Digital Home Thoughts: Absolutely Delicious... Delicious Library 1.1 Reviewed!

Who Needs to Catalog Their Media?
Why in the world would anyone want to catalog their media? After all, it's your collection, so you should know what you own and what you don't, right? Wrong. There have been several times when I made an impulse purchase on a CD at Target, when it turned out that I actually owned the CD in the first place!

Enter Delicious Library. Delicious Library helps you keep track of what you own, when you bought it, and who has it. Hmm, it sounds like something an Excel spreadsheet could handle, right? Wrong.

Delicious Library is designed to sort your books, music, movies, and games. Now, stop and think about how many books, movies, music, and games you own. I own about 60 CDs alone. Think about how long it would take to manually type in the artist, album, and any other useful information into your spreadsheet. The truth is that you'd never get it done, plus your spreadsheet would essentially be an inventory and provide no other useful features.

There are a plethora of programs that help you organize your media collections. They all work pretty much the same. You type in an ISBN number or UPC code of the item, and the program connects to one of the many online databases to retrieve information about the item. Those programs work well and save you time. However, if you have a really big collection, it can still take up a lot of time to enter all of that information.

Delicious Library's claim to fame is its scanning support using the Apple iSight firewire webcam, which is discussed in detail below.

The Interface
The interface is very uncluttered and beautiful. It has the consistency of Apple's iLife suite of applications, including iTunes.


Figure 1: The interface. Click for a bigger view.

On the left are tabs for each of the media types Delicious Library imports, Books, Movies, Music, and Games. Below is a tab that shows your recently imported items, and below that are shelves that essentially allow you to categorize your media, much like categorizing music into playlists.

The middle portion looks literally like wood-grained bookshelves with photorealistic CDs, DVDs, and books. They even reflect the light in the correct angle and show beautiful shadows. Sure, it might provide no functional use to the program, but it sure as heck makes it easier to quickly identify the item you're looking for.


Figure 2: The photo-realistic look of the media on the shelves.

If you'd rather have a table to view your items, there's that too. You can easily add and remove columns from the table to customize it to your liking.


Figure 3: The table view.