8.7.4 - Delicious Library 1.6.3
Delicious Library is a media librarian for Mac OSX.
Features: Manages your video games, DVDs, CDs, and books using thumbnails on shelves. Shelves may be custom created (a shelf for XBox games, for instance, or a shelf for science fiction DVDs.) Items the software is able to look up on Amazon and other online sources include reviews (that I mostly deeply disagree with, though they are still quite interesting to read), lists of actors and so forth, quite a lot of information. Can use your webcam (iSight, etc) to read bar codes on DVDs and other media in order to start the lookup and insert-to-library process, or you can hand enter title or bar code digits to find the item. If the item cannot be found (for instance, I tested this with some XXX rated DVDs, and they could not be looked up) then you can drag in your own thumbnails and enter your own data for the item. Manages lending media items. Can export library data to XML for use with your own custom software.
The pros: Delicious Library is very easy to use. Most things are obvious; and when I found things that weren't immediately obvious, it was because they were simply not very large, for instance, sorting your library is easy once you find the column controls at the top of the library shelves, where they sit very unobtrusively. In my test of the software, I have entered (so far) 471 DVDs, 332 Cds, 79 games, and 4 books. I have about 30,000 books (not a typo, 30 thousand) and I've not yet even given them a serious thought — more about that below. For the items I entered, I had little problem except for XXX rated DVDs and very old CDs without bar codes. Those had to be hand-entered, and as far as that goes, it wasn't difficult, it's just not quite as convenient as having the program look up the media by barcode.
I really like the feature set in the software; it is very, very close to optimum and this disposes me quite favorably towards it. The ability to build various shelves is such an important and useful feature of the software that I cannot emphasize it enough. Let me explain. First, DL puts all your DVDs in one big shelf called "movies." But then, you can make (for instance) a shelf that says "adventure" and drag a DVD to it. It doesn't leave the main "movies" shelf, which is marvelous, because now you can make a shelf called "scifi" and drag the DVD there, as well. So these shelves are virtual, in the sense that a single copy of a DVD can be on more than one of them at the same time. This in turn allows you to make a shelf that says "kids" and drag everything that you deem appropriate for your kids to it, making selection of something for them utterly trivial. Really, I cannot emphasize enough how useful this is, you just have to work with it a bit to make it fit your lifestyle. My sweetheart and I made shelves for adventure, scifi, chickflicks, XXX, horror, kids, humor, toons, anims, martialarts, exercise, PS2, XBox, Gamecube, Xbox360, and PS1. The ability to go right to the type of thing you're in the mood for and then pick is worth the price of the software just by itself — all you have to do is categorize the media correctly, and that's not difficult at all, just drag and drop.
Another cool feature is DL's ability to keep track of media you loan out. It's really quite good at this, but as I generally won't loan my stuff out, feeling that if you want to watch something, you should buy it yourself, I've not really tested this feature very far. I know a lot of people do this, though, and I suspect you'll find it very useful to actually be able to know where every copy of every media item is.
Missing features: One thing I noticed is that the software can handle games, CDs, DVDs, and Books. Nothing else. That's kind of a shame, because I would have loved to use it to catalog quite a few other collections I have. I have a rock collection, a resin statue collection, a classic audio receiver collection, an art collection, a collection of mech-assault models, a ship model collection, and a coin collection. The ability to associate a photo with a moderately detailed database of collectable item features would have been like heaven, and I thought it was such a natural fit to the software that I looked for about an hour, thinking that surely I had missed it, but no. So to the developers, that's something you might want to consider: User defined collections with user-defined fields. Mind you, this in no way says that DL doesn't have its selected four collection types covered; it does. In spades. It's just something I'd like to see because I am a rabid collector of many things other than what DL supports.
