Zack Mahdavi
03-15-2005, 06:00 PM
<img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/mahdavi-mar05-del_library-1.jpg" /><br /><br /><b>Product Category:</b> Software, DVD/CD/Books Library<br /><b>Manufacturer:</b> <a href="http://www.delicious-monster.com/">Delicious Monster</a><br /><b>Where to Buy:</b> <a href="http://www.delicious-monster.com/">Delicious Monster</a><br /><b>Price:</b> $39.95<br /><b>Pros:</b><li>Beautiful user interface. Almost "lickable";<br /><li>iSight firewire camera scanning;<br /><li>Imports books, movies, music, and games;<br /><li>Similar items feature is great for finding something new;<br /><li>Syncs your library with newer iPods;<br /><li>Amazon.com database provides tremendous info for each item. <br /><b>Cons:</b><li>Mac only.... Windows not allowed;<br /><li>Amazon.com database limits the use of the program to only a few countries;<br /><li>No HTML export option;<br /><li>Movie imports should also query IMDB;<br /><li>No "smart shelves" to automatically categorize items based on a query;<br /><li>Wish lists! I want them!<br /><b>Summary:</b><br />Delicious Monster is a brand new company formed by some very talented programmers. With Delicious Library 1.1, these talented guys have taken a seemingly mundane organization program and somehow managed to make it exciting! This program is off to a great start and looks great, but it's missing some key features that other collection programs offer standard. Regardless, this program serves as an awesome library for all you Mac users!<br /><br />Read on for the full, delicious review!<!><br /><PAGEBREAK><br /><span><b>Who Needs to Catalog Their Media?</b></span><br />Why in the world would anyone want to catalog their media? After all, it's your collection, so you should know what you own and what you don't, right? Wrong. There have been several times when I made an impulse purchase on a CD at Target, when it turned out that I actually owned the CD in the first place! <br /><br />Enter Delicious Library. Delicious Library helps you keep track of what you own, when you bought it, and who has it. Hmm, it sounds like something an Excel spreadsheet could handle, right? Wrong. <br /><br />Delicious Library is designed to sort your books, music, movies, and games. Now, stop and think about how many books, movies, music, and games you own. I own about 60 CDs alone. Think about how long it would take to manually type in the artist, album, and any other useful information into your spreadsheet. The truth is that you'd never get it done, plus your spreadsheet would essentially be an inventory and provide no other useful features.<br /><br />There are a plethora of programs that help you organize your media collections. They all work pretty much the same. You type in an ISBN number or UPC code of the item, and the program connects to one of the many online databases to retrieve information about the item. Those programs work well and save you time. However, if you have a really big collection, it can still take up a lot of time to enter all of that information. <br /><br />Delicious Library's claim to fame is its scanning support using the Apple iSight firewire webcam, which is discussed in detail below. <br /><br /><span><b>The Interface</b></span><br />The interface is very uncluttered and beautiful. It has the consistency of Apple's iLife suite of applications, including iTunes.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/mahdavi-mar05-del_library-1-big.jpg"><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/mahdavi-mar05-del_library-1.jpg" /></a><br /><i>Figure 1: The interface. Click for a bigger view.</i><br /><br />On the left are tabs for each of the media types Delicious Library imports, Books, Movies, Music, and Games. Below is a tab that shows your recently imported items, and below that are shelves that essentially allow you to categorize your media, much like categorizing music into playlists.<br /><br />The middle portion looks literally like wood-grained bookshelves with photorealistic CDs, DVDs, and books. They even reflect the light in the correct angle and show beautiful shadows. Sure, it might provide no functional use to the program, but it sure as heck makes it easier to quickly identify the item you're looking for. <br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/mahdavi-mar05-del_library-2.jpg" /><br /><i>Figure 2: The photo-realistic look of the media on the shelves.</i><br /><br />If you'd rather have a table to view your items, there's that too. You can easily add and remove columns from the table to customize it to your liking.<br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/mahdavi-mar05-del_library-3.jpg" /><br /><i>Figure 3: The table view.</i><br /><PAGEBREAK><br /><span><b>Adding an Item</b></span><br />Delicious Library obtains its information from the massive Amazon.com database. This is good and bad for a number of reasons. Amazon.com stores a plentitude of useful information for each item. For example, for a CD, the Amazon database provides the artist, album, cover art, release date, a track listing, a product description, plus more. This is a massive amount of information that I would normally never have entered into a spreadsheet. <br /><br />However, because the Amazon.com database is queried, only certain localizations of the Amazon database can be queried. Currently, Amazon.com only provides developers with APIs for its databases from the US, UK, Japan, and Germany. This is a clear problem for most international users. Also, for some types of media, there are plenty of other good databases that Delicious Library could take advantage of. For example, movies could be queried from IMDB, and books could be queried from the US Library of Congress. <br /> <br />It might even be useful if Delicious Library decided to start its own user-contributed database, much like what some Windows organizers do. Of course, this would only be useful if Delicious Monster ensures that the submissions are of high quality, which might be more trouble than it's worth. <br /><br />You have three options when adding an item. One option is to manually type in the ISBN or UPC number. This works just like you would expect. The second option is to scan the barcodes with an Apple iSight firewire webcam. This is truly an intuitive feature and it works really well. In fact, every single barcode I held up to my trusty iSight was instantly scanned. It's so fast that I scanned about 50 CDs in roughly 10 minutes. Another good thing is that you don't have to wait for the program to finish querying Amazon.com for book information before you scan the next item. Just scan each CD one after the other, and the program will accept the barcodes without a hiccup. This feature alone makes the program worth the $39.95. <br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/mahdavi-mar05-del_library-4.jpg" /><br /><i>Figure 4: Your iSight can be converted to a barcode scanner.