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25 July 2008
I have worked for the past three years in the public library sector, and I have daily experience with professional library collection management software. I was keen to find out what Delicious Library could do, and if it had any potential applications beyond home use. This review was conducted with Delicious Monster 2 being run on a 3.06 ghz iMac core 2 duo, with two gigs of ram, connected to broadband via wifi.
Ease of use
Value for money
Price
$ 40 USD
Software/Hardware Requirements
Internet connected Mac running OSX 10.5 Leopard
iSight (or compatible external camera) required for barcode scanner functionality
Available from
Delicious Monster
Delicious Library 2 is available as a trial download from www.delicious-monster.com. The full version can be unlocked by paying the $40 US registration fee online and entering the software key that you receive via email. The download and set-up was completely painless, taking about 8 minutes to download the 27.6MB application file.
Aesthetically, Delicious Library 2 takes all it's cues from Apple's suite of iLife 08 applications, and iTunes, which it is designed to integrate with seamlessly.
DL2's answer to Coverflow is "Coverview" which lets you view your book, DVD, video-game, or any other item, displayed on a virtual bookshelf.
It took me a while to get used to the faux-woodgrain styling of these shelves, which reminded me of the use of wood paneling on early versions of GarageBand. However, once you start adding books or DVDs to DL2's shelves, you begin to realise how visually appealing it is to be able to see and browse your whole book collection at a glance.
iLife users will immediately be comfortable with the left hand side menu structure, which lets you switch between your different collections; books, DVDs, games, gadgets; just like you would switch between albums in iPhoto, or playlists in iTunes.
When you start Delicious Library 2 for the first time, it will already contain some pre-set iTunes shelves, which will preview all of your album covers, taken directly from your iTunes library. Double-clicking on an album in DL2 will launch iTunes, and start playing that album; double-clicking on an iTunes movie will open that movie in QuickTime.
Importing your library
One of Delicious Library 2's most well publicised and innovative features is its ability to let you quickly add items to your library by using your built-in iSight camera as a barcode scanner. According to the developer's website, DL2 uses advanced "image deconvolution" algorithms to interpret barcodes directly from your iSight's video feed, enabling you scan the universal product barcodes on the back of most DVDs, books and games simply by holding them up to your iSight. As soon as a barcode has been interpreted, Delicious Library 2 will automatically search Amazon.com for that product code. If it finds a match, it will then import information about the item that you scanned, including title, author, blurb, and cover-art (where available) and neatly display on its virtual bookshelf.
At least, that is the idea; I was immediately disappointed when I started trying to scan my DVD collection. The scanner would read the barcode, search for an average of 15 seconds, and then display an error message that the DVD I had scanned could not be identified. Out of a total of 100 DVDs scanned, Delicious Library 2 was only able to name 23 of them, and only 8 were automatically assigned the correct cover art. I also tried scanning some of my computer games, with even less encouraging results.
I was starting to wonder if the iSight barcode scanning feature was anything but a gimmick. In actual fact though, the iSight works surprisingly well as a scanner but it is the Amazon database that DL2 uses as it's back-end for searching barcodes, that is letting the program down.
Since Amazon's site is based in the US, and they do not typically sell region 4 encoded DVDs (or Australasian releases of computer games or software). Unfortunately, since different region versions of the same DVD will be assigned different Universal Product Codes, it means that DL2 is unable to recognise a New Zealand, region 4 copy of say, Pulp Fiction, even though there are plenty of American Zone-1 copies on Amazon. Note that you can change which Amazon store it pulls information from if you have any DVDs purchased from the other regions that Amazon supports - US, Canada, UK, Germany, France, Japan, but there is no localised Amazon store for New Zealand or Australia.
I emailed the developers to ask about this, and they were able to confirm that the problem lay with Amazon's lack of region 4 content. The good news is that they do plan to work on developing some plug-ins that will add regional support for New Zealand and Australia, although this may be a little while off.
Fortunately, in the meantime, if you have trouble adding an item using the barcode scan function, then you can also search by title, author, ISBN number or keyword. DL2 will take a few seconds searching Amazon, and then return a list of possible selections, complete with cover-art for you to choose from.
When adding books however, there should be no need for this most of the time.
Where Delicious Library 2 was sluggish in scanning DVDs, often returning no results, I found that it was impressively capable of scanning and instantaneously recognising all of the books that I could throw at it. I was able to work my way through my book collection in a matter of minutes, and was left looking for more books around the house to scan, just for the fun of it.
I tested the software on a whole pile of New Zealand fiction and non-fiction books that I brought home from work. Generally it had no problems recognising NZ books, although I did find one or two rarer non-fiction works which DL2 could not find matches for; hardly surprising when they probably had very limited print-runs, and I could not find any information about them when searching on Google either.
Browsing and sharing your library
If you do have a large collection, there is a search-bar for finding any item instantly, and you can also use "Smart shelves" to display for instance, non-fiction books by Dewey Decimal Number, (provided they have one assigned).
The developers have utilised OSX's speech recognition engine by including the ability to search for a book or other item by speaking the title out-loud. This actually works pretty well, and can be activated or deactivated from the "Edit" menu. The small "widget" that pops up on the screen to capture your audio can be dragged to wherever you want on the screen, which is useful also.
A really good feature is the ability to export a list of your books and other items in various formats, including Excel (but not Numbers), and very usefully for students, various bibliographic formats. If you had an essay to write, you could scan the books that were using as reference materials into your library and then use Delicious Library 2 to compile and print your whole bibliography.
