A Few Delicious Library 2 Secrets

You may remember back in chapter 465, I teased about Delicious Library 2, which sparked some curiosity in the comments. Wil gave permission to mention a few details, and Lucas suggested some reasonable options, so now it's emotional payoff time.

First, one of the main question marks of Delicious Library 1 was "okay, I have my library filled out, now what?" That is, it was actually fun to enter all your books, movies, games, and so on, and see them in virtual shelves. But then there was a steep decline in what you could do with your collection.

Delicious Monster Logo


Delicious Library 2 will allow you to automatically export your library to the web, meaning instead of just you looking at your shelves, everyone else on the web can see them, and the contents is automatically updated as you go. Now that's just the what of the feature. It's the how that's really going to please. This is true Delicious-flavored stuff — nothing less than the exceptional.

The other gap from Delicious Library 1 was the iTunes library had no presence on the shelves, so you were only seeing a portion of your total media selection. Delicious Library 2 has iTunes integration, and does it without trying to be an iTunes replacement. For me, this helps me discover music I forgot I had.

Now, these are maybe some of the most-requested features, but there's even more interesting stuff in store. Two of my favorite brand-new features aren't mentioned here, and the way the web export is done is likely to keep the downloads rolling for quite a while. This is perfect for things like the DS micro reviews post from a while back.

You also may just want to buy a copy out of gratitude for all of the stress-testing that Delicious is putting on the Leopard APIs for you. They do some pretty, um, courageous stuff with the frameworks.

Of course, you've probably noticed there are no screenshots. There's a reason for that.
Design Element
A Few Delicious Library 2 Secrets
Posted May 22, 2007 — 38 comments below




 

Arne Martin Aurlien — May 22, 07 4140

You shouldn't be doing this to us. This is unfair. I want it NOW!

Romain Guy — May 22, 07 4141

I agree. Don't do this to us :)

Marc — May 22, 07 4142

Of course, you've probably noticed there are no screenshots.There's a reason for that.

Nice.... ☺

Ankur — May 22, 07 4143

Certainly sounding good. I don't have an iSight so I haven't used Delicious Library yet, but when Leopard is released I'll be getting a MacBook Pro and possibly Delicious Library. It's amazing how much influence a single application can have!

Joachim Bengtsson — May 22, 07 4144

It's inhuman. Why don't you just lookup every reader's home adress, travel the world to their houses, and rip our nails from their sockets? It would make us ache less.

Alex Gordon — May 22, 07 4145

I can't help think that it would have been nicer not to haved posted this. TORTURE!

Kelmon — May 22, 07 4146

I've missed most of the Delicious Library discussions but if I had to ask for one feature that would make Delicious Library 1 more useful to me it would be to be able to create eBay auctions for stuff that I own and that is recorded in DL. I have to confess that once the data is in the library it doesn't serve much use beyond syncing to the iPod so that I can check to see what I already have or allow others to browse in case they want to borrow something.

James — May 22, 07 4148

I want more book cover types!!

Jon — May 22, 07 4149

Worthless!!! You just confirmed two features we already knew were coming. And you didn't add anything new!

Scott Stevenson — May 22, 07 4151 Scotty the Leopard

You just confirmed two features we already knew were coming. And you didn't add anything new!
Well tell me how you really feel. I didn't realize these were public knowledge yet. If I can talk about anything else, I'll post a follow-up.

Alex — May 22, 07 4152

I love Delicious Library. Just in case Wil reads this blog I'll repost my two main feature requests:

  • Integration with Amazon's wish lists
  • Netflix integration: Queue or watched movies integration... and make it work with the suggestions system so that my 280+ rated movies that I've seen somehow work with the ones in my library.

John — May 22, 07 4153

The one feature I want most from the program (which I licensed a long time ago) is the ability to store the database on a central machine and be able to use any machine in the house (of which there are several) to enter information and to check out stuff. (And if this feature is already there somewhere, someone please bonk me over the head with a heavy book and then show me.)

-JOhn.

ACoolie — May 22, 07 4154

I am extremely excited about the increased web integration because most of the reviews I have read and people I know agree that one thing Delicious needs is more web integration. The only thing I wonder about is how much web integration. I mean, it is a great app for cataloging my stuff so I know what stuff I have (and does it very well with a beautiful ui). There is just so much potential for this that it seems almost wasteful for me. How great would it be if I could choose to publish my library to a central Delicious Library website where I could compare my library to my friends, be recommended items from users with similar libraries, and much more.