To sum on the "pros", this is an awesome piece of software based on features and capabilities. It does just what it says it does, and in such a way as to cover just about every need you might have with regard to DVDs, CDs, games and books. It is truly an awesome piece of software in terms of features and the creative ideas that underlie its operations. Remember that, because I'm about to tear into it like a hungry lion:
The cons: There's just one... but it is a doozy. Delicious Library is slow. Not a little slow, I'm talking glacially slow. Snail slow. Fossilization slow. It is slow in every way. It is slow to start, it is slow to load a library, it is slow to draw icons, it is slow to respond to scrolling events, it is slow to add items, and it is slow to switch between library shelves. It just feels sluggish. Worse, though is the tendency to suddenly hang for ten... thirty... a hundred seconds... then take off again. This is probably "garbage collection" by the underlying programming language. As a user experience, it is awful. The more media items you have in the program, the slower it gets. We're talking randomly huge waits of over a minute here between such mundane user actions such as scrolling through a shelf, which I would characterize as "far beyond unacceptable." Now, it is true I am testing this on a 1.42 GHz P4 Mac Mini, and this isn't exactly the Mac hardware benchmark for speed, but let me put it to you this way: Delicious Library is the slowest software I own. It can take longer to get a response from Delicious Library's UI for any particular action, no matter how simple, than it does to get a response from anything else I own. Anything. And I own a lot of software! Worse, looking on the developer's site, they warn that for over 3000 items, DL "will be slower." Slower? Holy Waiting For The Teapot To Boil, Batman! If this software were any slower, it'd have to run backwards!.
I mentioned above that I have a 30,000 volume book library. Based on my current experience with the software, and the 3000 (three thousand) item "slow" warning from the developer, I think I'll pass on entering all that stuff until my Macbook Pro at 2.33 GHz with dual core 64-bit CPUs gets here at the end of November, 2006. Even then, I worry. But we will see. The developer says that the program can be slow if the database is corrupted (in which case, it ought to have a "fix database" command) or if the preferences are corrupted (in which case, it ought to have a "rebuild prefs" command.) So when I test on the MBP, I'll make a new install and we'll see how fast — or not — DL is on the new machine. If it is more than six times faster (Apple's claim for MBP speed gain over the mini), then we'll see if I can fix it to run reasonably on my mini. If not... ugh.
Based on what the program can do for you, I'd readily give it 5 stars. Maybe 6. But because it is so slow, I really can't do that. If it were just somewhat slow, I'd just knock it back to four stars, and with some regret. But to emphasize that it isn't just somewhat slow, but truly unacceptably slow, I'm going to give it just two stars. To its developers (and all other developers) I want to say these things: If the language you use is a high level language with garbage collection mechanisms that will fire up in the middle of a user action, you need to change languages. If the application you produce makes the user wait more than a second or two for a response from the UI, again, you need to find a faster language. Or re-write the portion of the application that is causing such a drag. I am a developer myself, and I can tell you that while I was not clever enough to think of Delicious LIbrary, I could write an exact clone of it that would run somewhere in the range of 100 to 1000 times faster simply by writing the application in the C language and using common database approaches. I'm quite serious: Either Delicious Library is written in some terrible language as far as speed and garbage collection goes, or it is written in such a way as to be crippled by lack of modern data management technologies, or my installation is so broken I'm surprised my mini hasn't caught on fire. DL is so slow, I am honestly tempted to clone the program's functionality and beat the developers over the head with a version that has reasonable performance. You hear me, folks?
Message to programmers: Never, ever depend upon the latest and greatest hardware to make your application acceptably fast, unless your application is doing something incredibly exotic (not new, I'm talking exotic), and your code has been well and truly optimized, and the language you are using is at least reasonably fast. Otherwise, you're opening the door to someone like me who, while perhaps not creative enough to think of your idea, is still more than just an "adequate" programmer and can, and may actually choose to kick your butt by simply taking your idea and implementing it well. Can I be any clearer than that? Don't make me kick your ass. I'll do it. Seriously.
One last word: DL is free to try, though the library size is limited, I think to about 30 items. I'd encourage you to try it, especially if you're not running on a PPC mini. The feature set is, as I noted above, just about perfect. If your media library is smaller than mine, and your Mac is faster than mine (likely), and you're more patient than I am (possible), you could find the performance acceptable. Maybe. But as I say, it is free to try, and you should try it before my rants about speed turn you away.
Delicious Library is $40.00
Two out of five stars. Too Slow!!!!
Link: Delicious Library
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