Delicious Library¶
828 words
I stumbled across a page announcing the application Delicious Library a while ago. I thought it looked promising. And I still think it does. With the product having been released recently, I also saw a few rave reviews. Which I find totally over the top. Sure the program is pretty and may or may not be useful. But it’s not a revolution.
As a counterpoint to the rave reviews, let me just list my concerns.
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Their web page sucks. Just look at the screenshot I provide.
Half the screen is full of Flash junk wasting space and making the clouds move and there is a horizontal scroll bar which seems to be obligatory. Not convincing.
- The web page mainly reveals that the product costs US$ 40. Luckily I could still see the download link to its right. That’s quite a lot of money. Particularly for an application with an unproven use. And for an application that I don’t consider particularly complex. Just compare its complexity and number of features offered to those of GraphicConverter, which costs US$30.
- While the graphics may be nice at large sizes, they aren’t too good at small ones. Particularly the labels. This may be caused by Cocoa scaling deficiencies but doesn’t fit into the whole ‘polished’ style. Strange that the authors of such an eye-candy app didn’t spot this.
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And then there is amazon. The application ties into amazon too heavily for my taste. And that’s the friendly way of making my point. Frankly, some menus look like amazon should give us the app for free. While this has presumably been installed there for the user’s convenience, I’m not sure I want other people’s reviews downloaded right into my library or that I want many of my queries to go out to amazon (with what looks like a specific tie-in link which may earn the company some extra money but I wasn’t warned about).
- All the recommendation stuff seems to be amazon based as well. Which is pretty lame as amazon’s recommendations are only useful for the most-obvious choices, wich, I feel, anyone who is compelled to start the whole media cataloguing thing, will be aware of anyway. And why the heck would I want to have the amazon ‘rating’ of a CD I own displayed on my computer?
- They knowingly left out a tie-in with iTunes for the first version. There you start with a media library that leaves out all those media you already scanned and catalogued. Clever?
- Oh, and it seems to be U.S. only right now for all the convenient lookup features. So it’s worth very little for most people in the world who aren’t keen on typing everything in. And even trying some U.S. stuff I have didn’t even give me cover art from amazon. Not too impressive. While it doesn’t seem to support German amazon, for example, it still downloads the review (which I don’t want) in German. I find this very strange. It also displays a Euro price (well not any price or a reasonable one but amazon’s).
- The ‘Borrowers’ list may be handy but I wonder whether it’s really better than Stickies. Or if I would remember to actually use it. In the small icon mode for the main icon list, icons in the Borrowers list are also by far too small to be more than coloured blobs.
- The application isn’t particularly fast, either. Three or four seconds to switch to my ‘huge’ 11 item CD section isn’t impressive at all. It’s rather tiring.
- No AppleScript support, so presumably no way to add items ‘your’ way or support the built-in features. Also no way to tie in with tools like LaunchBar.
- No offline help. Hardly any help in total. What’s a UPC? The numbers beneath the barcode? Just the large ones or also the small ones? Some hints or checking here! Some assistance and examples!
- And that in an applications that seems to leave you stranded once a search went wrong, say. How can I do a search again with other terms if the first one failed?
- And what about tieing in with BibDesk?
This app reminds me a bit of iPhoto 1. It gives me the idea but will still need a while to mature. And even then it’s not really clear I’d ever need it. In particular as I feel that such an application absolutely needs to integrate with iTunes, BibDesk and similar applications. Also, with more search technologies being on their way to the MacOS, I wonder whether Delicious Library will be happy enough to abandon their own and integrate with those for better data im- and export.
I you feel compelled to flame me, go ahead. I’d just like to point out that – at this time – Delicious Library looks like a nice idea that’s started in a promising way. But not brilliant or finished. It’s a 1.0 version and looks like it. There’s still a lot of work to do.
