I’m currently in California, been here since Friday (June 6), and will remain here until June 29. We’re here for conferences, mainly, as this week is WWDC08 in San Francisco, a conference for Apple Software Developers like my boyfriend, and the last week of my stay in this state is the (previously mentioned) American Library Association Annual Conference in Anaheim.
I am not attending WWDC with my boyfriend, but he will be attending ALA with me. Even though I did not sit through the Keynote and watch SJ deliver the next surprise, I’m still pretty gaga about Apple. I use a MacBook Pro, and I’ve preferred Apple computers since I started using one this time last year. As a recent convert, the differences between Apple’s OS X and Windows XP/Vista are obvious and fresh in my mind. I don’t miss my old large and clunky Dell laptop. When working in the library, I can use both freely, but I prefer a Mac.
Everything I produce on the computer seems all the more valuable if I do it on a Mac. Programs are simple and intuitive: their functionality adheres to the metaphors that inspired them.
One wonderful application for the Mac is Delicious Library 2 by Delicious Monster. Delicious Library 2 allows the user to catalog everything: books, movies, albums, software, videogames, toys, gadgets, tools, and apparel. (The first version of Delicious Library only allowed the user to catalog books, movies, and albums.)
Delicious Library 2 Screenshot
What’s particularly awesome about this application is that it does not require the user to do much work, as far as typing in long strings of numbers or metadata for each object. If the application is installed on a Mac with a webcam, it can be used as a barcode scanner. The barcode scanner picks up the UPC or ISBN and looks it up in Amazon’s database, and then collects the metadata from Amazon associated with that item (e.g. publisher/label, release date, genres, format, dimensions, number of pages, retail price, current value, purchase date, ISBN, Dewey Decimal, EAN, and country for books). And if a working webcam is not available, it is also possible to search by a known metadata field such as title, author, or ISBN. The application also works with a bluetooth scanner, the Microvision ROV Scanner with Bluetooth, which would greater enable cataloging of a larger collection, such as the collection of a small library.
I like your description of the feature set, but how do you employ Delicious Library? One of the common criticisms of the program is that it’s a great application without a clear use case. In what contexts do you think it suggests a specific use?
As a game designer, I use it myself to catalogue games, categorize them by how important it is for me to play them, and use the metadata to physically locate them on the shelves.
How do you use it? Do you use it for multiple media? How many features, out of the total number of features, would you say that you use? How would you streamline the interface if there is some redundant task that you must perform?
I’d love to see complete critiques of software from you (: I’d also really like to see you write about LocoRoco…