It should come as no surprise that I, like many of my geeky brethren, am addicted to information. It doesn’t matter whether it’s movies, or music, or books, I absorb it like a sponge, and more often than not, prefer to keep it if I can. The problem, of course, is that as your collection gets larger, it becomes harder and harder to keep track of it all. If you’re the type who ever lends books or movies to friends, the process becomes frustratingly difficult. That’s where Delicious Library by Delicious Monster comes in. It’s a clean, professional application that makes managing your media a thousand times easier.

The company itself, Delicious Monster, was started by Wil Shipley, one of the original founders of The Omni Group (which has its own spotlight here). While the actual application speaks for itself as an example of small, independent developers making great software, the company is also a fantastic example of the indie developer philosophy: Delicious Library was written largely from within a local coffee house called Zoka. I consider this yet another nail in the coffin to the idea that great software has to come from a cubicle (or rather, two hundred cubicles). I applaud this ethic, and hope to see more cafe developers in the future.

I’m not going to break down every detail and feature of Delicious Library: that would take too long. That said, let me explain a bit about the metaphor behind the application. If you were going to distill the app down to one core concept, it would be creating a robust library. All of the other features really stem from that idea. Delicious Library includes multiple methods to populate your library database, including scanning the bar codes off the back of the books/dvds/cds/games/et cetera, and getting the entry automatically populated via the information on Amazon. You can also do searches by title or author, or by ISBN number, or, failing all other methods to automatically fill in the information, you can enter it by hand. At this point, I’ve input around 500 titles, and the vast majority have been a simple bar code scan using an iSight camera (I started out using the one built into the computer, however I got tired of holding things up that high, and so have opted to use my external iSight instead). My fiction has proven to be a bit more problematic, since so much of it is older editions from the days before everything had a UPC (and many of them before they even had an ISBN). That said, my non-fiction (art books, computer books, programming books, sociology, mythology, essays, philosophy, et cetera) all have gone through without a hitch, with maybe 4 relying on an ISBN search.

Once you’ve added your media to Delicious Library, you’ll probably want to organize it. There’s a number of ways you can view your material, depending on your own preferences (the program itself is fairly non-partisan about how you sort and display your information). Initially, everything is sorted into different “collections” which cover types of media: “Movies”, “Music”, “Books”, “Games.” From there, you can create “shelves” to sort and organize everything however you want it. One method that seems to be popular is to use Delicious Library to virtually recreate your physical shelves, allowing you to quickly and easily find exactly which shelf a given book is on. You could also create shelves based on category or loose affiliation, though my initial inclination regarding that is to use the search functionality (both within the application, and via Spotlight, which is fully supported). It’s also worth pointing out that you can sync your library to your iPod, allowing you to have an up to date list of what you own with you for that next time you’re in a store and wondering if you already have that book (I know I’m guilty of it, I have several copies of various volumes of Sandman, along with a few Asimov novels). Something that wouldn’t have originally occurred to me, but I think is incredibly handy now that I DO know is that since it populates its data from Amazon, it includes pricing information. The ramifications of having a quickly accessible, itemized list for insurance purposes is immense. Anyone who has ever been robbed or had a fire will immediately recognize the value of this sort of information handy.

Running with the library theme, Delicious Library actually supports checking out your media. You can create a list of potential “borrowers” (which can be populated via entries in your address book, as another example of integrated, innocuous computing). Delicious Library can track who you lent what to and when, and even can email them a friendly reminder when it comes time for them to give it back. Considering I’ve had books lent out for years at a time in the past, being able to see at a glance where things are is pretty handy.

Overall, I’m really pleased with the interface. Delicious Monster has managed to pack a lot of information into a clean, functional interface. There is a learning curve to the program, but it’s relatively shallow, and aided by good documentation in the help menu and liberal use of tool tips. In the course of a few hours, I feel confident with my understanding and use of the program.

There are a few quibbles and items that are on my wishlist for the program, though some come down to personal preference, and none are really deal breakers. I’ve quickly become accustomed to Aqua Unified and Burnt Aqua Unified interfaces, and Delicious Library is still using brushed metal (as I said, it’s a personal preference). Also, while Amazon is great in terms of populated a broad sampling of different media, sometimes an entry’s information can be lackluster at best. This isn’t a flaw of the program, so much as an unfortunate aspect of where they pull their information from. That said, I think it would be great if Delicious Library added additional databases to draw from, such as the Library of Congress, IMBD, or MobyGames, to at least augment Amazon’s information. Additionally, while the program currently supports ISBN-10 and ISBN-13, as far as I’ve been able to tell it doesn’t currently support ISSN (the periodical-based sibling of ISBN), though again, this may be a quirk of Amazon’s API. Most of the magazines I’ve tried adding are somewhat esoteric and old, however, so I’ll be happy to eat my words if I discover more mainstream magazines are covered. Other things that come to mind that I’d like to see include dynamic “smart” shelves, and some form of auto-completion when manually entering or updating an entry. None of these things really deter the program from being what it is, and doing its job very, very well — they would, however, be nice icing on the cake.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 5th, 2007 at 5:47 pm and is filed under AppleTalk. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.