RIP Delicious Library 37
Wil Shipley, announcing the end of Delicious Library, a media cataloging app: Amazon has shut off the feed that allowed Delicious Library to look up items, unfortunately limiting the app to what users already have (or enter manually).
I wasn't contacted about this.
I've pulled it from the Mac App Store and shut down the website so nobody accidentally buys a non-functional app. John Gruber of DaringFireball adds: The end of an era, but it's kind of surprising it was still functional until now. (Shipley has been a full-time engineer at Apple for three years now.)
It's hard to describe just what a sensation Delicious Library was when it debuted, and how influential it was. Delicious Library was simultaneously very useful, in very practical ways, and obsessed with its exuberant UI in ways that served no purpose other than looking cool as shit. It was an app that demanded to be praised just for the way it looked, but also served a purpose that resonated with many users. For about a decade it seemed as though most popular new apps would be designed like Delicious Library. Then Apple dropped iOS 7 in 2013, and now, no apps look like this. Whatever it is that we, as an industry, have lost in the now decade-long trend of iOS 7-style flat design, Delicious Library epitomized it.
I wasn't contacted about this.
I've pulled it from the Mac App Store and shut down the website so nobody accidentally buys a non-functional app. John Gruber of DaringFireball adds: The end of an era, but it's kind of surprising it was still functional until now. (Shipley has been a full-time engineer at Apple for three years now.)
It's hard to describe just what a sensation Delicious Library was when it debuted, and how influential it was. Delicious Library was simultaneously very useful, in very practical ways, and obsessed with its exuberant UI in ways that served no purpose other than looking cool as shit. It was an app that demanded to be praised just for the way it looked, but also served a purpose that resonated with many users. For about a decade it seemed as though most popular new apps would be designed like Delicious Library. Then Apple dropped iOS 7 in 2013, and now, no apps look like this. Whatever it is that we, as an industry, have lost in the now decade-long trend of iOS 7-style flat design, Delicious Library epitomized it.
What? (Score:5, Insightful)
Still not sure what delicious library does or did.
Re:What? (Score:5, Informative)
It was a cataloging app. Allowed you to scan barcodes of products back in the day and they'd appear on a virtual shelf. People used it to catalog their DVD and CD libraries, though I assume it eventually expanded to cataloging nearly anything you like. The post is right, it was years ahead of its time in terms of the super polished look to it. Haven't thought of it since like 2006 when I last saw them at MacWorld SF. But it was rather popular for the ease of use, the look, and the consistent updates. Very surprised it was still around.
Re:What? (Score:5, Informative)
IIRC, it also allowed you to keep track of items you had loaned out. The killer part of it was that barcode scanning, though. It made building your inventory of media so easy. I kept looking for a Windows alternative and never found anything even close.
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Oh yeah, it did allow you to easily track who you'd loaned what to. Certainly great for those who often loaned out games and movies.
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I kept looking for a Windows alternative and never found anything even close.
For DVDs DVDProfiler was the most popular option. Also used bar codes. Used to use it with a modded CueCat.
Re:What? (Score:4, Interesting)
It was an interesting concept and visually very pretty. But I never fully understood all the hype. Fairly early on I learned it was a lot more convenient to rip my music and movies, and access them electronically, than to catalog the physical media.
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It was an interesting concept and visually very pretty. But I never fully understood all the hype. Fairly early on I learned it was a lot more convenient to rip my music and movies, and access them electronically, than to catalog the physical media.
I always saw it as effective for my physical media that wasn't easily rip-able and more useful for managing what I loaned out. IE vinyl records, video games for current systems, books, etc. Otherwise, my media server has the rest of my music, movies, and TV shows.
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The power of it was basically it was "easy". You scan a barcode, and that's it. it automatically grabs information about the item - a book, a DVD, or CD or whatever else. It then populated the metadata for you.
All you had to do was scan one barcode. And it came o
media and collection manager app (Score:3)
imagine a SQL front-end that let you add consumer products to its database from the title, barcode (scan with your phone), etc and could interactively display your collection with pretty thumbnail images. And tag and filter your items. And even do things like make notes or track out loans of CDs, DVDs, books, etc.
see also GCstar. Similar functionality although not as slick looking.
Tracks what physical stuff you had (Score:4, Interesting)
You could hold a book's barcode up in front of your webcam, and it would download the info from Amazon... including the cover art.
You could then define bookshelves, and tell it where it was. And I think it handled DVDs and CDs, too.
And there was a library feature, so you could track that you had loaned out stuff.
I have an old copy, and have been meaning to update my stuff for a few years now, but it looks like that might not be possible.
Although, it would be interesting to know if they could push out an update that let everyone send them their info, so they can try to build their own database, then maintain something like CDDB before it got locked down. (If they didn't have it, a user could type in the track info, so others could automatically get it when ripping their mp3s)
Re: (Score:2)
Those databases are big business. (Though API access is far less expensive than when I last looked in to it.) They're way too big to just distribute with an app and they're growing constantly. Though I'd be willing to bet a app could get away with a much smaller database of popular/widely distributed works, falling back to manual entry for everything else.
Re: (Score:2)
If only there was another place you could download the data from instead of amazon https://www.barcodelookup.com/ [barcodelookup.com] https://scanbot.io/lookup-tool... [scanbot.io] maybe not as detailed as amazon this was the first 2 DDG results, but its a start and a little crowd sourced help could build on it
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iOS7 (Score:2)
What is delicious library? (Score:2, Informative)
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what part of "a media cataloging app" didn't you get?
Not serious. I had to google it and I don't know why I bothered except that lately everyone is saying why can't we have a better/more modern UI/UX immediately, but nobody can say what that is. Aside from everything having rounded corners, that is. Shewt our main site doesn't even include a background image to break up some of that white space..
