Delicious Library needs a huge update
I bought Delicious Library over a year ago, and immediately entered several hundred books, and most of my games. I also wrote lots of feedback to Delicious Monster, telling them how to improve this cool app.
Then my Powerbook chrashed. And I couldn’t find the file containing all my books and games in the backups. Doh. The thought of having to enter everything over (even if it was fast with the barcode scanning with iSight), made me forget about the whole thing.
Until yesterday. I have bought and read lots of books lately and figured I should make a list of books in Delicious Library, rate them, and also make a “Books to read”-list for the books that I didn’t read immediately.
No smart lists
The first thing I noticed was that I can’t make smart lists in Delicious Library. “Every” app out there can make smart lists now – lists based on criteria you enter. Like a list of all books rated 5 stars. Or all books in pocket. Or all books in Norwegian. Or all books NOT marked “read”. This is my number one feature wish. I would like to make lists for all kinds of things: The books on subjects like Final Cut Pro, Photoshop, Cooking or Creativity, the Novels or the non-fiction, Kids books, Norwegian or English books, travel guides, books I have lent away and books I have borrowed from others.
A shelf is the Delicious Library term for lists. You can add as many shelves as you like, but you can’t change the order of them: They go in the order you make them. How stupid is that? Also, you can not make folders, and put several shelves inside a folder. Yes, I know you wouldn’t put your normal bookshelves in a folder, but let’s not take the shelves system too far. I think it would be really nice if I could make folders. I could make a folder for “New media” books, and put the shelves for Final Cut Pro, Photoshop, Motion, Illustrator, blogging etc. in there. And a folder for novels with Norwegian, English in there.
More about shelves: I would like an easy way to change their looks. I would like to be able to have custom sizes for the books in different shelves. Now – if you set books to big size in one shelf, they go big in all shelves.
I also would like to have different backgrounds and shelves graphics for different shelves.
It really should be drag and drop: Drag a graphic to the background, and it becomes the background. Maybe with dialog asking if you want to change the background just for this shelf or all shelves. And ditto with the shelves backgrounds.
Tags
My feature wish number 2: Tags. I would like to tag my books, with names for projects I do, with subjects, with anything. Like I tag all my bookmarks at Del.icio.us and my photos and Flickr. With smart lists and tags, it would be very easy to make advanced lists, and find books that belong together for projects.
The tags field should be auto-complete, so that when I start typing, it fills out the first tag that matches. Just like tags do on Del.icio.us on the web. Auto-complete should be a feature on most fields. Or an option. Like in the language field: 99% of my books are Norwegian or English. So when I type N it should autocomplete “Norwegian”. Ditto with format, genres, publisher and author (like in iTunes).
Entering data
Now you might ask: Why? Isn’t all data downloaded from Amazon? Yes, with most English books. But many of my books are not in English. Or strange ones not found on Amazon. So I have to enter the data myself. Auto-complete is needed!
Also: If Delicious Library doesn’t find anything on Amazon, it should give me the option to use Google. Just do a Google search for the title in qoutes and the author name. With most my Norwegian books, I find the publishers page with a picture and all the data I need on the top spot on Google.
What if Delicious Library could “scrape” the data of the page? Just use a “get data from Safari” button. Delicious Library would then use everything it finds on the frontmost page in Safari, and try to fit that into the proper fields. How? If the web page says “Pages: 221″ then 221 would go to the number of pages field and so on. And if there were a preference pane where I could tell Delicious Library the words for author, published, pages etc. in my language, it could even understand Norwegian (or Spanish, German, French…) webpages.
When entering barcodes with iSight, if Delicious Library can’t find the book on Amazon, why not search Google? It would find most books just as easily as on Amazon. Then I could pick the right link, and use the “scrape” function above to enter the data.
Quotes
I would like to be able to enter qoutes inside Delicious Library, have a quotes pane. Where I can add a quotes with their corresponding a page number. After some time Delicious Library could be used as a research tool. With smart lists, I could make a smart lists that searched qoutes for keywords.
Lame rating
The ratings need to be fixed. Now you can rate any item from 0 to 5 stars. Let users decide how many stars. Where I live, most reviews are rated from 1 to 6, so I would like 6 stars being the topscore. Others might like 10.
More wishes
Highlighting When you click on a new shelf, Delicios Library always highlights the first book in that shelf:
Maybe that’s smart? But I don’t like it. It would be nice if there was a preference to turn that off.
Currency I would to set currencies when entering prices. And set my default currency in the prefs. So when I type 229 in purchase price, Delicious Library adds NOK behind. Or $ before if you’re paying in US Dollars.
Date purchased Delicious Library always enters today’s date when entering a new book. I never enter books the day I buy them, I take a whole bunch when I have time. I entered 50 books tonight with my iSight (I love that feature – amazingly cool!), and had to go back and delete the “purchase date” on all 50.
Date published Most publishers don’t put the exact date they publish a book online. Just the year. If I type 2006 into the release date field, Delicious Libray adds today’s date to that, making it “monday 1st of May, 2006″. Which is wrong. Ditto if I type 2003, it becomes 1st of May 2003. Also wrong. Software like Reunion and OmniOutliner Pro has date fields that are more intelligent. If you type a year, it stays like that. If you type “5.1.2006″ it becomes “1st of May 2006″ (or 5th of January if your date format is European in the Mac OS X control panel). “Today” becomes “1st of May 2006″ and “yesterday” 30th of April 2006″ and so on.
iTunes I would like a way to import everything I have in iTunes into Delicios Library. All my albums or just a playlist. I could make a playlist that had only the music I have imported myself from CDs. I tell Delicious Library about this playlist, and it makes albums, downloads cover art etc.
Publishing
There are software that can put your Delicious Library online. But it doesn’t add any affiliate codes. This should be a feature in Delicious Library. I’m sure Delicious Monster make quite a lot of money when people use the similar pane in Delicious Library, and buy books and movies from Amazon with Delicious Monster affiliate codes attached. Which is ok. But when and if I publish my own library, I want it to have my own Amazon affiliate code. Can we please have a great export feature in version 2.0?
Colin D. Devroe has a theory…
I’d love to publish my library as an HTML file on my Web site. This way my Internet friends can look at my library, and I could send them a DVD to view if they’d want. I think the main reason why Delicious Monster has not put this functionality in, is because they earn a kick back if you buy anything through Library on Amazon. If they were to try to do the same thing through the publish HTML file, people like me would go in and edit all the links to earn the dough. Perhaps this isn’t a reason, but that’s my guess.
Love it
I like Delicous Library a lot. It’s one of the coolest programs I have bought. And a good way to spot a great program is that it gives you lots of new ideas. Delicious Monster is working on a new version. With online social elements, and a faster database.
There are some other good suggestions for 2.0 features in this thread at Delicious Monster’s blog…
I’m not sure if there’s an online database that you guys to take advantage us for comic books, but I would love to see that feature in the next release.
Link to other more obscure databases (other than Amazon)…
What are your experiences with Delicious Library? Anything you miss?
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