</i><br /><br />Delicious Library provides a third scanning option for the person who has a massive library that isn't close to a computer. It's a bluetooth laser scanner that wirelessly scans items and sends the information to your Mac. If you take the scanner away from the range of the computer, the scanner will remember up to 500 barcodes. Then, next time you're in range of the computer, Delicious Library will download the barcodes and catalog the items instantly. The cost? $174.95. I wasn't able to test this feature myself since I couldn't obtain a scanner.<br /><br />All in all, as a US resident, I was incredibly happily with the ease with which I was able to import items. Only a couple of UPC codes weren't found in the Amazon.com database. In this case, you can search by title for your item. This feature worked well, and I was able to import those few missing items. <br /><br />In addition to the Amazon.com information that's imported, you can add some personal information to each item, including any notes, purchase price, ratings, etc. <br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/mahdavi-mar05-del_library-5.jpg" /><br /><i>Figure 5: Append your own info to each item.</i><br /><br />Lately, I've been buying many singles off of the iTunes Music Store, and I'm sure many people are doing the same. It would be nice to be able to import the songs I've purchased from iTunes in addition to the CDs I own. <br /><PAGEBREAK><br /><span><b>Other Features</b></span><br />So now you have your media imported into your wonderful, new Delicious Library. What to do now? Well, for one, you can explore similar items, which are gathered from Amazon.com's database. This is really useful when you're trying to find something new to buy, just so you can have a little fun with the iSight scanning later! <br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/mahdavi-mar05-del_library-6.jpg" /><br /><i>Figure 6: Similar items can be useful for expanding your collection.</i><br /><br />In addition, Delicious Monster provides links to view other editions of the item, buy another copy, or even sell the item on Amazon.com. These links include Delicious Monster's referral name, which I guess provides them with another source of income. I personally don't mind, as long as they stay around to further innovate.<br /><br />The search box performs on the fly searching, which basically means it shows results as you type a query. <br /><br />For organization, you can create new shelves, which basically allows you to categorize items. One big, new thing in Mac OS X is the use of "smart categories," such as "smart playlists" in iTunes. Basically, a smart category allows you to define a query that continuously updates the category with results. I'd like to see Delicious Library implement "smart shelves." This way, I could create a smart shelf that displayed all CDs from U2, and whenever I added a new U2 CD to my library, the smart shelf would automatically show the new U2 CD. <br /><br />I really liked the checkout feature in Delicious Library. How many times have you let somebody borrow something from your library only to forget who that person was a year later? Delicious Library allows you to add borrowers and then associate a borrower with an item. It's as easy as dragging the item onto the person. Then you can define a due date, and Delicious Library will notify you if the item becomes overdue!<br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/mahdavi-mar05-del_library-7.jpg" /><br /><i>Figure 7: The checkout feature is one my personal favorites.</i><br /><br /><span><b>Your Library... To Go</b></span><br />Exporting your library is kind of limited at this point. You can export it to a plain text file, or you can print it out to take with you to the store. The print feature doesn't provide any options, however. For example, you can't tell the program not to print out the images or specify a certain template to print. I'd like to see more customizability regarding printing in the near future. <br /><br />Delicious Library can also sync your library to your iPod, which I find very cool. Unfortunately, I have an old 2nd generation iPod, and since Apple hasn't released notes support for it, I couldn't test out the iPod syncing. Delicious Library should work fine with the 3rd and 4th generation iPod along with the iPod Mini.<br /><br />I want to see an HTML Export option that exports your library for publishing to the web. There is a freeware program called <a href="http://www.agencesi.com/DeliciousExporter/">DeliciousExporter</a> available, which fills in this gap. Something like this needs to be embedded into Delicious Library.<br /><br /><span><b>Weaknesses</b></span><br />I basically pointed out most of the weaknesses throughout the review, so I'm not going to reiterate them here. However, there's one more feature I'd like to see. After browsing through the "similar items" menu for some of the items in my library, I found so many more things I wanted to get. However, there was no way of storing these items that I want but don't own. I want to be able to create a "wish list" that I could add any items that have been on my mind. Maybe each item can be linked to some sort of price searching engine, and maybe the Delicious wish list could sync with my Amazon.com wish list. Regardless, I believe that implementing a wish list would be a killer feature. <br /><br />Delicious Library has been out for a few months now, so naturally it's going to have some weaknesses. I think this program has a lot of potential, and by implementing some of the things I'm asking for, this program will be amazingly useful at being more than just a library manager. <br /><br /><span><b>Conclusion</b></span><br />The friendly folks at Delicious Monster have created an application that has allowed a lazy person like me to simplify the initial burden of building a library. The interface is clean and beautiful, and the company has paid attention to every detail to ensure the user enjoys the using the product. All in all, I think this program is easily worth the $39.95 for any Mac user who has a collection they want to organize. Keep up the good work, Delicious Monster!