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 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.
A Few Delicious Library 2 Secrets
Posted May 22, 2007 — 38 comments below
Posted May 22, 2007 — 38 comments below
Arne Martin Aurlien — May 22, 07 4140
Romain Guy — May 22, 07 4141
Marc — May 22, 07 4142
Nice.... ☺
Ankur — May 22, 07 4143
Joachim Bengtsson — May 22, 07 4144
Alex Gordon — May 22, 07 4145
Kelmon — May 22, 07 4146
James — May 22, 07 4148
Jon — May 22, 07 4149
Scott Stevenson — May 22, 07 4151
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:
John — May 22, 07 4153
-JOhn.
ACoolie — May 22, 07 4154
Also, I get the hint on the interface, but can it really get that much better?
Mike — May 22, 07 4155
Jeremy Baker — May 22, 07 4156
Techslacker — May 22, 07 4157
The other requests sound great but comicbooks is my #1.
Jago — May 22, 07 4159
DL2 now uses Core Data, so you're set there :)
Kevin — May 23, 07 4160
Explanation?
And is the how more important than the feature ?
Curious.
K
Scott Stevenson — May 23, 07 4161
I didn't accidentally leave the explanation out. :)
Brian — May 23, 07 4163
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 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
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
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
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
@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
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
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
Pamela — Jun 15, 07 4368
Kai — Jun 19, 07 4413
-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
Joel — Oct 08, 07 4723
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
Paolo — Nov 18, 07 5068
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
Gopikrishnan — Dec 16, 07 5209
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
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