Having trouble indentifying a bag full of miscellaneous Transformers you bought at a garage sale for 29 cents? Trying to remember the name of that blue and grey indy car that the dog swallowed back in '92? Well, ease your mind, because the world's most powerful engine for identifying toys is now online. Have a look:
http://www.shmax.com/advsearchI hope it's pretty self-explanatory, but the two most important components (there are more to come) are the Alternate form selector, and the color picker. With the Alternate form selector, you simply surf down the through the categories, getting as specific as you're sure of. For example, perhaps you've got a toy in your lap that you can't quite make out--it's badly mis-transformed--but you see some wheels on it. In that case, you use the Alternate Form Control to click on Vehicles->Land Vehicles. Looking closer at the toy, you see what looks like the grill of a car, so you can narrow further by clicking Vehicles->Land Vehicles->Cars. You'll get the idea.
The other important bit is the color picker. What makes our system unique is that any number of colors can be assigned to a toy when they are entered into the database, and you can pick any number of colors to match when searching. This lets us narrow the search results, so that instead of 30 or 40 toys to scan when trying to indentify a toy, you'll likely only wind up with 2 or 3.
Now that the database is starting to fill out pretty nicely, I believe that the Advanced Search feature is going to be a powerful tool in your arsenal for identifying loose toys. Enjoy it, folks, and please post in the forums with any issues you come across.
- shmax
