Fountain Pen Database Available for Download

[pajaro]

Great Inventory database. Thank you for developing it and making it available free. I am a little staggered to see how much I have spent on pens over the years.

[Chi Town]

Great Inventory database. Thank you for developing it and making it available free. I am a little staggered to see how much I have spent on pens over the years.

 

 

Ha, Ha yes that's the down side of this program. Your able to see how much you have invested in your collection. But the upside is that it is a good program for your insurance co. To insure your pens with.

[pajaro]

After adding quite a few pens, an error occured, something about date format. After this, all entered items were lost, except the one I was working on when the date formatting error occured.

[pajaro]

Great Inventory database. Thank you for developing it and making it available free. I am a little staggered to see how much I have spent on pens over the years.

 

 

Ha, Ha yes that's the down side of this program. Your able to see how much you have invested in your collection. But the upside is that it is a good program for your insurance co. To insure your pens with.

 

Invested? I don't think you can really count on that as an investment bearing a return. The P 51 set I bought for $25 in 1970 is unlikely to be worth enough to keep up with inflation. I would figure $250.00 adjusted for inflation plus or minus, and I think I would be fortunate to get $100 for them as a user-grade set. Just an example. It's a passtime, an obsession, a collection of stuff. The value erodes as you use the pen, as it acquires battle scars, etc. You can't take it seriously. It's a whole lot of mula down the drain. Like the ink I have purged from pens. It has been enjoyable, though, and you just have to keep smiling.

[crofton99]

Just downloaded the program looks really useful. One question - I have an inventory number for my pens - is there a field for this?

 

Thanks,

Kevin

[ianmedium]

Thanks so much for this. I am having problems though. i downloaded the Mac version, I am running Lion. I have the folder saying fountain pen inventory and then when I open it I see several things including fountain pen inventory and fountain pen inventory.fpn

 

When I double click on either it crashes and I get one of those report status things. What am I doing wrong?

Thanks in advance!

[haldane3]

Thanks!

 

Works great. Now it encourages me to get more pens to fill it up!

[ianmedium]

I will try again! I have a Mac and am on lion. I have downloaded this programme several times now and each time it crashes. Could someone who uses a Mac and this programme please tell me what is going wrong and what I need to do to get it working! Thanks very much.

[peterpen53]

Thanks so much for this. I am having problems though. i downloaded the Mac version, I am running Lion. I have the folder saying fountain pen inventory and then when I open it I see several things including fountain pen inventory and fountain pen inventory.fpn

 

When I double click on either it crashes and I get one of those report status things. What am I doing wrong?

Thanks in advance!

 

Both items should work the same way, that makes no difference. Mine works on an almost 4-year old MBP running Lion. If it keeps on crashing, I would suggest you simply toss it and redownload the entire database. You might just have an incomplete or corrupt file, these things happen once in a while.

 

Good luck.

 

Cheers,

Peter

Edited July 23, 2012 by peterpen53

[mikalehtinen]

Thank you so much for this program Jon! Great that you share it for free to all of us who don't know how to create programs like this.

Great!

Cheers, Mika

[pen2paper]

Question: Is there anyway to insert a recently acquired vintage pen into the list by its date, (oldest to newest), other than completely retyping the list?

[pen2paper]

Unfortunately there's no version for Linux. Perhaps an open standard application that can be used on various platforms would reach more users? Libre Office http://www.libreoffice.org/ is free, has a database program and can be used on Linux, Mac, and Windows.

Just saw this program used today.. Wondering how it compares to Open Office??? I did peek at the site and see it allows for collections database. Has anyone adapted libreoffice for their collections?

 

 

 

[peterpen53]

Question: Is there anyway to insert a recently acquired vintage pen into the list by its date, (oldest to newest), other than completely retyping the list?

 

If you go into the Records menu item and choose Sort records... you can choose any sort criteria you like. That's the nice thing about a database, you can make it do almost anything you want.

