Notes on building TopVault, researching collectible variants, and documenting the collector workflows behind the app.
Deep dive research into collectibles, usually focusing on variants and identification techniques.
Three English Base Set holos exist in two different artwork designs inside the same Unlimited print run. The Black Flame Ninetales is the known one. The Black Rays Zapdos and Mewtwo are the same phenomenon and are barely documented anywhere.
We published a report on where Pokémon card prices went over the last year. This post covers where the data came from, how the index is built, and the two corrections we had to make before any of the numbers meant anything. The short version is that the...
Pokémon English Base Set 1st Edition holos are usually treated as a single variation. Among collectors who look closely there are two recognizable groups, informally called "alpha" and "beta", separated by the weight of the 1st Edition stamp and the angle of the halftone dot...
This is a list of well-recognized and obtainable English Pokémon test print cards. This list does not include "one of a kind" prints, matchprints, or make-ready-test unique prints. There are other types...
This is a list of unique English-language Pokémon cards created in Japan, likely by Media Factory, and distributed through promotional events between the years 1998 and 2003. This timeframe of English...
This blog post is a deep-dive into an interesting part of the Pokémon ex-era card generation. There are 16 expansions in this generation. In most of these expansions (exact list below) the common and uncommon rarity cards included multiple serial...
TopVault has a mission to become the most complete database for collectibles with a focus on "full complete" sets with large histories and diverse variations. The Pokémon Trading Card Game (TCG) is a great example of this type of collectible.
Welcome to the TopVault Tech blog! With this inaugural post, I will begin to go behind the scenes on how TopVault is built. This whole blog series will continue that theme of describing parts of the technology that runs TopVault. The main themes are...
Deep dives into the technology behind the TopVault application.
TopVault used to identify a scanned card by reading the text off it. It now compares the picture itself against a precomputed catalog of reference images, and only falls back to reading text when the picture is not a confident match. This is a walk through...
The TopVault website and mobile app allow you to upload photos of collectibles. These photos remain private to the collector and are not visible to either TopVault nor other collectors. For example, if you upload a photo for one of your collectibles...
This articles explains how TopVault uses React-ChartJS-2 to show collection trends over time. While TopVault aims to minimize the investing and pricing aspects of collecting, knowing values and trends over time will always be important.
The TopVault mobile app is built with Ionic. It is also accessible via a web application using Ionic's built-in web deployment features. This allows users to have the same experience on mobile and on the web. The original deployment used a subdomain...
One of the primary features of TopVault is to be a library of collectibles. This means indexing all variants and maintaining descriptions, historic pricing information, and links to other resources related to special rare collectibles.
TopVault allows collectors to see their entire collection on a single page. Collectors can also create large checklists or goals of collectibles and these can grow to over tens of thousands of entries. This is a classic situation where a paginated...
This is a short recap of how the TopVault iOS, Android, and web (SPA, PWA) applications use AI models locally, also known as using them on-device. The examples included in this post are pseudocode abstracted from the actual application to help with...
TL;DR, the Ionic UI Framework was a good choice! If I had to choose again, I’d pick Ionic again. Intro and context The context is that TopVault is a mobile-first experience that should also be available in-browser. This makes sharing content with...
This article describes an alternative approach to hiding the URL bar in Ionic app on Mobile Safari. The end solutions looks like the following demo: What is the problem On Mobile Safari, the URL (or address) bar does not shrink when scrolling...
