delicious library sale

Hundreds of people, tens of thousands of books, all jammed in an old airplane hangar out by the sound garden. Yes, the biannual SPL library sale can be a bit overwhelming.

SPL Library Sale
Aaaaahhhhh!

One of the things that happens a lot is I go there, and come back with twenty books that I already have. This year I had help. It starts with actually inventorying all the books I actually have. A pain in the ass that was lessened a bit by delicious monster's library.

delicious library screenshot
screenshot

It has a lot of cool features. Like isight barcode scanning that looks your stuff up on amazon and fills in the details for you. It keeps track of loans. And most importantly for the library sale, ipod export.

ipod icon on delicious library
ipod icon

It sticks a note in your ipod notes directory for each of your things. It even includes a snapshot of your 'smart shelves'. So while you're being jostled around by a crush of bookfans and trying to remember if you own "Cause of Death" or you just read it from the library, you can look it up. (And without lugging your computer around, or having to find a printer)

library catalog on an ipod
oh, I do already have it

So, delicious library is pretty useful. It's not the best thing ever though. It is buggy; I didn't mention the web export feature because it crashes the program for me (I suspect Japanese characters are the problem).

The worst thing about it though, is its tendency to make the wrong assumption when scanning old barcodes. Every week it picks a new movie to default to import when it can't find the book I'm looking for (this week, a best of Victor Borge vhs, last week it was something about Marilyn Monroe). To mitigate this a bit, you can make it speak the results (using the default mac os x voice), so you can move on to something else and it will tell you if it found the right thing.

Another bad thing. The UI for picking the exact edition you have, when you have to search by hand, is terrible. You type in "Murder Most Foul" and it shows you 50 titles, dates and covers (mostly blank). No option to search further. You can get more details, but it opens up an amazon window in your browser, which I don't want to do 50 times per book. My feature request was met with (paraphrasing) "we have to make the software more stable first; we'll think about that later". Not very encouraging for software that I actually paid for.

Update
If I had checked my mail before writing this post, I would have found a patch waiting for me for the web export (to folder) bug that I mentioned earlier. Which I just tried and it works.

I only filed the bug report this weekend. Quick work guys! Thanks! (Can we talk features now *grins*)

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