are probably wondering how we make money on freeware programs.  Well there are several ways we hope to generate money from our freeware programs:

1. Donations – we accept donations from users ofour freeware programs.  We received a grand total of 2 last year.
2. We have links on our web sites to amazon.com, Barnesand Noble and other online stores.  If you click on one of those links and place an order we get a small commission from the sale and it does not cost you any extra.  We also have links in most of our programs to these stores and if you click on that link and place an order we will receive a commission.
3. The Google ads displayed on our website.  If you click on one of those links we also receive a small commission for visiting the website of the ad.

Really if we could generate enough revenue from the above sources I would prefer to release all our programs as freeware, but that has not happened yet so get to clicking on those links.

Feel free to leave comments here or send me and email with your comments or questions.

We released Book Librarian Plus v5.57 today.  This update adds the ability for users to add additional MARC compatible online libraries to the library lookup database. To add a new library select List>Libraries from the main menu.  We also added one new report under the Report Designer.  This report will print a list of books sorted by book number.  You can download the current version from the link below:

http://www.turbosystems.com/blw32.exe

This update can be installed without affecting any of your existing data.

We released v7.02 on Apr 19 2011.  This was a minor update based on user suggestions. We made the main browse screen manually resizable and changed the way buttons re-sized when the screen was maximized. Household Register is now freeware and we’ve made several significant enhancements over the past few years.  We’ve added a new residence module, several new fields, updated the security module and made several bug fixes.  The current version will automatically update the data from older versions as far back as v5.0. We plan to add a graphing module in the future.

You can download the current version from http://www.turbosystems.com/hrw32.exe

The program is freeware but if you like to see the program continued and improved we welcome any and all donations.  You can make a donation by visting the following page:

http://turbosystems.com/house_buy.htm

If you need to new marc sites added to the search library database let us know.  We are working on an interface to allow users to update the marc sites database.

This blog is where TurboSystemsCo, LLC will write about their products and services.  This blog is dedicated to given you the latest news, tips and future plans about our products.

Welcome to the TurboSystemsCo, LLC blog.