As mentioned in an earlier post, Home Inventory is celebrating its tenth year since its initial release in 2005. We’re still in the first month of the new year and have a pair of Home Inventory-related releases for you: an update to Home Inventory and a brand new mobile helper app called Home Inventory Remote Entry.
Remote Entry is replacing Home Inventory Photo Remote. We’ll go into more detail about that later in this post.
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Home Inventory 3.3
Since the release of iOS 7 in the latter part of 2013, we’ve received a number of requests to bring its flatter, more minimal style to Home Inventory. We had an inkling that the update to OS X in the following year would bring some significant changes to the look of the user interface, so we decided to hold off on making any significant changes to Home Inventory’s look until OS X 10.10 was released so we could get a better idea of the direction Apple was headed.
Sure enough, Yosemite (OS X 10.10) heralded a brand new look to the Mac and our latest update to Home Inventory fits in nicely. New features and bug fixes in this update include:
- New, Yosemite-style user interface.
- Brand new free helper app, Home Inventory Remote Entry, for adding items to your inventory using your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch. Includes an offline mode that lets you add items without being connected to Home Inventory via WiFi. This app replaces the Home Inventory Photo Remote app.
- Share item information, photos, receipts, and file attachments via email, Twitter, and elsewhere using Yosemite’s share sheets (Yosemite only).
- Rewritten built-in image editor now displays within the main application window instead of a separate window.
- Rewritten image capture for adding photos to items using your Mac’s built-in camera now displays within the main application window instead of a separate window.
- Fixed a bug where the number of items shown in the status bar for a collection with a valuation method of “Same as the price/value given to the collection” is incorrect.
- Fixed a bug that resulted in a security sandbox violation when trying to update older version 1 Home Inventory/Stockpile databases to the new format.
Home Inventory 3.3 is a free update for existing customers and is available on the Mac App Store. Customers that purchased Home Inventory outside of the Mac App Store, you can download Home Inventory 3.3 by clicking here.
Home Inventory Remote Entry
Two of the most common feature requests we receive deal with Home Inventory Photo Remote. A lot of people have asked for the ability to enter items using Photo Remote without having to be connected to their Macs over WiFi and for a Universal version that ran natively on the iPad as well as the iPhone.
We did those things and more in the form of a brand new helper app for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch called Home Inventory Remote Entry. Use it to wander around your home, storage unit, or anywhere else, and build out your inventory. You can create new items, take photos of your items and add receipts. You can also add new locations, collections, categories, conditions, and tags.
Remote Entry replaces Home Inventory Photo Remote for Home Inventory beginning with the new version 3.3 update. Unlike Photo Remote, you do not have to be connected to your Mac via WiFi to enter new items. The items you create offline will be added to your inventory the next time you connect to Home Inventory over your home’s WiFi network.
You can also scan information from QR codes, Aztec codes, and other 1D & 2D barcodes directly into item fields. This is helpful for entering serial numbers, asset tags, and other machine readable information quickly.
When connected to your inventory over WiFi, you can also edit existing items and use Remote Entry’s built-in barcode scanner to add items to your inventory by looking up their UPC/EAN barcode online.
Remote Entry even remembers the custom fields, field layouts, categories, collections, locations, conditions, and tags from the last inventory you connected to over WiFi so they are available the next time you add items in Offline Mode.
Home Inventory Remote Entry is available free of charge in the App Store and requires an iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch running iOS 7.1 or later.
Goodbye, Photo Remote
Home Inventory Photo Remote is a special app for us. Despite the awkward name, it was this app that first caught Apple’s attention and led to a feature for Home Inventory on the Mac App Store. It was crucial in transitioning Binary Formations from a nice hobby into a real business.
We had originally planned on enhancing Photo Remote to do many of the things mentioned above, but the more we thought about it, the more it became obvious that a completely new mobile app was needed. Some of these features required significant changes to Home Inventory on the Mac as well and it did not make sense to have a Photo Remote app that operated in completely different ways depending on whether or not it was communicating with an older or newer version of Home Inventory.
We are keeping Photo Remote in the App Store so it is available for those who still use older versions of Home Inventory, but we won’t be adding any new features beyond what is already there.
Reviews
We don’t put popups in our apps that ask for reviews. Quite frankly, we find them annoying. But that doesn’t change the fact that reviews are an important component in an app’s longterm success, so here’s our plea: If you like the new update to Home Inventory and are willing to take the time to leave a review or a rating in the Mac App Store, we would really appreciate it. The same goes for Remote Entry. It would help us tremendously if you felt compelled to leave a positive rating or review for it in the App Store.
If you don’t like our software, we want a chance to make you happy with it. Please head on over to our support page and send us an email and we will do our best to help you out.