What's New?

March 6th 2010

Added a visual indicator on the add page when entering an items barcode manually. It will display the country of issue for the barcode and will notify if the country is currently supported by Boks. Planning on adding an barcode mapping-database, which maps popular items between either USA and UK with the respective countries, such as Norway, Sweden, etc.

The count on number of items found when doing a search is now displayed correctly.

March 5th 2010

Gallery is open! You can now share your catalogs with friends, just edit the properties on your catalogs and make sure the visibility is set to Everyone.

If you want to share the link with your friends, use the following URL: http://www.intheboks.com/gallery.aspx?user=USERNAME.

March 4th 2010

Small improvements and bug fixes. Fixed some issues with out-of-browser authentication and loading.

March 2nd 2010

Removed the anonymous (preview) feature, this created some confusion after the last update. In the beta period, there is no need for the preview feature as all users are required to authenticate.

When adding new items, the selected items will be unchecked after adding. This avoids confusion where you re-add the same items twice.

Themes are working again!

Added some thanks in the Boks About dialog (accessible in the Settings page).

Mouse scroll will jump a full page for every step now, previously it moved too slow, now it moves too fast. There are unfortunlately no in-between for Silverlight. Might replace the scrolling feature with another implementation in the future.

March 1st 2010

Anonymous catalog and items are currently not working. This will be fixed in a later release.

Background theme is no longer working, will be fixed in a future release.

February 28th 2010

We're very sorry about the delayed updates. We have been very busy trying to integrate authentication with Windows Live ID, but unfortunlately this effort has not yet materialized. Here are some of the updates that has been made available today:

Extended the lifetime for the persistence cookie, which is stored on your computer when you seleted the "Keep me signed in" option. The cookie is stored for 90 days and is renewed for another 90 days, if you access Boks again after 45 days has passed. Accessing Boks from a shared and public computer? Make sure you uncheck the "Keep me signed in" option.

Local Cache support has been added, this should improve the performance and user experience of Boks.

Known Bugs: The first time you select an item in any of your catalogs, the rating stars are not binded properly. This is only at the first item you select.

Sometimes the item count will be wrong, clicking the Refresh button (at the bottom) will reload the catalogs from the service and update the item count correctly.

January 28th 2010

We're working on adding support for the Isolated Storage feature in Silverlight. This means Boks will cache all your catalogs and items on your local machine. This should greatly improve the User Experience of Boks.

January 27th 2010

Edit catalogs allows you to rename your catalogs and configure the privacy level (Private, Friends, Everyone). The privacy level controls the visibility of your catalogs in the gallery feature.

January 25th 2010

Added visibility of borrowed and lended status, yellow and green overlay. The visual effect of this will improve in the future.

Tooltip on items has been added and visibile when you hover. Label names in thumbnail mode (the only mode currently supported) has been removed.

January 24th 2010

Rating of items is added, allowing you to rate your own items. The customer rating from Amazon is also shown in the details pane for any new items you add from now on.

When you click the + link to add a new item, the item type will default to the type of which you have selected in the Collections view. This means if you're currently watching your movie collection and click to add, the item type of Movie will be selected by default.

January 23th 2010

Added status for Own, Want and Lent or Borrowed. We used the past tense for Lent and Borrowed, as oppose to Lending and Borrowing.

Improved the visibility of controls when no catalog and no item is selected.

January 21st 2010

Added tab control for the details of an item. The details of an item is still not fully functional, we're still working on it.

Sorting the list items is now possible with a new combobox.

January 20th 2010

Item titles are now limited to 30 characters, if the title is longer it's cut and "..." is appended to the end. This should make the list view less cluttered when you have items with very long names. Should this be a setting, or is that low value and would clutter the settings page?

Items such as 24, 23, 300 was recognized as possible barcode numbers and hence was not possible to search for. Any length of number input below 10 characters will no longer be recognized as special numbers, but instead title of items.

