Delicious Library with iSight Camera

I want to catalog our book, CD and DVD collection. I want it to be easy and quick to do. It doesn't come much easier than this.

Recently on an internal mac-users mailing list, several people recommended using Delicious Library to do this. Last night I tried it out.

I'd borrowed an iSight camera. Nowadays it's come to the point with Apple hardware and software that I don't bother reading the documentation first. I'll plug it in and/or fire it up and see what happens. I plugged it into a Firewire port, and up comes an iChat setup screen. I went through the various questions it asked me. I already had an AIM account so I filled in that information. At the end up came my Buddy list. But the camera was still off. Hmmn. I then looked at the small booklet that came with it, and it told me that I needed to twist the end of the camera to turn it on. That worked just fine. Not totally obvious, but I guess they were going for cool looking hardware rather than ease of use by slapping on a label to tell you what to do here. After I'd fired up iChat, it also told me there was a newer version of the software and did I want to download it. Yes I did. Easy.

I showed Lynea the working camera and she said "that's what I like about Apple. They do it in Crayon". That's pretty good. Apple, if you'd like to use that as a future marketing slogan just let us know. I'm sure we can work something out.

But it gets better. I then went to the Delicious Library website and downloaded the demo version of the application. After it downloaded, it displayed an icon on my desktop. I double clicked it and it started the installer that told me to just drag the icon into my Applications folder. I did that. I then double clicked it to start it.

I clicked on the little camera icon near the bottom of the application window and it started up a video window with five red lines overlayed on top. I went and got a book and placed it under where the camera was pointing and used this to scan in the barcode on the back cover. When it went beep, it spoke the name of the book and showed me an image of the book cover plus lots of other Amazon product details for it. Lynea and Duncan were watching. We all went wow!

I then did a similar thing for a few more books. With practice I can probably get this down to about 5-10 seconds per book. You can do a similar thing for your music, movies and games and they get catalogued into onto separate shelves in your library.

That's just the tip of the iceberg. Checkout their website for a full set of the features.

I was hooked. I went to the website to order the full version (the demo version only lets you enter 25 articles). It just pointed me right back at the Delicious Library application I was running. There under the Library menu was the Delicious Licensor. I filled in my information including my Visa card number and it automatically turned my demo version into a full version. Nice.

Color me impressed. Very impressed.

Now if only all software and hardware could be this easy to use.

[Technorati Tag: Delicious Library]

[Technorati Tag: iSight]

[Technorati Tag: Cataloging]

( Aug 08 2006, 03:36:33 AM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [2]