"Amazon has shut off the feed" that allowed this unmaintained app to continue working - that's the news here. Ama
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Worst Apple style apps (Score:3)
Re:Worst Apple style apps (Score:4, Interesting)
I can't express how much I hated this style of app. its a freakng catalogue. Make it functional. I liked the ease of entry, but the display of everything was terrible. its from the same mindsent that thought that Itunes was an amazing music app. They were both piles of garbage, ux. The pretty look was anti functional.
It's another subset of "enshittification." Like when the ipod/itunes took over from all the interesting MP3 players and audio apps. Remember when you could just plug an MP3 player into a computer and it would just WORK? No software installation, it just popped up as a removable drive and you could drag your music in there. As a bonus, this also allowed you to use your MP3 as a removable hard drive back when such things were wildly expensive. And itunes! Remember when you could just point your music player at a folder of music and it would work? Then itunes came along as started moving/renaming our MP3 collection.
Neither of these were "better," in fact they were objectively worse. But here we are a couple of decades later and people think this is normal. It paved the way for people thinking we need a special third-party "app" to do normal things like moving files around a computer.
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Sometime in the early 2000's, I bought an MP3 player for a kid in college. She was able to easily copy music onto it herself. Her roommate, in a silly fit of one-upmanship, bought an iPod. She gave up after a few hours of frustration. How that thing took over the market, I'll never understand.
But here we are a couple of decades later and people think this is normal. It paved the way for people thinking we need a special third-party "app" to do normal things like moving files around a computer.
Blame Apple and Google for that. Apple because of a stupid idea Jobs got stuck in his head, Google because they wanted people dependent on search. This can't possibly last, but for the moment being able to manage
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I also remember migrating from iTunes to Foobar2000. It was a PITA but I've never looked back
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Remember when you could just plug an MP3 player into a computer and it would just WORK? No software installation, it just popped up as a removable drive and you could drag your music in there.
The reason given at the time was that Apple was trying to walk a very fine line with the iPod wrt the music labels. By obfuscating the process of getting files on and frustrating people trying to get files off, not to mention the encrypted nature of itunes store files they hoped to keep the music labels happy enough to let them get their disruptive service off the ground.
Now, as reasonable as that sounds they never did give up on this approach even after they had "won" the market and moved to unencrypted fi
Re: (Score:2)
That comment seems to miss the point.
They needed to get it off the ground before they have the leverage with the labels to get DRM-free files. This was ultimately in the interest of the users. If they got killed in infancy, they wouldn't have been able to get to the end goal. So it's not so much "prioritizing the corpos over users" as "keeping them appeased long enough to be able to stab them in the back to get what they want."
If they didn't, the labels would have cut them off right away, iTunes wouldn't
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But it looks really cool, apparently, which is all a depressing number of people care about.
I don't get it, but people seem to be more than happy to dump their important photos onto Bookface or whatever cloud thing came with their phone and scroll for however long it takes to find the picture they're looking for.
Either that or they just don't know that things could be better. For that, we can blame Apple and Google's war on hierarchical file systems.
End of an Era (Score:4, Interesting)
I used Delicious Library since ~2008. I would use it to catalog which movies, books, and CDs I had for both my own accounting and if I ever needed it for insurance purposes. The barcode scanning with a camera and later the iOS app made it quite easy even if the UI of the shelves wasn't the best.
I discovered the lack of metadata loading in very early November and digging around other reports strongly indicated that it wasn't coming back. I since switched to libib. The UI isn't as pretty, it's a cloud service, some items can't be found, but the basic functionality is there and the barcode scanner is much less picky. It also meets the hard requirement of being able to export to CSV so I can go somewhere else if needed.
[Book|CD|DVD|Game]Pedia (Score:3)
Hate Flat Design (Score:4, Interesting)
Humans can see in 3D, screens have developed to become incredibly vivid, pixel dense, and color accurate. And all we get are boring 2D icons that belong in a NES or SNES game.
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Amen! It's often hard to tell what are buttons. Whoever invented it should be flattened. UI's can use 3D-ish bevels and shadows to indicate various things, but the Flatticans burned those all down.
For example, apps used to use a 3D bar to indicate a window separator that can be dragged to move the separator, making one window larger and the other smaller. With the flat version, you couldn't tell it was draggable. I nice intuitive convention was de-conventioned.
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I'll take readability over flashy any day of the week. Do you really want 3d icons? For what purpose?
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The purpose of simple 3D lines and box shading is not flashy it is To make interactable elements clear.
For example, you know the Okay button is clickable because it is marked accordingly.
On the modern Flat designs the marking of clickable elements is nonexistent or very subtle, And thus it takes You longer to find what components you can interact with on the page. In fact for new users it comes down to Trial and Error to try and find what elements on the screen are clickable; whereas with the old
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On the modern Flat designs the marking of clickable elements is nonexistent or very subtle
I've never had a problem. Do you have a specific example?
Re: Hate Flat Design (Score:2)
3D gives you more options for how to represent an object or image. With 2D designs we get a lot of symbolic, âoeartisticâ icons that barely represent the app. For example the iTunes Store app icon on an iPhone is literally a *star*. News is a diagonally banded red and white square that belongs at a barber shop. These are hopelessly uninformative and uninteresting.
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For example the iTunes Store app icon on an iPhone is literally a *star*.
How would making the star '3D' be an improvement?
So... don't use Amazon for lookup (Score:2)
I've used plenty of other tools that used plenty of other sources for lookup. E.g. Booxster uses multiple sources so you can backfill data that is one source and not another. I sort by books by Library of Congress Classification and that isn't available through Amazon. However, The Library of Congress Catalog doesn't have cover images.