Delicious Library 2 (via Mowser)

Check out Delicious Library 2

Delicious Monster Catalog your books, movies, music, software, toys, tools, electronics, & video games.

When we demo Delicious Library to people, about â…” of them instantly say this:

“Wait, I just hold a CD or DVD or video game or book or whatever up to my webcam, and it magically reads the UPC and downloads that item’s cover and all pertinent information about it, and displays all my stuff on photorealistic shelves? I’ll take it! Right now! This is why I bought a computer in the first place! ”

But a few people are skeptical, or slightly less obsessive. “Ok,” they say, “then I have my stuff in my computer. Big whoop. I can just look at my real shelf, right now, for free.”

And we say, “True, but have you ever had someone break in and steal all your CDs or DVDs? Your insurance company wants an exact list of what you had, but you can’t remember every last thing, and so for years afterwards you think, ‘Drat, I forgot to list Rocky Horror Picture Show, and now it’s too late!’ Well, with Delicious Library you always have a complete inventory of your stuff, with replacement costs. You can print it or back it up to the web, so it’s not going anywhere.

“Or, have you ever loaned a book or DVD or $200 DeWalt Cordless Driver to a friend, and forgotten which friend? And then bought another? With Delicious Library you just drag any item onto any friend from your Address Book, and it’ll remember the loan for you — and even put an entry in iCal reminding you when it’s due. Or maybe you have something lying around you don’t use, like an out-of-print book, that’s worth serious bucks and you don’t know it? Because with Delicious Library 2 you always know the current value of your things, and can put your used items up for sale with three clicks. Or maybe you just want to publish your library to the web and share it with your friends...”

At this point, usually the only people who aren’t buying are the ones who don’t own Macs. To them, we say: we’re sorry. For the rest of you... enjoy.

Publish your library to .Mac with a single click, or import your FTP preferences from Transmit and use that (if you’re the sort of person who knows what “FTP” is). If you have iLife ’08, we can even squirt your library directly into your iWeb site.

Use one of the pretty templates our artist made for you, or create your own using standard HTML and CSS (with a few extensions of course).

Publish your whole library, or select only the shelves you want the world to see when you publish — remember to mark private items with our special flag, so you don’t accidentally let your patients know you’re reading Appendectomies for Dummies. Web Publishing

Catalog your books, movies, music, software, toys (including board games), tools, electronics, & video games... and even your clothes and jewelry (but you’ll mostly have to enter those last two by hand). Lots of Categories

Delicious Library 2 has no absolute item limit; it uses Apple’s new CoreData framework to drastically cut down on how long it takes us to load and save files, and their new CoreAnimation framework to efficiently draw tons of items without any pauses.

We routinely test with five thousand items on our laptop machines and find Delicious Library 2 quite snappy — your performance will depend on your machine’s available RAM, its graphics processor, and its disk speed (in that order). Large Libraries

When you export your collection to the web (see “Web Publishing”) we automatically add in a special version optimized for your iPhone or iPod touch. It’s like having your library in your pocket when you go to your favorite bookstore (or video store, or game shop, or electronics hut), except you don’t need really, really big pockets. iPhone Export

Delicious Library 2 won an Apple Design Award for “Best Apple OS X Leopard Application” before Leopard itself was even finished! Designed and developed exclusively for OS X Leopard (10.5), we take advantage of almost every new Leopard feature, including CoreAnimation for incredibly fast graphics and CoreData to allow huge collections and QuickLook to view individual items without launching Library.

Don’t have Leopard yet? Well... Delicious Library 1 can still be purchased for users of OS X 10.3 and 10.4, but we’d encourage you to upgrade when you can. Built for Leopard

Reprogram Delicious Library 2 with our full read and modify AppleScript® support.

In an industry first, script authors can not only add their scripts to Delicious Library 2’s main menu, but can now specify exactly where the new command should appear. Now your new “Import from MyStinkyOldApp” command script can be put under the File ▶ Import, where it should be, instead of being exiled to the some Scripts menu ghetto with all the other misplaced commands.

If you’re not wild about AppleScript, you can also write Cocoa tools or shell scripts that extend Delicious Library 2, and have those appear as new menu options as well. AppleScript

Export to the standard BibTeX format (or to the Bookends application), or rich text in the six most common bibliography formats — AMA, Turabian, APA, CBE, Chicago, MLA, or even OMGWTFBBQ. Bibliography

Speak the title of any book, CD, DVD, or video game and it’s instantly highlighted.

In version 2, you may speak just the first part of a multi-part title, so saying “Visual Explanations” will find Edward Tufte’s Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative. Voice Search

Since Delicious Library 2 keeps track of the current value of your things, you may discover that some of your books or DVDs are worth way more than you think. Filthy lucre! But how to get it?

