News

12th April, 2008

2.2.0 is finally released - too many things to list here, but the entire UI has been overhauled and reworked, with date pickers, better combo handling and many bugs fixed.

22nd February, 2008

2.1.1 is released. This release adds many cosmetic improvements and fixes to many areas of the application. The icons have all been overhauled to look a lot better, form layouts have been tweaked to get the most space where it is needed. Media handling is now a lot better and whole directories can be imported/exported. The main area of improvement is database handling - you can longer have ASM in a broken state where it will not start due to a misconfigured database. The days of manually entering JDBC URLs are gone as well, to be replaced with a friendly database selector that will not allow you to continue until it has checked that the connection is valid and actually holds an ASM database.

In addition to these changes, I've fixed a lot of niggling little things people have let me know about, so this is well worth upgrading to.

10th February, 2008

2.1.0 is released. This release adds a Spanish translation, much improved performance and many bug fixes.

A new intelligent matching system will auto filter breeds based on your data, adoption donations will default based on previous donations for that type of animal.

The Windows installer has been overhauled (no more DOS boxes popping up) and much of the codebase/build system refactored for ease of maintenance. Media files can now be attached to waiting list entries, animal images can be included in custom reports now and custom reports can disable the header/footer and output of criteria. Mac OSX integration has also been improved.

Note that the code layout has changed, so there is no jar file upgrade (hence a major revision version). You will have to rerun the installer to upgrade (do not uninstall your current ASM first, just run the new installer).

14th January, 2008

New features have been added to the sheltermanager.com hosting site. Accounts can be managed online now, along with information about database backups, etc. A new automatic publisher will publish your animals to free hosted space on sheltermanager.com. See my example.

1st January, 2008

Happy new year everyone!

Some new things have been uploaded - there's a beta release of 2.0.23, which features some PetFinder fixes, owner criteria fixes, rabies tag searching and better integration with charts.

Thanks to Chris Thomas for mailing me a patch for 2.0.23 (which is now included), which greatly improves integration with MacOSX.

I've uploaded my conversion code with some examples for people who want to convert their old data from Excel as CSV files. Note that this is pretty rough and ready and you'll need to have some programming skills to modify it to your needs.

30th June, 2007

ASM now has a new publisher for 1-800-Save-A-Pet.com. Thanks to Bill Wheeler of Mountain Home Pets and Abbie at 1-800-Save-A-Pet.com for supplying me with the information necessary to do this.

This is now available in the new 2.0.22 release. I'll also be updating CafePress with a CD Master of this version as the current one is now a little out of date.

25th February, 2007

2.0.18 is now available with the bug fixes rolled in. This fixes all icon problems, bugs with the In/Out and Not-Microchipped reports and a few other minor issues.

24th February, 2007

Looks like I missed a couple of spots where icon names needed updating. They shouldn't cause any problems, but I've fixed them and updated the release jar to 2.0.17.1. If you've downloaded an installer, update the asm.jar file to this latest one.

It would appear that 2.0.17 in general was a bit premature as a few people have reported other bugs. These are now fixed in a 2.0.18 development release available for download now.

23rd February, 2007

2.0.17 is released, this is mainly a maintenance release, cleaning up a few bugs people reported. It also adds an amd64 Linux build, so you people with nice fast amd machines don't have run ASM in 32-bit mode.

11th January, 2007

I've finally managed to get a professional CD sorted. You can buy ASM CDs here for a nominal donation.

October, 2006

Do you run a clinic at your shelter? Adam Spencer (the guy who set the initial requirements for ASM) has turned his hand to writing open source software and produced a full-fledged vet management application - go check it out at http://evette.homeip.net. Features medical stocks/controls, surgery/appointment tracking and a lot more.

25th September, 2006

2.0.16 is released. This one is more of a cleanup and rationalising of some things, improving support for OpenOffice 2, better default templates and saner defaults for new users.

