News & Views

Delicious Library Catalogs Your Media
By Bill Davies

Let me start this review by saying “I finally found a good use for my iSight videocam.” I don’t mean to be a complete luddite, but I just never really saw the need to videoconference on the computer.
But then I started hearing people talk about this application called Delicious Library so I decided to take a look. Delicious Library 3.0 is a program for cataloging and managing your "library" of books, movies, music, DVDs, and video games. Quite frankly, that’s not a task that I’m interested in, and in our house we have far too many books to even tempt me to start such a project.
And you can imagine how boring a cataloging program can be. That’s why you need to look at Delicious Library, to see what happens when the developers get just a teensy bit creative.
Sure, you can type in all your listings by hand. But Delicious Library offers support for barcode scanning using an iSight or Bluetooth barcode scanner, automatic downloading of information about the scanned media from Amazon (including similar items, user reviews, etc.), the ability to track items lent to people, the ability to send recommendations about a book to friends, and much more.
To see how well it worked, I pulled out my son’s Superman “Diamond Anniversary Edition” DVD, launched Delicious Library on our G4 iMac, and all of a sudden a little window on the screen poped open and I was looking at myself. So the iSight turned itself on automatically and was ready for input.
I then held up the back of the DVD so that the iSight could read the bar code. This took a bit of experimentation because (having not read the documentation) I was unclear how close or how far to hold the DVD case from the camera. Nothing seemed to happen, so I created a new “card” in the library and held the bar code a bit closer to the camera, letting the image fill approximately 10% of the viewable area. (See figure.) The presto, without me typing anything, Delicious Library read the bar code, queried Amazon.com for details on the publication (author, release date, current value, description, and even a high-resolution picture of the cover), and filled in all the information for me. If you think this is clever, you’re not the only one, as this product was awarded O’Reilly’s MacOS X Innovators Award for 2004. And now you know why I think I finally found a good use for my iSight camera! I suspect that the faster your Mac, the faster the iSight processes every single frame of digital video, but I have to say it was not too bad on our G4 iMac. And I have to wonder about books we’ve inherited from both our parents or friends; I mean, did they even have bar codes in the 1960’s? I’ll have to pull out some of those old books and see.
Quoting from Delicious Software, “using the same technology found in $800 industrial-strength CCD barcode scanners, Delicious Library reads every single frame of digital video; seeking out, targeting, and instantly decoding any visible barcodes. This results in a seamless process of scanning that lets you import about 750 items an hour (assuming you can move your arms that fast). At that rate the staff of the new downtown Seattle Central Library could work together to import all of their 1.4 million books into Delicious Library in just over 5 hours.
Once you get the information in, how do you get it out? Delicious Library offers iPod sync so you can take your catalog with you, lets you issue voice commands to initiate a search, and if you can’t remember who wrote that book you liked but you remember the cover, Delicious Library lets you browse the cover art. (You can also just type part of an author or book name and get back the results that match.) And not surprisingly, you can find related items by the same author or subject on Amazon, list parts of your collection for sale, etc. While I can’t prove it, I’ll speculate that Delicious Monster Software receives a small commission from every Amazon sale they generate.
Sound great? Ready to start cataloging? You can download the software and enter up to 25 items without paying a cent, by visiting
http://www.delicious-monster.com
Delicious Library is the first release from Delicious Monster Software, a new company formed by two former employees of the Omni Group, makers of OmniWeb and OmniGraffle. The cost is $40 and it only works on OS X.
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(c) Bill Davies, MacNexus 2004. May be reprinted by any Mac user group with attribution to MacNexus.

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