Version 8
An East Coast Software
Product
Software
License and Warranty
The software, which
accompanies this license, is the property of East Coast Software and is protected by copyright law.
You may:
(1) use one copy of the
software on a single computer;
(2) make one copy of the
software for archival purposes or copy the software onto the hard disk of your computer and retain the original for
archival purposes;
(3) transfer the software on a permanent basis to another person, provided that you retain no copies of the software and the transferee agrees to the terms of this license.
You may not:
(1) copy the documentation
which accompanies the software;
(2) sublicense, rent or
lease any portion of the software;
(3) reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble , modify, or make any attempt to discover the source code of the software.
Limited Warranty:
East Coast Software warrants that the media on which the software is distributed will be free from defects for a period of thirty days from the date of delivery of the software to you. Your sole remedy in the event of a breech of this warranty will be that East Coast Software will, at its option, replace any defective media returned to East Coast Software within the warranty period or refund the money you paid for the software. East Coast Software does not warrant that the software will meet your requirements or that operation of the software will be uninterrupted or that the software will be error-free.
Disclaimer of damages:
East Coast
Software will not be liable for any consequential losses, including lost
profits or lost data arising out of the use or inability to use the software.
In no case will East Coast Software’s liability exceed the purchase price of
the software.
Table of Contents
From Windows
95/98/Me/2000/NT/XP
Add/edit
bird colours, eye colours and/or strains
Viewing
archived races and results
Installing
From Windows 3.1/3.11
Version 8 of the Loft Management System is incompatible with Windows 3x.
From Windows 95/98/Me/2000/NT/XP
The installation consists of a number of forms that require a “Next” button to be clicked. One form requires you to accept the license agreement. On another you will be shown where the system is to be installed. If you have only one hard disk (C:) then just accept the defaults. If you have partitioned your hard disk or have more than one hard disk, you may want to install it on a disk other than C: This is the place where you can choose. It is recommended that you leave the directory or folder (the bit after C:\) at the default (Program Files \ East Coast Software \ LMS8).
Uninstalling
This software can be removed from your computer in two ways. You can use the standard windows ‘Add/Remove Software’ feature. To do this click ‘Start’, ‘Settings’ and ‘Control Panel.’ Double-click on the icon for ‘Add/Remove Programs’ and find the Loft Management System (LMS8) in the list. Click on this to highlight it and then click the ‘Add/Remove’ pushbutton. Another way is to click on Start, All Programs, LMS8 then click on the uninstaller.
What’s new in Version 8?
There have been many improvements and additional facilities in version 8. Updates are now automatic – you simply go on-line, ask the system to check for updates and if there are any, they will be downloaded and applied without any further intervention from you. Even better, if you are on a broadband connection and are connected when you start LMS8, the system will go and look for updates without being asked.
There is a Tip-of-the-Day form that reminds you of the many facilities available in The Loft Management System. You can switch this off when you are happy that you are completely familiar with all facilities offered by LMS8.
You may have many windows open at the same time. If you fly in more than one club, you can open the “choose race birds” form as many times as you have clubs and choose which birds to send for which club, watching the lists all at the same time. You can have bird details form and race details and choose race bird forms open all at the same time.
Pedigree cock birds are printed in blue whilst hen birds are printed in red. Where a bird is unknown or of unknown sex, they are printed in black.
The text in the boxes of the pedigrees is now not fixed size but instead is determined by the amount of text in the fullest box on the pedigree so that if you do not have a lot of text, the font size will get bigger.
On almost all forms if a ring number is displayed and you right-click on that ring number, the bird details form will open with that ring number bird displayed.
The bird details form has a page to show hatchings of that bird for the current year and for any archived years.
The bird details form has a page to show race results of that bird for the current year and for any archived years.
Bird ratings can be viewed for current season and for any archived years.
There is an option to Add/Edit your address under the Maintenance menu.
If you get problems when printing photographs on a pedigree, there is an option to try a different method of printing.
There is a new facility to repair corrupt data.
You can have your own bird photographs displayed as the system starts up or just accept the ones built into the system.
