TuxRadar has an article comparing collection managers. Tellico comes out pretty good, with a grade of 8 out of 10, claiming second place to GCstar.

At first glance, Tellico seemed like the obvious winner of the bunch. It’s got built-in templates, it’s configurable and provides good documentation. The design is elegant, if not pretty, but it’s been superseded by a superior program, one that’s pushed the heights of what a collection manager can be.

Near as I can tell, Tellico loses out to GCstar’s shiny templates! Well, I can take that. It’s a pretty good article, though with not much in the way of substantial critiquing.

Even though you don’t have to fill in all, or even most, of the fields, the result is unappealing. The dialog boxes you use to fill in the information for an item are crowded, but there are also all the ugly empty spaces from fields you didn’t fill in.

I think the author is hitting two points there. I understand the crowded dialog complaint, though aside from doing in-place editing in the view, I can’t think of any other way to edit the data. The second point, about showing empty fields in the view, is easily fixed with some tweaks to the default. Maybe I should add a template for that as an option.

Tellico’s website provides a detailed illustrated guide in addition to the extensive documentation, but the drawback to having extensive built-in support is the in-your-face interface that comes with it, although this is more than offset by the program’s features. When filing our comic book collections, we honestly don’t want to enter the date we purchased the book, so we find it irritating that Tellico expects us to.

Definitely a valid point there at the end of that paragraph. That’s why Tellico 2.0 added a field for automatically storing the date that the comic book was first added to the collection as well as the date of the last modification of the comic book data. I decided not to remove the default field for year of purchase, though maybe I should have.