April 18, 2005
Delicious Library!
Tonight I've been playing around with the Delicious Library, it's pretty cool software for organising your books, DVD, video and CD collection. The GUI is nice, it presents you a "bookshelf" style view of all your books, etc, graphically with their covers, etc.
The searching is all done via Amazon (US, UK, Germany or Japan), and it retrieves all the usual data such as publisher, release date, region code, genres, retail prices, and Amazon user ratings. You can also right click on any book, etc, and view, buy or sell it on Amazon.
The ingenious part is that it can use your iSight as a bar code scanner, which makes data entry really fast. You simply hold up the book, etc, to your iSight camera and it will read the bar code off the item and automatically find it on Amazon.
Delicious Library will also let you define a group of "borrowers" from your addressbook who are people you lend your books, DVD's, etc to. You can then drag and drop items onto their icons and it automatically manages who has what, and puts a reminder in your iCal calendar so you don't forget to get everything back.
In addition to this, you can synchronize all the data to your iPod so you have a list of your belongings when you go shopping, etc.
Once the data is all entered into your library you can then search any of the data fields via a search dialog similar to most others in Apple applications. It's also possible to arrange items into shelfs of particular kinds (eg. Computer books, Action DVD's, etc), however I didn't find any smart capability to do this like smart iTunes playlists - so far it's a manual process.
All in all, it's a pretty nice package for managing your digital and printed media.
Update: You can also export your Delicious Library to HTML for web publishing using DeliciWeb.
Posted by crafterm at April 18, 2005 12:22 AM | TrackBack