January 19th 2010

Password requirements has been lowered. We take your security and privacy seriously, though we realize that Boks is (currently) not used to store sensitive information. Your password is still stored in a non-reversible hash, but the requirements has been lowered to be minimum 6 characters and there is no longer a requirement to use at least one non-alphanumerical character. We hope this improves the usability of our service. Our advise is to use as strong password as possible.

While we try to do small improvements as often as possible to the client side of the Boks service, there is a backend system that requires attention for user management, exception handling, invitation system and a lot more. We're busy developing everything and making it into a service that you can enjoy.

January 18th 2010

SSL certificate installed, we will require HTTPS communication for all authenticated requests in the future (there is currently an issue with loading photos of the items when HTTPS is active, so we don't require HTTPS at the moment). This is for your own privacy. This is up for discussion, as there might be occasions when HTTPS is a problem, if you have any opinions on this, please leave a comment. This policy secures our service from attacks such as session-hijacking, making it harder for anyone to steal your session.

Fixed the handling of item prices, should now display the proper list price for all new items. Existing items will continue to have the old prices, until the reload metadata functionality is implemented.

January 17th 2010

Important notice: Fixed a bug that re-created catalogs upon adding a new catalog. The effect of this is that items was deleted from the existing catalogs. We're sorry about this bug and hope it's forgiveable as we're stilling in early beta testing. If your catalog reports a count number, but does not show any items when you select it, you've been hit by this bug. Please re-add your items and refresh the browser, this should then display the correct item count.

Added support for searching Amazon UK. New settings option available for default provider.

Thumbnail slider works as expected again.

Books can be added by writing the barcode into the search field, e.g. 9780312877828 (The Spike by Damien Broderick). All book barcodes starts with 978, other barcodes are not yet supported.

Password reset functionality is added, making it possible for users to reset their passwords.

January 14th 2010

Thumbnail View is back and this time it's fully functional. Update: It only worked in Silverlight 4 beta, not in Silverlight 3. Will investigate and fix this problem in next update. The slider is available when listing existing item and looking at the search results. Thumbnail sizes goes from 16 to 512 pixels. If you'd like this behavior any different, please leave a comment in the feedback form.

Improved the initial loading of catalogs. There is a slight problem with Boks running on the desktop for too long and the user gets signed out. If you click catalogs and no items appear, please restart Boks. This is a known bug and will be fixed in a future release.

Januar 13th 2010

Fixed the bug with Out-of-Browser error message when adding item (clicking the + button).

Added support for adding items when there are no catalog of that specific type present. A new catalog is created automatically. When adding items of an type that has multiple catalogs, there will appear an catalog dialog where you can pick where you want the item to be added.

Removed controls and elements in the UI which was non-functional, to help reduce the confusion for beta testers.

January 12th 2010

Signup for beta testers is now public. Users will be given access in the order they signup. Users who receive the invitation code, can create accounts using the signup page.

January 10th 2010

Added support for auto-update when Boks is installed locally. Right-click in the browser when Boks is running, allows you to install a shortcut on the desktop and program files. The local running copy of Boks, will automatically check for updates and inform you when an update has happened. Boks will only inform you that it has been updated and the next time it starts, it's already up-to-date.

Running version of Boks is now available from the Settings dialog.

Delete items is now implemented, making it possible to delete items from your catalogs.

Improvements to the search query, should now return better results than before.

January 9th 2010

Improved the settings dialog, adding support for backgrounds, sounds and startup view ("home page"). Added the first sounds to the application, some simple clicking sounds on different places. Prepared Boks for future theme support.

January 7th 2010

Updated and streamlined the UI. Renamed some of the menu options and links. The following items have been added as UI-prototypes which are non-functional:

  • Marketplace - new area in Boks. There will be a popular items list, which aggreates the top items added to Boks by all the users. You can also navigate and find new content you want to buy.
  • Settings - allows users to change their settings, details about Boks. Export and import of collections will be available in this section.

January 6th 2010

First beta users got access to the Boks service. Feedback form was made available, allowing users to give feedback on the service.

Fixed many bugs and improved the loading of items. Added more progress indicators when Boks is loading data.