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Avril
2005
La RVF - La Revue du Vin de France
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Le
Livre de Cave -
Très
Bien
Optez pour le menu
Six
menus (vins, dégustation, classement, millésime,
consommation, achats) qui vous permettront, par exemple, de gérer
vos endroits de stockage, d’enregistrer les classements de
revues comme La RVF. 50€ ou 25€+ 15€ pour les mises
à jour importantes.
Mes
commentaires:
Veuillez noter que la version en revue était
la version précédente. La nouvelle version 1.4
apporte des importantes améliorations (voir nouveautés).
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March
2005
by Kurt at
http://www.baycountryliquors.com/softlink.htm
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Test
results: Here we have a design that is very intuitive. By that
I mean it’s nicely design and simple to maneuver around the
various windows and functions. I like the way the main window
looks. It’s divided into three parts and each part can be
resized.
The top lists all the wines in the database,
or only selected wines by red, white, champagne, or other
characteristics. That’s nice.
The middle part lists
details for a wine highlighted in the top list. On top of the
middle part are several buttons to select additional information,
such as purchase details, consumption details, tasting details and
there are several more options.
The lower part of the
windows displays ideal drinking dates, purchase information, cost
and quantities, and the location of the bottle.
The author
has given this product much thought and it’s enjoyable to
use. Some of the functions I really like. One example is the ease
of entering several wines with the same label, but perhaps
different vintage or flavor. By selecting a “make a copy of
the wine” button the wine highlighted in the wine list is
duplicated. One can now simply change the vintage date or flavor
and we now have two wines of different characteristics.
One
little annoying item is that several pictorial buttons lose their
picture after the button is selected. The picture does return when
other functions are selected. Not a big deal, but meanwhile I’m
looking at a gray button not knowing what it does.
I do
have a big problem as well. When I entered a “new”
bottle into the database I was unable to select the Country and
Geographical Region. These values are pre-entered and selected
from a pull-down list. USA and California (or any other US region)
were not on the list and neither was Spain. I found just about any
other country in the world, including Ghana and Iraq. I was unable
to figure out whether there is an option to add these countries
and regions to the scroll-down list. This is obviously a huge
oversight and would keep me from purchasing this product. I did
send an inquiry to the author, but have not heard back as of this
writing.
Now, there are six basic reports that can be
created. I do like the details that are in each report and it
would be sufficient for me. The two reports that are likely to be
created most often I did not like. I fiddled around with it for a
longest time, but was unable to figure out how to fit the font
onto a page, using landscape format, without running off the
page. The most right side of the text on each line is simply
cut off because it doesn’t fit. This is not good and simply
must be corrected unless I have done something wrong and there is
always a first time for that.
Other functions allow for
detailed tracking of where a wine was purchased, a guestbook to
track events and who was attended, search functions to easily find
a wine and label printing.
A lifetime license costs US$84
and comes with a CD. I would always recommend purchasing software
on CD instead of downloading it. This way it is easy to reinstall
it on another computer if needed.
While I really like the
general layout, functions and features of this product I do NOT
recommend it at this time until the two major discrepancies are
corrected. The print function and the addition of Countries and
Regions that are not available at this time on the scroll-down
list.
My
comments:
The software reviewed was version 1.4, Responded
to the author on March 3 and resolved the issues by March 12th.
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Demo database of release 1.4 is in French (my mistake), so to find
the United States one has to reconfigure it by selecting the menu
option “File/Preferences” and re-selecting English
from the drop down list, Save the changes and close Preferences.
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Reports were not adapted to the US paper format (8.5 x 11 inches),
corrected versions of the affected reports have been sent to all
registered users in the US on March 12th.
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The buttons on the toolbar in grey indicate that they are not
available, by holding the mouse pointer over them a tooltip is
shown explaining what they do. In the next version (1.5) due to be
released in April/May 2005 will have much nicer buttons which will
show the image in black and white if the button is not active
(only working on Windows XP at this point, otherwise still a grey
button).
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