Getting started
You must set the resolution of your screen to at least 800 by 600. At less than this resolution, parts of some forms will be off your screen and you will have to use the scroll bars to see all of the forms. To check your resolution, close down any open applications, right-click on any empty area of your desktop and, from the resulting menu, click on Properties then on the Settings tab. Look inside the rectangle labelled, “Screen Area.” At the bottom there are 2 numbers, x and y, in a statement that reads, “x by y pixels.” If x is 800 or larger, you need do nothing. If x is smaller than 800, move the slide bar to the right until it becomes 800 then click the Apply button. If the slide bar is already as far right as it will go and x is less than 800 (a most unlikely event), your video board is very old and cheap and will need to be changed to allow you to run Windows at higher resolutions. Talk to your local computer retailer about your problem.
If you intend to store and print photos of your birds in the pedigrees, set the number of colours as high as your video board will allow – at least to 16-bit colour. If you set it to 256-colours, you will get pretty awful prints. You’ll find the settings on the same form as the resolution above.
Before
entering birds, work your way through Maintenance | Birds and Maintenance |
Racing
Before entering any new birds, you should make sure that the lists of bird colours, strains, and eye colours contain those values that you are likely to use in your system. When you receive LMS, it contains a few entries in these lists but by no means all the values you may need. You can add, edit or delete values from the lists so that they reflect the, for instance, strains that you have in your loft and in the forebears of your birds. You can add an entry to these lists in the middle of entering a bird but, if you are adding a new bird or editing an existing one, the addition/change to the pick list will not be reflected in the open list until you save or abandon the add/edit and re-open it. As a general rule, do NOT try to enter new options in drop-down lists directly, go to the relevant item in the maintenance menu to add the new item.
If you intend to record racing for your birds, add the start points and the distances from your loft before trying to define any race. If a start point for a race does not exist, you must NOT try to enter it by typing in the drop-down list of start points on the “add a race” form, as you will not be able to add the distance from your loft. Abandon the add a race procedure, add the start point and distance through the “add/edit start points” form under the Maintenance, Racing menu item then re-enter the race details. You should also set up the pools that your club uses and the numbers of birds getting points that you want to use for the calculation of ratings before starting to enter race details. Also check with your secretary that the darkness allowance for multiple-day races is correct.
Since most of the things you need to do before starting to enter birds, races etc., are done only once and then rarely need to be altered, you will find them all under the “Maintenance” menu. Work your way down the maintenance menu list making sure that all items are as you will want them.
If you have an older version of the Loft Management System, you may be able to import bird details from that, provided you have a good, working backup.
Importing data
If you have an older copy (versions 3 to7) of the Loft Management System and have backed up your data, you may be able to convert that data to the new version. This MUST be done before you enter ANY bird data into the new system. Once any bird data has been entered, old data cannot be imported.
Data from versions 3 to7 can be imported. Earlier versions than this cannot be converted and you will need to enter your data from scratch.
The new version stores much of its data in a very different format to previous versions.
Before trying to convert old data, look at the entries in the colours, strains and eye colours pick lists and edit the pick lists to ensure that they contain entries that you normally use. If you have many birds of strain “xyz” and many of the birds in the backup you are going to convert are of that strain and it is not in the strains pick list, then none of the converted “xyz” birds will have a strain. As a further example, let’s pick a silly colour. Suppose you have a lot of birds of a rare colour, say, purple pied and many of your backed up birds are marked as “purp pied”, unless you enter “purp pied” in the colours pick list, none of your converted purp pied birds will have a colour assigned. You will then have a lot of editing to do to get your converted data up-to-date.
After getting the pick lists up-to-date, you can attempt to convert your old data by choosing File | Restore data FROM storage and choosing the drive or directory where the backed up data resides. The system will recognise if it is old data from a previous version and will start the conversion process. You will be reminded that pick lists must be right for your data and you can exit at that point if you have not got them up-to-date. The process will take some time but you will be shown what is happening at all stages. Be patient and do not interrupt the process. You will receive a message, “Conversion complete,” when the process is over.
When the process is complete, you are not finished. There is still much for you to do. If the old data you are importing contains races and race results, the conversion process will not have calculated the velocities. What you have to do is edit each result of each race. Choose Race | Add/Edit results and, for each race, click on each bird to highlight it and click the Edit then the Save buttons (it’s the same button so just click it twice). This will calculate the velocity for each bird. If the velocities are silly – negative or containing all asterisks – you may have to edit some details of the result or even the race. Most (all, hopefully) will be correctly calculated but there may be the odd race that had a long holdover or something else that the conversion process cannot cope with. Look at the results and the race definition and make appropriate changes to get the velocities calculated correctly.
