Wednesday, November 10, 2004

More Delicious Monster

I've had a serious play with this application now, and I must admit to being very impressed. I pulled the disk image from the Delicious Monster website and within a couple of minutes of running the application I'd scanned the barcodes all the books I could conveniently reach from my desk, without standing up, using my iSight. There was only one failed lookup out of about twenty books, I added it manually, and funnily enough this was the most impressive bit...


The Delicious Library, using my iSight to scan barcodes

I typed in a title and an author by hand, clicked on the link to do a quick Amazon search, and then dragged and dropped the Amazon.com URL directly from the browser onto the library shelf, at which point it just added it to my collection with all the associated meta-data. Nice...

Am I impressed enough to buy it?

Yes, it looks very much like I am. I just used the licensing popup to pay my $39.95 for a full license, and this was also a seamlessly impressive experience. A popup appeared, I typed my credit card number into it, which was dispatched (encrypted) to the company's website and verified (and presumably billed). The application then automagically acquired a license. No cut and paste from the verification email, it just worked. Again, nice...

2 comments:

  1. Should I be worried that I have 97 books in my office? Of course, the really depressing thing is that 16 of these are on Java and only 10 are on Perl. There is definately something wrong there...

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  2. Tim has pointed me towards ReaderWare, which is attempts to resolve the scanned item against a range of web sites, not just Amazon.com. This is a crucial functionality improvement for people trying to identify obscure titles.

    On the other hand the interface looks very poor compared to Delicious Library which as you can see from the screenshots is, like everything Mac, just beautiful.

    Of course it also has, for me, the killer feature that I can do my barcode scanning using my iSight. I'd love to buy one of the new Bluetooth barcode scanners, but I can't really justify it...

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