The macosxhints Rating:
[Score: 7 out of 10]
- Developer: Delicious Monster
- Price: $39.95
Ever since I've had a computer, I've been looking for the ideal way to catalog our belongings, primarily for insurance purposes. I've used everything from self-developed HyperCard stacks to FileMaker databases (both self-written and purchased). I even tried using Quicken. But in the end, all the tools suffered from one major downside: it was too much work to catalog everything we already had, and adding new purchases was very tedious.
Then along comes Delicious Library (DL for short). DL is an application that catalogs your books, DVDs, CDs, and video games using an intuitive graphical interface. It also greatly speeds the process by using your iSight (or other FireWire camera) to read the barcodes from your stuff and look up the values on the web. You'll have more info on your stuff than you might even have wanted -- publisher, publication date, Amazon users ratings, genres, etc. The use of the camera to read the barcodes is a nice innovation; I was able to catalog nearly 800 items in something less than six to eight hours of work, spread across three days.
This application absolutely blew me away with its features and interface (click the picture at left for a larger version), and so I thought I'd write a full-blown review on it. Then I realized that (a) I don't have the time to do that, and (b) lots [that's Ars Technica's review, the most thorough I've seen] of other people have already done similar things, and they've covered much of what I would have discussed! So instead, I'll just do my usual PotW summary, and let you read the above-linked reviews for the details. Oh yea, there's a small Easter Egg hiding in DL, too -- read on to find it :).
On some fronts, DL scores a 10+ out of 10 -- its use of iSight to read the barcodes is what makes the app work for me.
However, on other fronts, it scores much lower -- it's crashed on me a few times, and there are a number of obvious features missing, although it is a 1.0 release. The most glaring omission is a tie-in to the iTunes library. I have all these CDs already in iTunes; wouldn't it be great if DL could just grab the info from there, then look up the data for me? Also, I'd love the ability to have "smart" collections, much as you can have in iTunes and iPhoto. Finally, the application is (presently) very much US-centric, as it relies heavily on the US Amazon site. It's also tied in from a purchasing standpoint; DL uses its referrer number when you visit Amazon, so any purchases you make will give a commission to the Delicious Monster folks. I don't necessarily have a problem with that, but I wish they'd been more up front about it on their site. Finally, at $40, it's a tad expensive for something you may not use every day -- and that's a per computer license, not "licenses in use at once" license.
I won't use most of the "borrowing" features that let you track items you've loaned to others, but for use as an app to simply track our growing collection of stuff, DL's speed and interface is unbeatable. Once a 1.1 (or whatever) release comes out to squash the bugs and add a few new features, it will easily become a '10' in my opinion.
Oh yea, about that Easter Egg ... if you want to experience it for yourself, make sure "Speak scanned titles" is enabled in the preferences, and then scan any Harry Potter book or movie. If you'd rather ruin the surprise, just watch this QuickTime movie [558KB]. And turn up the volume before you do so :).

