GCstar is delivered under the terms of the GNU General Public License It can be used on any operating systems on which gtk2-perl is available. It has primarily been tested on GNU/Linux systems (used to develop it) but also on Microsoft Windows .

GCstar is a free open source application for managing your collections. Detailed information on each item can be automatically retrieved from the internet and you can store additional data, such as the location or who you've lent it to. You may also search and filter your collection by many criteria.

There is some documentation for translators that explains how new languages could be added or existing ones, completed.

Current version is 1.7.1 . A mailing list lets you know when new versions are published. You may subscribe to it on the GCstar-release mailing list information page .

News

13 March 2016: Registration to the forum open

I made a few changes to the forum, and I'm going to experiment them. So the registration is again possible. I'll see how it goes in the next few days to decide if that's viable or not.



If you need to contact me, I'd still suggest to use my email address instead as I will check it more regularly than the forum, at least for the moment.

09 March 2016: Version 1.7.1 released

Here are the main changes contained in this version.





When generating statistics, they can be grouped per dates.

Export to GCstar Viewer generates a collection that loads faster in image mode (requires GCstar Viewer 2.10 or above)

Display totals for numeric fields when the list is displayed in detailed mode.

Updated languages: Catalan, Czech, German, Greek, Swedish.

Bugs fixed in the application and in the plugins to fetch information from websites.

You can also read the full changelog for 1.7.1.

29 February 2016: Back in business (but I need your help too)

Hello everyone,



After a long period of really low activity, I'm trying to do my best to spend again some time on GCstar. A lot of personal and professional stuff happened in the meantime that kept me busy. I still don't have as much time as I used to be, but at least I'll focus on saving some of this time for this software that I never forgot about.



First, I'll go through all the messages I received and to which ones I didn't reply. It may take some time and I ask you to accept my apologies for this delay. Don't hesitate to send me again an email you may have sent to me and that has been left with no replies. I think that in 1 or 2 weeks, I should be done with the catch-up of emails, but I can't promise I won't miss a message (or even that I may have deleted it by mistake). So that's the first thing I may need from you, some gentle reminders that you sent me a message.



Then, I need to think of what to do with the forums. At some point, it became unmanageable and I was just spending time fighting spam instead of reading actual messages. I won't have time to take care of that. So I see 2 options here:

- Keeping the same forum, but with some moderators that would follow it regularly

- Creating a new forum, at the same place, or hosted somewhere else, that could have a good anti-spam module



The forum you see here is based on an old version of PunBB that I customized to have it integrated to the current website. I wouldn't be able to do the same at the moment with a more recent version. So the 1st option could be the easiest one, at least as a first step. If you would like to take care of this moderation, please contact me by email.



And, starting as soon as possible, I'll also work on the software itself. I'll start with the bugs you may have found and with new features. Some changes have actually already been made on the development version, but they haven't been released yet. So the first step could be to just release it after I'll manage to identify exactly what are the changes.



I hope I'll post some messages here soon with more concrete updates.

01 September 2012: Version 1.7.0 released

Here are the main changes contained in this version.





New translation added: Chinese (Simplified) made by 林雪凡.

A new panel has been added below the list of items to easily change the settings.

It's now possible to define default values for the fields when adding a new item to a collection.

Image mode has been improved with slight animations and a popup window with more information.

Bugs fixed in the application and in the plugins to fetch information from websites.

You can also read the full changelog for 1.7.0.

01 September 2012: Model for collections of music lessons has been submitted

A user of GCstar, lesagnic, submitted on the forum a new model to manage your collections of music lessons on CD or DVDs. It can be downloaded from this post:



http://forums.gcstar.org/viewtopic.php?id=3137



The message is in French, but the collection has been translated also in English. Just download the attachment there and extract it where GCstar is installed. It would be safer to do that in a dedicated installation as advised by lesagnic. More information here if you want to create another installation of GCstar:



http://wiki.gcstar.org/en/test

04 March 2012: New skins for image mode by arnymateo

arnymateo created new skins you can use for the list in image mode. They can be found here with some instructions how to install them:



http://forums.gcstar.org/viewtopic.php?id=2336

26 November 2011: Version 2.9 of GCstar Viewer for Android released

This version fixes the problem that was reported by some users with Android Honeycomb (3.1) used on Asus Transformer and other devices. Version 2.8 didn't start on them before this change.