4th September, 2006

2.0.15 is now available - this one fixes the last of the v2 rewrite bugs and adds support for BSD and other Unix variants. I'd recommend everyone upgrade as soon as possible.

15th July, 2006

2.0.12 is released. Due to problems at SourceForge, this is not a complete release and only contains a replacement asm.jar file - you should download 2.0.11 and install that before upgrading the asm.jar file if you are a new ASM user.

In addition, a new SwingWT has been released and is included here, this is a replacement for the swingwt.jar file in your ASM/lib directory and fixes the grey background and truncated file chooser bugs under Windows.

2.0.14 (for superstitious reasons) will be released next week when normal service is resumed with proper installers.

2nd July, 2006

Half way through the first rental term on the dedicated server running FindMeAPet.com and things aren't looking good. So far only 8 shelters have signed up and of those, only two are publishing animals. There's 3 months left to go and it's looking like I'm going to pull the plug. I'm not going to waste any more of my own money trying to help shelters who clearly don't want it.

6th April, 2006

2.0.6 has been released, this fixes another pile of bugs reported recently (the move to 2.0.0 involved a lot of rewriting so unfortunately there were always going to be bugs - on the upside I think that's the last of them).

It also adds support for FindMeAPet.com - a new site I've started to allow shelters to publish their adoptable animals and allow members of the public to find the animals they want online. It's currently UK, US and Canada only, but if anyone from another country wants the service there, contact me about it - we can have it up and running in a few days.

27th March, 2006

An interim 2.0.2 ASM has been released. This fixes a couple of bugs from the previous 2.0.1 release. Copy the asm_2.0.2.jar archive over asm.jar in your ASM installation directory.

22nd March, 2006

ASM 2.0.1 is out, this release includes bugfixes from the 2.0.0 beta and some improvements to OpenOffice handling (and adds support for AbiWord).

12th March, 2006

ASM 2 beta is now available from the development builds section. Note that a new install is required. While it doesn't look much different from ASM 1.x, it has been largely rewritten to allow much greater flexibility for future releases (and to make translation efforts easier) and most importantly, database portablity - ASM will happily work with HSQL, MySQL and PostgreSQL (and allow you to freely copy between any of them via System->Copy Database)

I recommend you try it out before unleashing it on your live data. To do this:

Download the appropriate ASM installer for your platform
Rename $HOME/.asm (typically Documents and Settings/YourUser/.asm on Windows) to something else to prevent ASM 2 interfering with it (you can rename it back later when you want to use a previous version).
Install the new ASM in a location separate to your normal ASM
Start up the new ASM and when prompted pick "Create new local database". This gives you a scratch database you can play with while testing the new release.
When you're done, rename $HOME/.asm to something else and your previous one back again to use the client.

4th March, 2006

ASM 2.0.0 is nearing release - I'm currently looking for beta testers so if you want to try it first, drop me a line! ASM 2 has many improvements, including:

Out-of-the-box HSQLDB support (simplifies and shrinks the Windows installer and guarantees new users can get up and running without problems)
Support for PostgreSQL as well as MySQL 5
Support for ALL versions of Windows (and Linux/MacOSX/BSD).
Support for MacOSX/Intel
Properly tokenised resources to ease translations
Full Dutch translation (care of Irv Elshoff)
DBFS issues all sorted
Typed business layer gives speed increases and eases plugin writing
Compatible with GIJ/GCJ 4
OpenOffice 2 support
Database conversion support between backends
Many bugfixes

5th August, 2005

Time for ASM 1.40! - note that if you didn't upgrade to 1.39 then you still need to import your media. This is purely a bug fix release, curing MacOSX display problems, some 64-bit Linux performance issues, broken icons, Linux PNG support (so David's icons look much nicer) and many minor bugs squashed.

24th May, 2005

I'm back from holiday and had an excellent time! Once again, thanks to Gary and Jane of nwrr for their hospitality on the way down (and it's nice to put faces to names after all this time!).