You need to check through all your birds to see that the conversion process has worked correctly. This is easy to do since all of the bird data is on the one form. Choose Birds | Details, click on the top bird in the list at the left hand side of the form and press the down arrow on your keyboard to move down the list, checking the details for each bird in turn. If you come across one whose details you want to change, just click the Edit button and change the details.
NOTE: If your computer fails to complete the conversion process, you will have to uninstall the Loft Management System, install it again and start the conversion process afresh.
Tip of the day
When you first get LMS, as you start it up, it will display a tip of the day. This is merely a reminder of some of the functions built in to LMS.
When you are happy that you are completely familiar with LMS, you can switch the tips of the day off by selecting for that in the bottom left corner of the form.
If you have previously switched the tips off and would like to restore them, choose Help, Show tip-of-the-day on start up. You will be shown a new tip each time you start LMS until you have seen them all, then they will start again at tip 1.
Managing multiple forms
You can have many forms open at once but only one form will be active at a time. You can tell which form is active by looking at their title bars; the one with the brightest title bar is the active one.
As the forms open, they will be positioned so that you can see the title bar but the last form opened will cover most of the previous form. You can place them more conveniently by grabbing the title bar (the very top part of the form) and pushing it to where is best for you. If you cannot see all of the title bars because you have a large number of forms open, if you can see any part of the form you want, just click on it and it will come to the front and be the active form.
Another method to find a particular form is to click on the Window menu item. From there you can click on any form name and it will come to the front and become the active form. From that menu you can also close all open forms quickly.
Add/edit bird colours, eye
colours and/or strains
Bird colours, strains and eye colours are all chosen from drop-down pick lists. This is the place where you construct the contents of these lists. The lists are in alphabetic order.
To add a new value to the pick list, click the Add button and enter the new value in the entry field that will appear below the table. Click either Save or Abandon. Save will keep the value and add it to the pick list. Abandon will abandon the entry.
To change an already existing value, click on it in the table to highlight it, click the edit button then alter it as you require in the entry field below the table. Click Save or Abandon.
To delete a value, click on it in the table then click the Delete button. You will be asked to confirm the deletion and you will not be allowed to delete a value that has already been used in any bird details.
Note: You can do stupid things to your pick list. For example, you have entered several birds and assigned, say, Blue Cheq as their colour. If you now come to the Add/Edit colours and edit “Blue Cheq” to “Red Cheq”, all your previously Blue Cheq birds will now be registered as Red Cheq.
If you import backup data from a previous version of the Loft Management System, you must ensure that all three pick lists, (colours, eye colours and strains), contain those values that you have used in your previous version. If you fail to do this, any colours, eye colours or strains not in the pick lists will either be left blank or will contain a wrong value and you will need to edit all birds to ensure they are as you want them to be.
Bird
details – Page 1
All your bird data can be accessed from one form. It has several pages that you select by clicking on the buttons across the top of the form. Page 1 of the form looks like this:
On the left hand side is a scrolling table showing all of the birds in your system. They are in alphabetic order of ring number. Initially, there will not be many birds here but, as you use the system, you may eventually have several hundred birds. How then do you find a particular bird quickly? Just above the table is a “seeker.” As you start to type a ring number into the seeker, you will “home in” on the required bird in the table. If you have used spaces as separators in your ring numbers, do not enter them in the seeker. Just enter the number as though it has no spaces. Suppose you want to find the bird, NEHU96TEE19636. When you type “n” into the seeker, you will be taken to the first NEHU bird. Then as you type “ehu”, the position will not change at all. The “9” will take you to, say, a 92 bird if that is the earliest 90s bird you have from the NEHU, the “6” will take you to NEHU96, jumping all birds from 1992 to 1996 and so on until you are at the bird you want. In the above example, if it were a Dutch bird you were seeking, an “L” after the first “N” would jump past all NEHU birds. Finally, when you can see the bird in the table you can click on it or you can use the scroll bar on the right of the table to move down some more. You are now at the bird you want to see. The large title at the top shows the ring number and its pet name, if it has one.
At the bottom of the left hand side is a set of radio buttons that will limit the birds in the left hand list. You can limit them to all in-loft birds, in-loft race birds or in-loft stock birds. Whenever you click on the Add or Edit buttons, the limit will revert to all birds. This is so that you can add/edit records and the parents will not be excluded because of a limit you imposed at this stage. The limit will also be removed whenever you move up a pedigree by clicking on a bird in the pedigree (page 2).
It is from this page of the form that new birds are added; details of existing birds are edited