11 November 2011: Problems with Ubuntu 11.10

Some users reported some performance issues after they upgraded to Ubuntu 11.10. This happens when using image mode for the list, with a background picture.



This is not directly related to GCstar and has been reported to Ubuntu maintainers:



https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour … bug/889019



If you have a similar problem with another distribution, please report it as it may help to find how to fix it. More information about the issue is also available in that topic:



http://forums.gcstar.org/viewtopic.php?id=2066

10 July 2011: Version 1.6.2 released

Here are the main changes contained in this version.



New option to change the way items are sorting while in image view.

New plugin to import many items with a barcode scanner, or from an Android device. More information about using a barcode scanner.

Country field in movies collection is now a list, allowing multiple countries.

Bugs fixed, some of them thanks to unclepetros.

You can also read the full changelog for 1.6.2.

09 July 2011: No more Windows version until someone handles them

While trying to prepare the next release, I lost many time trying to prepare the Windows version, fighting with my Windows installation that decided to stop working.



It should be still possible to use GCstar from the sources on Windows, but unless someone really take care of being responsible for it, it may stop working in the future.



As this version was also using an old version of Gtk2, there is no point for the moment in making efforts to maintain it. If someone wants to handle it, feel free to let me know through this topic. I can explain you what I was doing before to release it. But be prepared to also search a lot on your own to have something more maintainable than how it worked before.



I was using Ant (within Eclipse) and NSIS to generate the installer. If you know these tools, as well as ActiveState Perl, and ideally how to use Gtk2 and perl-gtk2 on Windows, you may be a very good candidate as the new responsible of the Windows release.

10 April 2011: I (Tian) am still unavailable

For professional reasons, I moved to another country. For the moment, I am still not in a definitive place. I know it has been a long time without a new release, but I hope I'll be able to do one on next month (understand: I hope I'll have a computer, internet access and spare time on next month).

25 August 2010: Version 1.6.1 released

Here are the main changes contained in this version.



CSV plugin now allows you to select which field to use to search for internet results.

Graphs generated from statistics are smoothed.

New default collections: TV shows (series) and Computer Software collection (written by Qoolman).

Bugs fixed.

You can also read the full changelog for 1.6.1.

03 August 2010: Version 1.6.0 released

Here are the main changes contained in this version.



Generation of statistics.

New chinese (traditional) translation.

New default collections: Smart cards

Dramatic speed up of loading collections when hi-resolution pictures are used.

Language strings are now collection dependant.

Added Update button to items, which refreshes the current item's details from the web page it was originally fetched from.

Fields with a history have an auto-completion feature when user starts to enter text

Lots of new skins and skin remakes

There is more information on the page about GCstar 1.6.0.

25 July 2010: GCstar Viewer is on Android Market

GCstar Viewer is now available on the Android Market. This is a new version compared to the one previously announced. Here are its new features:





Image mode for list of items

Collection and pictures may be stored in one single zipped file (.gcz)

New search with suggestions

Button to open the page information was fetched from

Previous and Next button in menu when an item is shown

07 July 2010: GCstar Viewer for Android

A new application was just delivered for Android users, it's GCstar Viewer.



As its names implies, you can only use it to display a collection you created using GCstar. You cannot modify it. It can be downloaded from the following link, directly on your smartphone.



http://gcstar.org/viewer/AndroidGCstar.apk



To use it, you need to copy your collection (.gcs file) with a folder containing the pictures to the SD card of your phone. The constraint is that you should use relatives paths. Next version of GCstar will contain an export plugin that will do the job for you, whatever the settings are. Its documentation is available on this page:



http://wiki.gcstar.org/en/gcstar_viewer



I hope you will find useful. Please let me know by replying to this message. But please keep in mind I began to learn creating Android applications 4 days ago. So don't be too rude ;-)