If anyone's interested, I stuck up a few photos here

3rd May, 2005

1.39 is finally out - I made the decision to get it out today so there's at least 2 days for anyone to report anything unpleasant and for it to be fixed before I go away.

Note that so much has changed with 1.39 that you cannot download a replacement jar - you should rerun the appropriate client installer for your platform (don't forget to untick the server box if you are using Windows and already have an ASM server setup on your machine).

Note that you will still need to reimport your old media after updating to 1.39 (see instructions below).

21st April, 2005

The screenshots were a bit old, so here are some new ones.

14th April, 2005

New dev build is up...

Thanks to David Rolfe, we have some improved icons in ASM (you can see them in the latest dev build) - these are a great improvement. There are a couple of bugs we have to work out on PNG alpha transparency (at least under GTK2) so don't worry that some have black backgrounds.

I'd also like to thank Mike Streeter for the first bit of contributed source code I've had for the core application - thanks to him we now have donation document/receipt generation (and I couldn't resist consolidating owner and adoption donations into one logical place either).

Since we're on the subject of thanks, Asoka Desilva has also put in a lot of good work and completely rewritten the Mac installer as well as helping me debug the Mac version.

Upgrading to 1.39

For those of you upgrading to 1.39 (currently in dev, but will go stable soon), note that ASM no longer needs the media server as everything is now stored in the database. You will need to import your old media.

To import old media, go to the new System->Media Files menu option and hit the "Import From FS" button at the end. You will be prompted to select a directory. Windows users should select C:\Program Files\ASM\Xitami\ftproot\asm, Linux users /home/asm and MacOSX users /Users/asm
Note that when the time comes, you MUST upgrade by running the appropriate installer for your client - a new asm.jar will not be distributed for 1.39 stable.

7th March, 2005

The first 1.39 beta release is out with a number of extra features, including better video capture support, owner thumbnails, extra sysinfo on Help->About and a few other bits and pieces.

I have decided to abandon the SourceForge support trackers. I've been considering this for some time and I've done it for the following reasons:

Trackers don't really promote discussion as other people don't go out of their way to see them. By directing these items to the discussion forums or mailling list, more people can comment on RFEs/bugs and help answer support requests.
New users who install the software, can't be bothered to read the FAQ or manual, have a problem and post a bug, feature request, support request and a forum entry all saying "URGENT, NEED HELP" (not to mention personally emailling me). I am tired of closing these and this way others can correct these rude individuals on the forums.
Trackers look far too much like a TODO list and I get stressed about getting items done. This is not fair given that this is a spare-time project which I ultimately do to help animals (and fund myself). The items that were outstanding have been moved to the source control based ASM TODO list in CVS (they have not been forgotten about and will appear in 1.39)

Hope everyone understands.

23rd February, 2005

1.38 is finally released. There are still a pile of RFEs I want to add, but right now, the current dev build was so stable I wanted to put out a stable release before breaking everything again with the new round of features. Besides, it's been months since the last stable and many people were missing out on new features.

8th February, 2005

A new development build with a couple of cool new features:

Owner Criteria Matching: This allows you to enter criteria for animals owners might like to adopt. You can then run the new matching report (Reports->Inventories->Owner Criteria Search) to produce a list of matching animals for all owners requiring this service (the active flag is ticked on their criteria tab).
Not For Adoption Flag: Finally, you can tick a box on the animal details screen to flag it as unavailable for adoption. It will then be ignored by the publisher (there is no way to override this setting from the publisher either - you have to untick the box if you want to make the animal available again).
Owners can be vets: There is a new vets entity type which will form part of some new RFE's for the next development build.

Enjoy!

10th January, 2005

Happy new year! I've just put up a new development build that adds lots of friendly features for Windows users having trouble with missing database servers and things. It also adds support back in for Windows 95, 98, SE and ME (although they are very poor and you really should use something else.

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