Cppcheck and CollectionStudio

We always try to keep our software with high quality level as much as possible. The fault-tolerance computing comes first during development. Nevertheless high skilled professionals in programming cannot discover all possible problems in source code of the programs during development and testing. Therefore we have started to use a very nice semantic analyser – cppcheck.

Cppcheck is an static analysis tool for C/C++ code. Unlike C/C++ compilers and many other analysis tools it does not detect syntax errors in the code. Cppcheck primarily detects the types of bugs that the compilers normally do not detect. The goal is to detect only real errors in the code (i.e. have zero false positives).

In spite of there are limits of cppcheck, it shows rather good results in analysis. Just imagine this statistics:

Number of files scanned: 430
Scan duration: 1 hour and 3 minutes
Errors: 88
Warnings: 1026
Style warnings: 1017
Portability warnings: 159
Performance warnings: 424

During last weeks we have fixed following issues, reported by cppcheck:

• Mismatching allocation and deallocation
• Memory leak
• Common realloc mistake: 'm_pBuffer' nulled but not freed upon failure
• Unused variables declared;
• Unused private function
• Variable 't_bExistInList' is assigned a value that is never used
• The scope of the variable 'i' can be reduced
• Checking if unsigned variable 'a_nIndex' is positive is always true.

Errors: 6
Warnings: 672
Style warnings: 933
Portability warnings: 1
Performance warnings: 6

All these remaining issues were checked but not fixed, because they will neither enhance program flow nor program development. Anyway we will come back to this analyser time to time in future.

Posted by serge, December 20, 2011. Post has 0 comments.
analysis code CollectionStudio cppcheck errors warnings

Upcoming events in December

Today in the night, there was unscheduled network downtime. At result of technical issue during standard core infrastructure update DC1 (San Jose) went down for 30 min. Currently this situation is under control and our techs from Serverel Support investigate it to prevent same issues at the future.

In this time, our programmers work on the new update for CollectionStudio Online service – support of custom containers and several types of standard containers (such as wish list, for sale and exchange, and container for deleted collectibles). All this functionality will be then expanded into new section of our collectors’ web site – collectibles store, where you can sell, exchange collectibles with your friends. Containers functionality will be finished at first base version during next week.

From other side, the CollectionStudio will be also updated until the end of this 2011 year. The upcoming version will enclose several improvements in stability, more accurate drawing of main window, enhanced export and import etc.

Stay tuned.

Posted by serge, November 30, 2011. Post has 0 comments.
CS CSO news

South Sudan

JUBA, Monday 18 July 2011 – Mr. Elijah Malok the head of the Central Bank of South Sudan has said that the South Sudan Pound (SSP), the new currency of the Republic of South Sudan, was released into the market. Addressing the media at the bank’s premises, Mr. Malok also announced that the new currency will exchange 1:1 to the Sudan Pound (SDG) in the meantime but added that the value may change in the coming days based on market factors.

25 South Sudanese Pounds, 2011

By the way, the newer version of the CollectionStudio 3.63 will also contain an information in the inner database about this new country of the World.

Posted by andrew, July 28, 2011. Post has 0 comments.
25 pounds banknote pound South Sudan Sudan

Small meeting in Dresden

During last Saturday serge and our old user Catalin has a very calm and cheerful meeting in Dresden, Germany. Catalin is sand collector and he is our most active forum member. He has suggested a lot of improvements and remarks how our custom collectible feature in the CollectionStudio software can be more powerful, customizable and to be most suitable for particular collectibles. We have implemented his ideas, with only one remark – each feature should be suitable for any kind of collectible. That's why right now you can track collection of any type within CollectionStudio.

During this meeting in Dresden we have discussed following existing features and upcoming in nearest feature extensions:

• CollectionStudio Online feature;
• Using notebook camera for barcode scanning;
• GPS coordinate and map pointing;
• Map zooming feature;
• Customizability vs. usability;
• Different collectible types;
• Exchange of discrete materials and “duplicate” field usage;
• New services for collectors.

