December 10 2004
Review: Delicious Library
In many ways, the application Delicious Library lives up to its namesake. It's a software application that allows you to catalogue your personal collection of books, music, movies and games. Where this program takes a big twist, and a large part of its appeal factor is in two features. Firstly, its integration into Amazon.com and its ability to turn the iSight (or any digital camera) into a barcode scanner. So rather than tediously type in information about a book (which you can do too), you simply wave the barcode in front of the iSight and it will scan the barcode, grab and download the information off Amazon and assemble it into your library. Collections in Delicious Library work much like playlists in iTunes. So if you wanted to sort everything related to Apple, you could have Games, Books etc. The User Interface is very well designed. Searching, like iTunes, is instantaneous. When you click on the conveniently named Similar button you get a listing of the similar titles from Amazon . Those you already have are conveniently greyed out. You're given an arrow which will take you to the Amazon page, or you can directly add it to your cart for convenience. Which means you can add to your collection instantly. The program is simple and elegant in its execution. When you scan in a DVD, it will download the artwork, and create a virtual DVD sitting on your shelf. Some really nice GUI touches, however I prefer the metal shelf that appears in 'Recent Imports' rather than wood-grain. A very highly polished program, especially for a new program.Renting out stuff.
Sometimes it gets hard to keep track of stuff. If you loan a lot of your stuff out, then you are going to really dig the borrowing feature in Delicious Library. To loan an item, you simply drag and drop the item to the person in the source list and click on the person. There you can select a date for the item to be returned. To return them is just a matter of clicking the lower right hand corner, and selecting Check in. Now if Tito would just return my Perl book!Problems.
I ran into several problems in scanning some of the items. International readers should take note that none of my Australian DVDs scanned in, and many of my Games (for Playstation 2 and Gamecube) did not scan. I've been told that they're working on international support, and integration to Amazon UK is just around the corner. However only one Gamecube game scanned properly. The program had a tendency to come up with bugs, although is very good about getting them dealt with so you can go back to work. There are a couple of quirks with the title bar over the main area.iSight compatiblity.
The iSight works really well, and you will find that you can go though very quickly and very slowly. Sometimes the camera gets finicky especially on shiny objects. It took several minutes to scan in the Star Wars Trilogy Box Set, because the bottom was shiny. The iSight works great for the home user, but I would move up to the barcode scanner for a library, or someone with a large enough collection. One thing that did strike me as strange is the way that your library 'looks'. In real life you don't have a library that consists of nicely placed books with the cover showing. It almost feels alien. Perhaps a different metaphor for the library would've been more successful. They did include a list view, which visually and practically works much better. Delicious Library is a very cool application. It's surprisingly fun to actually input the information, and the significant amount of thought about how the program actually works is apparent. The iSight integration is spectacular and it effortlessly integrates into Amazon. It's a bit quirky, and not everything scans in. If you are scanning in, every so often you'll come across an item that simply won't scan, which can be frustrating. The placement of some buttons could bet better placed, and the shelf UI seems strange. However if you have a large library, and or you loan a lot of stuff out to friends, for $40 Delicious Monster is definitely worth the price of entry. Whether or not this seems like your cup of tea, a demo is available, you will be surprised at just how much fun data entry can be. Delicious Library get's a delicious 4 out of 5.Copyright
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