Also, I get the hint on the interface, but can it really get that much better?

Mike — May 22, 07 4155

The feature I hope will be there is support for large libraries. DL 1.x chokes hard on libraries with more then 1000 or so items. If DL 2.0 supports libraries with several thousand items and is zippy fast with them, I will be very happy!

Jeremy Baker — May 22, 07 4156

I really loved DL when it came out. But took so long for these really useful features to come out, that I shifted LibraryThing. My perfect solution would, of course, be for DL2 to link with LibraryThing.... :)

Techslacker — May 22, 07 4157

I just want to see support for Comicbooks. I would be pretty happy to see the same old interface and all if I could just scan my comicbooks in easily.

The other requests sound great but comicbooks is my #1.

Jago — May 22, 07 4159

"The feature I hope will be there is support for large libraries. DL 1.x chokes hard on libraries with more then 1000 or so items. If DL 2.0 supports libraries with several thousand items and is zippy fast with them, I will be very happy!"

DL2 now uses Core Data, so you're set there :)

Kevin — May 23, 07 4160

"It's the how that's really going to please."

Explanation?

And is the how more important than the feature ?

Curious.
K

Scott Stevenson — May 23, 07 4161 Scotty the Leopard

@Kevin: Explanation?
I didn't accidentally leave the explanation out. :)

Brian — May 23, 07 4163

I'm a longtime licensed user.
The one thing that drives me nuts about DL is that it only checks Amazon -- unlike Readerware which checks the Library of Congress, the British counterpart to the LOC, and numerous other book retailers. The APIs are out there. Use them, please.

Joe — May 23, 07 4164

I love DL, and have used it since it originally shipped. I think I have a fairly modest library by most people's standards: around 500 CDs, 130 DVDs, and a dozen or so games. I haven't added books to DL, but probably will after 2.0, by which time I will have upgraded my rig.

I echo other's comments about only being able to import from Amazon. That covers 95% of what I need, but that remaining 5% is annoying. Apart from that, there are two things I'd really like to see in DL 2:

1. Better Library sort/view options, including the ability to create a user-defined "sort field." For example, if I sort CDs by artist, "Bruce Springsteen" is together with "Ben Folds," while my preference is to sort them by last name (i.e., "Folds" with the "Fs" and "Springsteen" with the other "S" artists, etc.). Library should be about more than just cataloging your collections; there should be more robust options to sort and view your stuff.

2. Library desperately needs either: (1) a trash can; or preferably (2) a user-preference to require confirmation on delete. Right now, there is no audio or modal feedback when you delete an item. It may seem like an isolated issue, but it has happened to me more than once: I think I'm editing an item, hit the backspace key, and oops, I've just deleted an item from a shelf without noticing. Once I spent more than an hour figuring out what was "missing" so I could re-add it. iTunes, iPhoto, etc. all allow a user to specify whether they wish to be prompted to confirm item deletions, and there's no excuse for DL not to follow this practice.

Pascal — May 23, 07 4165

My #1 request
A better management of internationally mixed library (mix of French, Australian and US books in my case), and graphical novels too, which is still sort of another country (and note that graphical novels, comics and mangas could be indeed 3 different countries :-). With a way to select which source to use amongst various propositions.

Someone — May 24, 07 4168

Of course, you've probably noticed there are no screenshots. There's a reason for that

Let me guess: you do not want to be targeted by SJ for leaking the look of Leopard.

Oh, and shouldn't that anti-spam measure know that there is no the current 4-digit year? The world has more than one calendar, you know, and more than one of them currently are running into 4-digit years. This tool should at least accept hebrew and islamic years.

Joshua — May 24, 07 4170

Of course, you've probably noticed there are no screenshots. There's a reason for that.

Maybe just a portion of screenshot - just enough to whet our appetites.

It sounds like DL2 is going to be one of the defining apps for Leopard Mac development. I'm officially stoked!

Jon Shier — May 29, 07 4183

@Joe: Dude, it's called undo, look into it.