Delicious Library 2 also lets you publish your library as a miniature web app formatted for viewing on an iPhone or an iPod Touch. Unfortunately this requires you to host the webpage externally if you want to view it anywhere but on your local network. If you have a Mobile Me account, Delicious Library 2 can automatically upload the web version of your library for hosting.
If you end up lending a book to a friend, DL2 lets you record who you have loaned it to and for how long. The program uses the Mac Address Book to let you select one of your contacts, who will then appear on the menu to the left of the screen, and allow you to drag books from your library onto them. DL2 will also place a reminder for you in iCal on the date you specify to remind you to chase your friend up and get the book back, before they lend it to someone else.
This lending function is a simple idea and seems to work quite well, although it is clearly designed for home-use and does not offer enough features for it to be used in a public library environment.
One of the most obvious but useful reasons for keeping a computerised record of all your books, DVDs and other assets is for insurance purposes. Delicious Library 2 can automatically obtain market values for your books and DVDs on Amazon, which can be useful when calculating how much your collection may be worth in terms of replacement value. You can also use this feature to help you list items on Amazon yourself, if you are thinking of selling part of your library. I could see Delicious Library actually being quite a useful tool for second hand book-shop owners, who may want a way to keep a searchable record of what books they have in store, and their going values, but might not otherwise want to use more complex financial management software to manage their stock.
Conclusion
All in all, I would recommend DL2 to anyone who can see the sense in keeping track of their Book and DVD collections, and don’t mind having a bit of fun while they are doing so.
- Very smooth, and nice easy to read documentation.
- Generally the program is very easy to use, but lacks user customisation, and advanced functionality in some key areas as a result.
- Good value for money if it sounds like the kind-of software you will actually use.
- Online support is reasonably fast, and very friendly.
- Only scored 4.5/5 for value for money, because I'm not sure a 5 would be justified until localisation issues have been fixed for New Zealanders.
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MattD
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Great thanks for review. The key localisation issue for NZ is that there is not searchable database available for region 4 products. DL2 was a massive architectural change, and incorporates full integration with Leopard There are a lot of fantastic v2 features that build upon a great product. - Spotlight integration - Quicklook to view items even when DL2 is not running - Core Animation for deleting items (burning books, shattering DVDs etc) - CoreData framework support with major performance improvements, and large libraries, where v1 used to get bogged down - Controllable via Apple remote control (including starting songs, movies, 'Look Inside' ) - Bonjour sharing of other libraries on your network - Ability to import friends' libraries (if published to web) - AppleScript support (excellent) - Amazon 'Look Inside' preview of books - Visual image outline for Gadgets and Tools - Multiple Currency Support and conversion - Recommendations and items Owned! and many more Also great to use with Bluetooth Scanners as you do not need to bring all items to you desk. It scans vast amount of items and stores in scanner, then when back in range of your Mac, the codes are transferred and items added to the library. |
MattD
said:
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DL on GetSatisfaction, MacNN Forums Track and participate in feedback, discussions, questions and ideas on GetSatisfaction or the older style forum on MacNN |
Darryn Lowe
said:
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A bluetooth scanner might seem cool but you've still only got a 10m range and that will be affected by shelves etc. It would be interesting to see if it supports PDTs (scanners with internal memory) so that you can scan the barcodes then dump them to Delicious Library. Failing this your best bet is to have DL on a MacBook or MacBook Pro and go to each area. That way also you can do manual searches if nothing is returned by the search engine. It would be great to have a New Zealand or even just an Australian search so when this comes it will be awesome although who they'd do the searches through is anyone's guess. Maybe Real Ripoff I mean Real Groovy? Something interesting to note about MobileMe publishing. Apparently any application that publishes to MobileMe needs to be rewritten as HomePages is being shutdown. HomePages is different to iWeb's location so effectively if you have a MobileMe account currently you have two websites available to you. With HomePages being shutdown everything will have to be published to the same place iWeb would normally publish to. This in my opinion is a great thing because it keeps directory structures simple. It also means that your Delicious Library would be able to use your domain name if you have one setup. So for example instead of: http://homepages.mac.com/lowededwookie/deliciouslibrary it could be: http://www.lowededwookie.com/deliciouslibrary Personal domains aren't available to HomePages only iWeb sites. |
MattD
said:
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Darryn, the BT scanner I was referring to does exactly that. It stores multiple items in memory and then when in range it downloads to DL2. I have an early Flic BT Scanner. The newer RoV looks similar but is meant to be an improvement. Understand it can store If you've got a lot of items and a Bluetooth-equipped Mac, get our second-generation RoV® wireless LASER barcode scanner to scan in items from all over your house, business, school, church, synagogue, or small unmapped pacific island full of polar bears. Thanks for heads up on .Mac/Mobile me... have not updated my library for a while. |
Darryn Lowe
said:
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Cool. I never realised that it stored entries. Mind you I didn't really delve too deep into it.  What could be done with apps that publish to MobileMe would be simply to do what MacGourmet (reviewed under the Recipe Management review) does in that it allows you to publish to which directory you want instead of automatically setting it. This way you can set the publish directory to /Web/Sites/deliciouslibrary and this will work as: http://web.me.com/lowededwookie/deliciouslibrary or if you have a personal domain http://www.lowededwookie.com/deliciouslibrary Even if it's hardcoded to save here it won't be a massive change for these companies. |
MattD
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Good point. Also aside from MobileMe, you can publish to a folder on desktop, an FTP server, or iWeb. Then have control of where and how you wish to publish. |
Darryn Lowe
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That makes even more sense. Save directly to iDisk. There's nothing that is path specific because I copied the published MobileMe folder to the iWeb path and it works with no worries. |
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