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

Other Features
So now you have your media imported into your wonderful, new Delicious Library. What to do now? Well, for one, you can explore similar items, which are gathered from Amazon.com's database. This is really useful when you're trying to find something new to buy, just so you can have a little fun with the iSight scanning later!


Figure 6: Similar items can be useful for expanding your collection.

In addition, Delicious Monster provides links to view other editions of the item, buy another copy, or even sell the item on Amazon.com. These links include Delicious Monster's referral name, which I guess provides them with another source of income. I personally don't mind, as long as they stay around to further innovate.

The search box performs on the fly searching, which basically means it shows results as you type a query.

For organization, you can create new shelves, which basically allows you to categorize items. One big, new thing in Mac OS X is the use of "smart categories," such as "smart playlists" in iTunes. Basically, a smart category allows you to define a query that continuously updates the category with results. I'd like to see Delicious Library implement "smart shelves." This way, I could create a smart shelf that displayed all CDs from U2, and whenever I added a new U2 CD to my library, the smart shelf would automatically show the new U2 CD.

I really liked the checkout feature in Delicious Library. How many times have you let somebody borrow something from your library only to forget who that person was a year later? Delicious Library allows you to add borrowers and then associate a borrower with an item. It's as easy as dragging the item onto the person. Then you can define a due date, and Delicious Library will notify you if the item becomes overdue!


Figure 7: The checkout feature is one my personal favorites.

Your Library... To Go
Exporting your library is kind of limited at this point. You can export it to a plain text file, or you can print it out to take with you to the store. The print feature doesn't provide any options, however. For example, you can't tell the program not to print out the images or specify a certain template to print. I'd like to see more customizability regarding printing in the near future.

Delicious Library can also sync your library to your iPod, which I find very cool. Unfortunately, I have an old 2nd generation iPod, and since Apple hasn't released notes support for it, I couldn't test out the iPod syncing. Delicious Library should work fine with the 3rd and 4th generation iPod along with the iPod Mini.

I want to see an HTML Export option that exports your library for publishing to the web. There is a freeware program called DeliciousExporter available, which fills in this gap. Something like this needs to be embedded into Delicious Library.

Weaknesses
I basically pointed out most of the weaknesses throughout the review, so I'm not going to reiterate them here. However, there's one more feature I'd like to see. After browsing through the "similar items" menu for some of the items in my library, I found so many more things I wanted to get. However, there was no way of storing these items that I want but don't own. I want to be able to create a "wish list" that I could add any items that have been on my mind. Maybe each item can be linked to some sort of price searching engine, and maybe the Delicious wish list could sync with my Amazon.com wish list. Regardless, I believe that implementing a wish list would be a killer feature.

Delicious Library has been out for a few months now, so naturally it's going to have some weaknesses. I think this program has a lot of potential, and by implementing some of the things I'm asking for, this program will be amazingly useful at being more than just a library manager.

Conclusion
The friendly folks at Delicious Monster have created an application that has allowed a lazy person like me to simplify the initial burden of building a library. The interface is clean and beautiful, and the company has paid attention to every detail to ensure the user enjoys the using the product. All in all, I think this program is easily worth the $39.95 for any Mac user who has a collection they want to organize. Keep up the good work, Delicious Monster!