Well, one click in Delicious Library takes you to Amazon’s selling site for the item, a second selects the item’s condition, and then you hit ok (click #3).

That’s it. It costs you nothing up front, and Amazon will send you a check as soon as the item sells and tell you where to ship it. Three-click Selling

Delicious Library 2’s import helper examines your text files and suggests options, easily snarfing data from a variety of formats.

Export your library to XML, delimited text files, Excel, a variety of standard bibliography formats, or even back to Delicious Library 1 if you’re a masochist.

Delicious Library 2’s native file format is industry-standard sqlite3, and, for hackers, we’ve even included our ‘xcdatamodel’ source, so you can write your own CoreData applications that read Delicious Library 2’s files (if AppleScript isn’t enough). Import & Export

Take your virtual card catalog with you — just plug in your iPod (except Touch) and automatically sync your library to your iPod’s Notes menu.

If you have an iPod touch or iPhone, use one-click web publishing to publish specially-formatted versions of your library for viewing on your device. Now when you go to the store, your shelves go with you. iPod Sync

Print your library using one of our very beautiful built-in templates, or create your own if you have mad HTML and CSS skillz.

We include a compact format that’s perfect for folding up and sticking in your pocket when you go to the bookstore (or video store, or music store...) if you don’t have an iPhone. Printing

We add your albums, TV shows, movies, & audiobooks from iTunes, and put ’em all on their own shelves, just like your physical items. Compare your physical CD collection to your iTunes CD collection by selecting both shelves and seeing which items are doubled! Publish your iTunes collection to the web with a single click. Launch iTunes albums (use your Apple Remote!) from Delicious Library.

Individual iTunes songs are grouped together into albums on our shelves to make them easier to view — Apple liked this feature so much they copied it for iTunes 7, but it’s still pretty great to have 'em in Delicious Library.

As you modify your iTunes collection, Delicious Library notices the changes and keeps itself instantly up-to-date; rate a song in iTunes, and when you click back on Delicious Library you’ll find the album’s rating is changed too! iTunes Shelves

As in iTunes or iPhoto, smart shelves in Delicious Library 2 allow you to make up rules for a shelf, and have it populate itself with the items that match. And, if you understand boolean logic, you can build up extra-complex expressions with AND and OR using simple drag and drop (just hit the ⎇ key when you add a line).

You could make a shelf of hardback mystery books that are currently worth over $40, or DeWalt tools that are more than 2 feet tall, or even DVDs from the ’70s whose cover is green or blue. And with our industry-first automatic currency conversion, rules based on prices will work between different countries, so you can compare £ to ¥ to US$ and get their real, relative values. Smart Shelves

Apple’s new CoreAnimation framework allows application developers to get the speed of OpenGL, which is what games like Quake use to draw their stunning graphics.

Delicious Library 2 uses CoreAnimation to draw its shelves, so scrolling and zooming are incredibly smooth and responsive, even with huge libraries. And, since we had graphics power to spare, we added some cool animations... because it made us smile. Fast Graphics

If you and a friend are in the same place and are both running Delicious Library 2, you’ll automaticaly share your libraries. Now your LAN parties just got a little geekier.

If your friends are remote, you can still add their published libraries from the web and view them from inside your copy of Delicious Library 2 — you can specify where their library is or even let Delicious Library find it for you. Bonjour Sharing

Use your built-in or external iSight web camera to scan in your stuff — just hold the barcode up to the camera and it’s instantly added to your digital shelves (assuming it’s in our vast database of items).

Delicious Library was the first application ever with this feature, and although we have spawned a raft of imitators do not be fooled — as of this writing none of the others work with internal web cams, like the ones on every iMac and MacBook and MacBook Pro. Only Delicious Library has support for internal cameras. iSight Scanning

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.

If you wander out of wireless range, the scanner automatically remembers up to 4,000 barcodes that will be imported the next time you’re back near your computer. Bluetooth Scanning

Browse through shelves and media using your Apple Remote® (if your Mac has one). Pressing ‘play’ works as you’d expect on iTunes songs or movies and will “Look Inside” books. You can also manually set ‘play’ to open any URL for any of your items. Apple Remote

Always losing your cordless drills? Or DVDs? Used books? No longer.

Drag any item onto a person from the built-in OS X Address Book and check it out to a friend or family member. A due-date is automatically placed in your built-in OS X Calendar, reminding you to remind them that you may not want to lose another copy of The Long Run. Item Checkout

If you’re into tweaking your data, you’ll appreciate our new autocomplete feature, which works for fields like actors, creators, composers, platforms (&c) and snarfs values from other items you own.

