Delicious Library: A Review

After showing the grandparents Delicious Library’s iSight scanning feature, they set me on a mammoth of a task; they wanted me to set up a catalogue of all their books. And what a mammoth that was. A big, furry, brown, knock-your-door-down woolly mammoth. They have a three-part floor-to-ceiling bookcase with 18 total shelves, 6 shelves in the study and two bookcases in the bedroom, 8 total shelves. The shelves in the study and bedroom are stacked two deep on every shelf. As you can probably guess, this took quite a while, giving me some very extensive use of Delicious Library (Version 1). So what was it like?

Setting Up The Library

Getting the library to the point of being able to start the process was a doddle. Just open the app and there it was, ready to import all the books. I wanted to sort all the books by location, so I added a virtual shelf for each physical shelf in the house. This was very quick and easy to do, just clicking the “+” sign at the bottom of the Collections panel added each one.

Importing The Books

Importing the books was also simple, and even quite fun. The main way of importing is using the iSight camera (unless you already had a wired one, there’s no way to get one now – only built-ins available now) to scan the barcodes of the books. Any cynical readers out there will most definitely be saying to themselves right now, “That can’t possibly work for every single book”. And in some ways, you’re actually right. 97% of the barcodes I scanned did work, and Delicious picked up, from Amazon, what the book was from the scan. Another 2.9% of them didn’t actually have barcodes (they are my Grandparents, remember), or the barcodes were too old to still work on Amazon, or the books were American and so had different barcodes. The last 0.1% just refused to scan altogether. However, this last 3% was easy to import still because of the fact that you can search for a title, author, or ISBN number – which means that no book is impossible to import.

Organising The Library

Obviously there’s no point importing all those books without doing anything with them. I was planning on sorting by location, so I moved the books to their appropriate shelves by dragging. This was very intuitive. To be able to then sort by location later, all I had to do was select them, click in the Location  In Building field and typing in the location – Study, Shelf 4, for example. There was also the option to add custom art – that is, the picture shown for the front cover of the book.

Sharing The Library

Seeing as they wanted the library to remember where all their books were, I needed to export the library to give it to them. This is where the disappointment came. There was only one option: to export as a .txt file. Even this was, to be honest, rubbish. It doesn’t get formatted and isn’t even set out logically. To get the library to them, I had to download the free trial of Library 2 so that I could export it to Excel. I was not happy about this.

Report Card

Set-Up – 5/5          Importing – 5/5          Organisation – 5/5          Exporting – 0/5

Overall – 15/20

Final Thoughts: Delicious Library is a great app, but it is let down on its one export feature. If I had the option, I’d get Version 2, but I don’t. I recommend you do though.

“Boom!” – Steve Jobs, “Let’s Rock” Event

Well, it may be “Boom!” and everything’s done for good old Steve Jobs (who’s apparently dead), but it’s certainly not for me. Having downloaded iTunes 8 and it working perfectly on my Mac, getting it to work on Harry’s PC was a rather big hassle. First, it wouldn’t install properly. Then, once it did install, everything was pixelated and pink. Finally, having sorted that out, it won’t find my shared library, which is why I’m now downloading my 257 songs onto a memory stick to transfer them over. You see, he used to just use the shared library to listen to my music, but now it won’t work. That’s Windows for you.

I also had a mini Microsoft Office-related trauma involving the mens’ public toilets, a rather large wooden bat and a bar of lead… No, I’m joking. It was actually a lot less exciting than that. My school have just upgraded to Office 2007, and I had to continue a PowerPoint presentation for homework. However, I saved it onto my memory stick, brought it home and… Uh oh. It’s a .pptx file, and I have Office 2004. Whoops! So I hastily downloaded the 2007 to 2004 file converter from Microsoft, and then got on with choosing my Corporate Identity for my ICT course.

Same Old…

Today was a rather non-exciting day, due to the fact that we could not think of anything to do except go into town. We got up, went into town, where I bought a book – The General, by Robert Muchamore – then we came home again to have lunch before spending the rest of the day pottering around on the computer. I started to sort out my iTunes library, adding a few new songs, and creating a sorting system whereby it only plays songs that I like. In the evening, I took the train home, filled my pencil case for school then came up here to go on my Mac. I found a good games site, which you can find here, where you get “badges” for doing certain things in the games.

Hopefully tomorrow will be more interesting.