Comic Book Collector

Entertainment has evolved into various forms like clips and audio recordings, with some older ones still highly active even over the web. The subject in question are comic books that gave birth to fictional heroes that still roam the virtual streets to fight crime. Enthusiasts can use applications such as Comic Book Collector to keep a well-organized database of items you own.

Running the application fills your screen with the main window, which makes a rather poor impression due to elements that are not properly distributed. You can switch to a smaller window, but the impression doesn't change. However, this doesn't affect practicality, with fields and overall design being rather simple and intuitive.

There are a few examples to show you what can be accomplished. You can either include them in your collection and just add new titles, create a new one from scratch, or simply load an existing one if it's found under the CBC format.

It only takes a little while to set up all details to any type of comic book. This is because the application doesn't ask for the actual item or its location, but rather lets you add entries based on several fields. As such, you need to write down name, category, publisher, series, artist, writer, editor, purchase date, price and a few more.

Details are saved in real time, with the possibility to quickly sort through them just as you would in a phone book, by selecting the initial character from a list. However, this only highlights the first entry, with better sorting being automatically done in tabs based on category.

You can also attach a cover image of common formats like GIF, JPG and BMP, but only one picture can be added per comic. It would have been useful at least to be able to create some sort of link to the actual comic to open it directly if found in a digital format.

There's also the possibility to print labels on a sheet of paper in order to cut them to fit on audio cassettes, business cards, diskettes and a few more, with corresponding size indicated. If your collection is large enough, you can generate reports based on any of the fields you fill in, or create a custom template.

Taking everything into consideration, we can say that Comic Book Collector doesn't really live up to expectations and is nothing more than what you can also write down in a plain spreadsheet. Although you quickly get the hang of it, the visual design is pretty rough, while the limited number of images you can add and variety of options quickly makes you look for alternatives.