Fields like languages, formats, platforms, conditions, MPAA ratings, and ESRB ratings also have built-in autocompletion presets, since, for instance, language names don’t change very often. Autocomplete

Every time you buy an item recommended by Delicious Library 2, Delicious Monster donates (and usually tops) the revenue sharing that it gets from Amazon’s affiliates program (~5-7%) to various charities around the world. Delicious Library users have so far raised tens of thousands of dollars for hurricane relief, for Child’s Play, and for 826 Valencia. Support Charities

Delicious Library 2 automatically gathers native details for scanned items from six different web stores around the world: The United States, Canada, Japan, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom. Delicious Library 2’s interface has been translated into many languages, and more are always being added.

Internationalized

In another industry-first, we incorporate automatic conversion of the world’s most popular currencies, so if you sort a list of books whose prices are in £ and ¥ and US$, you’ll always get the correct ordering. (This also works for smart shelves when price is a criterion.) Currency Conversion

New in version 2.0

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From Your Shelf to Your Screen

Import all your stuff onto your digital shelves using your Mac’s iSight webcam, our wireless barcode scanner, or your keyboard.

Most people will want to use their built-in iSight® webcam to scan their items, since it’s free and it’s cooler than heck. Just hold the barcode from the book, movie, CD, or whatever up to your webcam and your item magically appears on your digital shelf seconds later — and the title is even read aloud, so you don’t have to watch what you’re doing.

Delicious Library pioneered using a webcam to scan barcodes, and is still the only program that works with built-in iSights — these do not have the ability to focus. We had to write a new algorithm, using hard math and research papers and stuff, to do “image deconvolution” where we actually use the vector processor to re-focus the out-of-focus image, like in the movies or CSI, except for real. (If you’re familiar with Photoshop, their “unsharp mask” is a primitive deconvolution filter, but suffers from artifacts that make it unusable for barcode scanning.)

If your Mac didn’t come with a built-in camera, you can use an Apple external iSight or any QuickTime®-supported digital video camera. Or search for items by hand (see the button above).

If you have tons of items, or don’t want to have to take your items to your computer to scan them in, check out our Bluetooth wireless scanner (again, check out the button above).

If you’re a serious collector (or simply love cool gadgets — it’s ok, you’re with friends, here), check out our incredible Microvision RoV® Wireless Laser Barcode Scanner. This scanner connects wirelessly (via Bluetooth) to Delicious Library to look up barcodes as you scan them off your shelves. You can wander around your house (up to ~50 feet away from your computer) scanning everything in sight, instantly importing items into Delicious Library as they are scanned, without being tethered to your machine. Cooler yet, since Delicious Library reads out the titles of items as they are scanned, you’ll hear your Mac in the other room, calling out, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. And if it has trouble looking up a barcode you’ll hear it say, “Lookup failed,” so you can go enter the item by hand.

But wait! If you wander outside the wireless range, no worries: the scanner’s on-board memory will automatically kick in and record up to 4,000 barcodes. When you walk back into range (after, say, scanning your collection upstairs, or at the office) Delicious Library connects to the scanner and imports all the stored barcodes. In effect, you get a wireless barcode scanner with an unlimited range.

The RoV® Wireless Laser Bar Code Scanner is the coolest way to go if you’ve got the scratch. It’s not cheap, but it’s cheaper than any other real LASER scanner we’ve seen. The “RoV” is Microvision’s second-generation scanner, and it replaces the large, clunky oscillating mirror with Microvision’s MEMS technology — a tiny chip that has teeny little electro-mechanical mirrors on it that guide the laser much more precisely than the previous generation of mechanical scanners. The RoV scans barcodes quickly and accurately, and it works well in any light conditions. You can buy the RoV wireless scanner directly from us when you buy Delicious Library, for less than it would cost to buy a Bluetooth laser scanner alone (without software) from any source we’ve seen. If you can find the same scanner for less, for gosh sakes buy it!

If your computer has no built-in iSight, you don’t have to invest in our barcode scanner. To get your stuff into Delicious Library, all you have to do is type in part of an author or title from your books, movies, CDs, or whatever, and Delicious Library will instantly return a list of matches. Select one and we fill in all their details and covers for you.

This is also handy if you have a large number of items from a single creator: for instance, you could just type in “Beck” and see all his albums, and then highlight the whole mess of them and click “add.” Sometimes this’ll be faster than scanning each one. Or, if you have older books or records with no UPCs on them, you can use this technique to find them. And, if all else fails and your item is so rare it’s not in any database we know, you can enter your item by hand, and even drag a snapshot onto it so it looks right.

But, if you have hundreds of items to import you might look into buying our RoV Wireless Laser Barcode Scanner — it’ll save you a ton of typing and it’s a heck of a lot more fun.