@Scott: I was being dramatic on purpose. But Wil has mentioned both of those features at some time, along with DL2 being CoreData based for ludicrous speed. And I think some small shots of parts of the custom UI would be cool, without ruining anything. Or perhaps a shot of the web export?

Pete Lasko — Jun 02, 07 4190

@Jon Shier,

Dude, he said deleted with out noticing. Or does your copy automatically and selectively undo days or weeks prior deletions?

Paul — Jun 11, 07 4294

Congratulations on starting to catch up to Bruji's Pedia applications.

I see DL as the equivalent of Microsoft, with Bruji's DVDpedia, bookpedia and CDpedia the Apple of the cataloguing world. Look to the current pedias to see what DL will have in version 3 (albeit in a clunkier, buggier interface).

Rich — Jun 13, 07 4348

What you need is to be able to hide the details view if you want. I just want a view to just look at the covers. I don't care about that huge window for details when i'm browsing!

Pamela — Jun 15, 07 4368

One big thing I'm looking for in a DL update: Better data sorting options. I would really like to see a process similar to what Excel, with primary sorting and secondary sorting. For example, when I sort my titles by genre DL puts them in any random order it wants, within that genre. So Godfather I can be seperated by 4 shelves from Godfather II. Any chance we'll have more control over that in DL 2?

Kai — Jun 19, 07 4413

Two more feature requests:
-a configuration for words to be ignored while sorting by title. So far this seems to be fixed to "a", "an" and "the". As some people have films in languages other than English they might want to make DL ignore other word as well (e.g. "un", "une", "le", "la", "les" for French titles)
-a field for the original title of the film. For example, I bought "A bugs life" in France, hence the DVD is called "1001 pattes". Would be nice if I could also search/display/export the films also by their original titles.

Thanks!
Kai

Julz — Jul 25, 07 4543

Yeah DL 1.0 is a dog. It's basically unusable to me and it doesn't take serious collections... seriously. CDPedia is what I currently use but it's so ugly.

Joel — Oct 08, 07 4723

I discovered the Delicious Library SQL Exporter on macupdate.com... allowing me to get all my Delicious information into a pre-built SQL database.

A few hours later... with some custom graphics, CSS, and PHP... I was able to get the information from the database to display nicely on the web. See it at adore-design.com

GillouStyle — Oct 18, 07 4774

So now that Leopard is announced, can we See MORE of what Delicious Library 2 is All about? Printscreens, videos, ??

Paolo — Nov 18, 07 5068

Hello there. What about ITALY for God's sake?

I mean, the app is translated in Italian too.. and that's good, but... for the research of media information, there are just french, spanish, english..

At least give us the possibility to tell the program which site it should go to retrieve the info...

Christiaan — Dec 09, 07 5185

Be great if my friends could request to borrow a book via the exported webpage of my library.

Gopikrishnan — Dec 16, 07 5209

Hi,
Being from India and having movies in my regional language as part of my movie collection, not being able to get the info from IMDB or some such place is very difficult for me. And I did read the comment on the delicious site that you would not want to import data from such databases. And I also understand that people of each region might have different places they want to download info from. So is it possible to open up delicious to have people write their own code to pick the info from some channel. So in effect once I have the plugin written for any channel, may that be a site or some XML file I have lying in my disc, I can set it as an a SITE in Delicious at my own risk and responsibilities which Delicious will call to populate the information.

Is that a fair request to make? I am really impressed with your tool and its functionality. The only reason stopping me from going ahead is this.

Gustavo Diogenes — Mar 03, 08 5587

Delicious Library just gave me the greatest frustration in a long, logn time:

After having all my books carefully added to Delicious and using it for a few months, suddenly all the Borrowers list turns into "Deleted User".

Now I have a list of books that I know that have been borrowed but I don't know by whom...

The integration with address book is pretty, but unusefull as soon as anynthing changes in it. In my case, I use .Mac to keep my AddressBook updated.

I've would like that Delicious2 has the option of adding Borrowers in a local database, not linked to AddressBook in any form.

Francesco — Jun 01, 08 5994

You think that frustrating - I just payed for full version 2.0, and is not run on Tiger! At all!!!!




 

Comments Temporarily Disabled

I had to temporarily disable comments due to spam. I'll re-enable them soon.





Copyright © Scott Stevenson 2004-2015