Unfortunately, we had not so much time to discuss more and more but we hope it was not our last personal meeting.

Posted by serge, October 28, 2010. Post has 1 comments.
collector features Germany Meetings

New collectionstudio.com design

Many people suggest very good enhancements and improvements in our collectors software and tools. Most of them are posted on our forums section and another part goes directly to our info@collectionstudio.com email address. Thank you. But right now, I want to open new discussion about new collectionstudio.com design. Here is the first version of the first prototype:

Hope together we will create a really convenient atmosphere both for dear collectors and for our hard working developers. I will keep you informed with temporary or next version of the design prototype...

Posted by serge, March 25, 2010. Post has 0 comments.
design site

Unicode symbols

On one software catalog site in Chine I have found a small description of our product: Collection Studio 是一款收藏记录软件，可以帮你记录你的收藏品的信息，并通过不同的视图来显示你所有或部分收藏品的特点。(共享软件). I hope there goes only positive remarks

But browsing that site, I thought about one small problem - CollectionStudio has no support of Unicode symbols, therefore we have no interface translation on Chinese nor in Persian or in Arabic language. Further more it is not so easy to use mixed language characters in document on PC with different installed or selected interface language. This makes inconvenience for many of our users. I believe that we will change this situation may be not in next version, but during this year for sure.

Stay tuned.

Posted by serge, January 19, 2010. Post has 2 comments.
Chinese language unicode

Country flags

Many our users suggest newer flags for omitted countries in our CollectionStudio database. We always try to add them in new release. But it takes some time. Therefore our users have suggested to add possibility to manage country flags within CollectionStudio without building of the new version.

This is rather good suggestion (and we will implemented this one day); But we think that CS should have more setup for work with collectibles comparing to the work with information properties of collectible parameters. Yes, it is more convenient to have a list of countries with flags, the view is more nice-looking, but these flags add no additional information by itself.

When CollectionStudio starts, we want that our users will concentrate on the list of their collectibles or on its sampling. They need lots of fetch tools, special sort procedures, export and import, synchronization, check lists, light boxes, grouping and so on. This is a aim of each CS versions during all years that CS is available online.

Hmm, what we are talking about?... country flags! Here they are:

A pie chart of all the colours used in all of the world's sovereign-state flags.

Using a list of countries generated by The World Factbook database, flags of countries fetched from Wikipedia (as of 26th May 2007) are analysed by a custom made python script to calculate the proportions of colours on each of them. That is then translated on to a piechart using another python script. The proportions of colours on all unique flags are used to finally generate a piechart of proportions of colours for all the flags combined.

Posted by serge, October 28, 2009. Post has 0 comments.
country CS flag

5 years cake

Our long celebration of the 5 years that Collection Studio is online comes to the end. For this special event we had a holiday cake in our small development team:

After the "cut" you will see a small cake animation (700k), created by our photoshop guru and designer Nadine...

Read more...

Posted by serge, October 27, 2009. Post has 2 comments.
5 years cake

5 years online

Today, we celebrate 5 online years of the Collection Studio. In 2004, 17 September, the first public version of the CollectionStudio 1.27 was uploaded on the www.collectionstudio.com web-site. Yes, it was five years ago:

At first steps the program was written as a special tool for amateur banknote and coins collectors and now according to lot of changes, users’ suggestions from the entire World, new features and tools, according to support additional collectibles, including custom collectible, CS became very powerful software. It became a Studio, not a regular software or second-rate application.

All this essential improvements were reached only using your support, my dear users. And it was very important for us, to hear from you every your opinion and suggestions. Therefore from today and all next 30 days, we will provide a special offer for every new customer of our collectors’ software. Just use the following coupon code: SAND-68J8.

Let’s celebrate this great day together!

Posted by serge, September 17, 2009. Post has 0 comments.
5 years offer release