A Different Ww Stamps Album

area66,
First, you will fail if you think that you are going to force your vision on other people. You HAVE to give users what the want, regardless of what YOU think.

Second, reread my post. I said Scott OR SG numbers. In fact, if you read and understood my post, you would see that you would be providing users with the ability to assign ANY numbering system they desired. Now if you personally believe that having some kind of numbering displayed on album pages is lame, so be it. But the truth is that a feature like this would be highly desirable by many users.

Frankly I suspect that there are other reasons (like it sounds like to much additional work) that you would not consider this kind of feature.
Don

Yes, area66, for your information, I have worked with Steiner pages.

Extensively. As in "since the beginning."

I was using Steiner pages around 2000-2001 and if I remember correctly I could download them in a format that was compatible with Pagemaker software. I used this to extensively modify the US pages and add notations under the stamps or even to make spaces for 2 or 3 examples of one stamp. Am I misremembering again? I believe I used Steiner as the base and made the perfect page to suit me. If there was a rare stamp I would never get I might just eliminate it from the page.

I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if this happened. I'm imagining a company like Mystic sending a selection of stamps on approval, which will also include a reference to the exact pages that need to be printed to mount the stamps they send. Instead of telling new collectors they need to spend $100+ on a new album that may or may not have spaces for their stamps, they sell them a disk for half that or less that is guaranteed to have the stamps they need, and only costs pennies per page. Scott could also buy them and add Scott numbers and maybe images. Frankly, I'm somewhat surprised that Steiner hasn't already been bought out.

area66,

This is an issue a lot of us long-time collectors have faced. While every album system has its plusses and minuses, no album system seems to perfectly suit our needs.

Some collectors simply add pages to their albums, others give up on albums altogether and use stock pages to organize their collections.

About five years ago I decided my collection needed a complete reorganization. After floundering around for a year or so, I decided on Steiner pages for my foreign collection and homemade pages for my specialized collections.

Steiner pages are flexible enough for me to create workarounds for the pages that didn't suit my collecting interests.

Homemade pages are relatively simple to make after you get the hang of it. Hieronymus nailed the real issue:




That was the real task for my project, what to put in and what to leave out and be consistent.

I wouldn't dream of making my pages publically available. I'm sure most of my "editorial" decisions would not be acceptable to other collectors.

That's the real issue for a commercial project, meeting the needs of the consumer. Stamp collecting has no rules and is a very individualized hobby. We all march to our own drummer.

I've come to appreciate Bill Steiner's efforts. I still have a subscription although I seldom need to download pages anymore. I want to support his efforts.

As a friend of mine says, "It sounds easy when you talk fast."

Good luck on your project!

Dan

Ditto. I first subscribed to Steiner a little less than 2 years ago. When I first joined, I downloaded all of the files, whether I'm currently collecting that area or not. Now I suppose I would just need a couple supplements here or there, but it's something I could easily go 2-3 years between updates. But I renewed my subscription anyway because I've gotten so much more than $30 in value out of his pages and I'm happy to support his efforts. I've said elsewhere that I'm not so sure I'd still be collecting today had it not been for Steiner, and I certainly wouldn't be collecting in the same way I am today. If there is such a thing, Steiner should be enshrined in the Philatelic Hall of Fame. His pages have been a godsend to countless collectors all over the world.

They was not only compatible, they was Pagemaker pages. Steiner also include a tutorial on how to make pages from scratch with PageMaker



I have PageMaker 6.5 runing in a virtual XP

Many of you miss the point; I'm working on a World Stamps Album, not Country Specialized Albums so here some facts I think are important;

Unless you are Bill Gates it's impossible to collect all the stamps of the world, so 80,000 pages is way too much, 1c Z grill is also impossible for even a specialized US collection, so even more for a World Album.
Scott albums are missing a lot of stamps cheap and easy to find.
Scott and Steiner have on many pages offer only the possibility to include the souvenir sheet version of a stamp, World collector may not need 20 same version of Marylin Monroe Stamp.
As many of you mention, Bill Steiner make a dam good job, with a little help of Libre Office Draw you can open and mod the PDF to fit your needs.
It's 20 years I have this idea in mind, so please stop to ask me if I know what it need to do it. As I said I start country by country for my own needs, if it fits other needs good, I will not do all that only for 1 person.
But I have to limit myself some place, so the real question is where do I cut …… as example, I don't believe a World album must contain all the Grill and hard to identify and very expensive Watermark US varieties, You have ( and I have ) so many other good quality albums on the market for that purpose.
I want to focus on peoples who like me purchase stamps in large buddle or lot and want to have fun placing them in their albums.

Final word, I do order time to time CD of Steiner pages, and I have a subscription too, they are valuable reference material for my projects. Same as the Scott Internationals album, I have them as reference only; all true they are hosting a large part of my stamps for now

Well, you could borrow a practice from coin collecting and do a "type" collection. For example, instead of all the varieties of the 1851 1-cent US stamp, you could just have a space for one stamp with that design. Doing it that way would leave out all of the grill issues and would drastically simplify the Washington-Franklins, for example. That would probably be a little too simple for intermediate and advanced collectors, but it might be attractive to some collectors.

Here we go ..something usefull and constructive. And this is why I don't want to see a Sc # under the square box or a specific date of issue

That's the problem. Your choice for cuts won't be my choice for cuts.

What you are talking about sounds like a variation on the "face different" collection. A face-different collector only collects one of each design, without regard to differences in papers, watermarks, perfs, etc. Some face-different collectors don't even worry about color. A space could be filled by the 3c John Doe red or the 3c John Doe purple.

It sounds like you would also edit out face-different stamps above a certain catalogue value.

It is a perfectly valid way to define your collection. Probably even interesting. But there may not be that many collectors who share your exact vision.

[edit: I see TheArtfulHinger put in a similar observation while I was typing...]

That's why the "perfect" solution is one where you can just check off the stamps you want spaces for and have it generate pages on the fly. Honestly, given the plethora of album choices already out there, that's the only option I could see getting any traction in the marketplace, but it would also be the hardest to develop.

I think you need to decide what it is you want to do. At first you seem to want input from others. Then you posted that you are doing this for yourself and if other liked it then they could use it. I only have 30 years of product development experience but one of the few things a learned was that you should poll potential customers and develop an good understanding of what THEY want. Typically users want flexibility, they do not want to be dictated to. Given this, ideally the interface would support 'drag and drop' elements for all kinds of album page items. This would include borders, font type, description, numbering, and of course, the stamps themselves. Users would want to be able to 'group select' stamps from a list and then drag and drop them on to an album page, arranging them as they wish.

Or you can follow the path you are on; which sounds more like 'I will define exactly what users want and if they like then the can use it. It will be my vision and I don't care what others think'. If your vision is exactly what many user want, then you will be fine. Good luck with your effort.
Don

I get this... In terms of software world, you're branching from the main - to make it more You. The way I see it's just one more option / alternative that collectors could choose from. Absolutely nothing bad in it. IMHO it's even admirable and surprising that it took this many years for somebody to do so.

-k-