Edited August 1, 2012 by peterpen53

[Tdot]

I will try again! I have a Mac and am on lion. I have downloaded this programme several times now and each time it crashes. Could someone who uses a Mac and this programme please tell me what is going wrong and what I need to do to get it working! Thanks very much.

No problems using it on my iMac-OSX 10.6 and my PowerBook-OSX 10.5.

[Inginkpen]

My fountain pen inventory database is ready to download. There is a version for both Mac and PC users. The database maintains a lot of useful information about your fountain pen collection, including basic descriptive info, prices paid, repairs made and unlimited photographs. It also makes it very easy to post reviews to FPN. This database isn't associated with FPN, but I did add a couple of features that plays nicely with FPN.

 

As I mentioned, there's a Mac and a PC version. I ran into some font issues on the PC and had to make a a couple of small changes to the PC version in order to get it posted without delay. There isn't a large difference, but the Mac version looks a little nicer.

 

When you download it and unzip it, you will see a file and a folder named Fountain Pen Inventory. The file is an alias to the main program file in the folder. I don't usually distribute my solutions as standalone runtime databases. I've tested it as carefully as I could, but let me know if you have any issues. Even better, let me know if you like it, too. There is no charge for Fountain Pen Inventory. It's my gift to the FPN fountain pen community. You can redistribute it to someone else, but are not allowed to charge for it, modify it or present it as your own work.

 

Enough of the intro, you can download it at: http://www.jonro.com/downloads/

 

Regards,

 

Jon

 

 

Thank you very much for this database. I'm not an expert database or computer user and was able to install it on my computer and start using it immediately!

[tenney]

Thanks for the database. Is there any chance of being able to export it (or something) to be able to import it into say Bento or to use it in your own Filemaker database?

[iduncant]

Thanks for the amazing resource!

[C.W.]

I am running Mac OSX 10.7.4 on a MacBook Pro, the software will not start up and continues to fail.

 

Have reinstalled, restarted and reinstalled, reinstalled then restarted, and a few other things, nothing seems to get it running.

 

Really wish I could get this running, seems like an amazing resource!

[outbackpengeek]

I will try again! I have a Mac and am on lion. I have downloaded this programme several times now and each time it crashes. Could someone who uses a Mac and this programme please tell me what is going wrong and what I need to do to get it working! Thanks very much.

 

You're not doing anything wrong...it crashes on startup every time on Mountain Lion (10.8) as well.

[eric47]

I will try again! I have a Mac and am on lion. I have downloaded this programme several times now and each time it crashes. Could someone who uses a Mac and this programme please tell me what is going wrong and what I need to do to get it working! Thanks very much.

 

You're not doing anything wrong...it crashes on startup every time on Mountain Lion (10.8) as well.

 

I downloaded the DB again, and not much has changed since my last post. Again I suspect it's related to the included FM runtime engine; the files all date from 2007.

 

The included FM runtime engine is v8.5.1; the runtime engine a small program -- a stripped down bit of FM which lets those use a FM database without having the full FM program.

 

v8.5.1 is quite long in tooth these days and extends to the PPC era. There was an update to v8.5.2 -- I don't know if either version of the full FM application v8.5.x itself even runs under Mountain Lion. I don't know many 5 year old programs (from the 10.4 - 10.5 era) that still run unpatched or without any upgrade on Lion or Mountain Lion. Filemaker's table doesn't even go back to v8 for Lion Compatibility, see here. But v9 isn't compatible with Lion -- I can verify that, I tried to install it.

 

The current version of Filemaker is v12. It and v11 are both deemed Mountain Lion compatible by Filemaker. v11 was also Lion compatible on the release of Lion.

 

I have a copy of FM v11, so I don't need the runtime engine. I can open the DB file itself without issue, and can use the database.

 

If you want this to run, I see two basic options:

1. Contact the author of the DB (jonro), to see if he can repackage the db program with a Mountain Lion compatible runtime engine.

2. Use a Mountain Lion compatible version of Filemaker (the full program) to work on just the db file.

Edited September 26, 2012 by eric47