Magic Bake (and Book) Shop

Thanks to those of you who have provided feedback. I’m still working on a couple of issues that I can’t seem to reproduce, but the next release will be available soon.

Fixes include:

• Improved handling of different currencies, no more adding apples and oranges, or euros and dollars.
• Improved column formatting
• Other cleanup and efficiency improvement (internal changes)

New or greatly improved features include:

• Multi-file selection on import (ie, bulk import)
• Simpler selection criteria for reports and charts

In development which may or may not make it to this next release:

• Pop-up calendar for selection by date range
• Year-over-year, quarter-over-quarter and month-over-month comparisons
• Manual sales record input (eg for a reprint sale, etc.)
• User color choice on graphs and charts
• New input formats, including Google eBooks, Comixology and Graphicly. (The latter two are digital comic distributers, and their report formats offer a bit more challenge than the others so far.)

Additional documentation is in the works. I plan to have a User Manual out soon, and of course it will be available as an ebook. Cheers.

Any glaring omissions or deficiencies in the above feature list? Let me know.

The latest development test version is available for download. The documentation has not yet been updated, but the process is the same as before: download the executable JAR file, click it and go.

Fixed: scrollbar problems, import speed, some file format issues, some file chooser inconsistencies

New: charts (two kinds), restrict view (and charting) by title, named exports, ad hoc queries (for database experts)

See the comments for more detail on the new features, known issues, etc.

Give it a try and let me know if you have any problems. Also please let me know if there are any particular charts or analyses or other functions you’d like added. Thanks.

I’ve spent time this week developing different subsystems of the MagicBakeshop software. The most visually interesting is the data charting capability, here’s an example (don’t get hung up on the color choice, that can change):

Test chart: Title sales by vendor

The data selection is much improved, and the scrollbar problem on the main window is fixed.

Those of you with many titles or a lot of sales reports will be happy to know that I’ve sped up the data import: on my 1 GHz system it will load 1000 records in about 1/6th of a second. Got a million records? Less than a minute. Of course you can’t actually display a million records in the panel (unless you’ve got a lot more RAM than I do), so the view will limit itself to a couple of thousand records. Queries on the data, though, will work on the full million. Or more; there’s no set upper limit.

My task now is to integrate the disparate pieces back into the main program and package it up for you to play with. That should be done this weekend, stay tuned.

Got any other features you’d like to see or particular data queries you need to run? Let me know.

Edit to add: Another example of the kind of charts the graphing package is capable of.

Tester Steve C. ran into a problem loading a CreateSpace report file into MagicBakeshop — something that had worked fine in testing.

It turns out that CreateSpace reports come in (at least) two different formats, a shorter form using 8 data columns, and the detailed report with 17 columns, with the extra columns mixed in. This confused the importer.

This is easily fixed. The next (0.3) test release will be able to figure out the difference and import accordingly. Indeed, I think the detailed format is preferred because of the extra data, but it’ll handle both.

By the way, can anyone explain what “Unit Fees” are and their relationship to List Price and Royalty on the CS detailed report? Thanks.