I tried Delicious Library tonight, finding yet another use for my new camcorder.
It’s as cool as you may have heard (I realize I may be the very last person to try it, so I’m not sure why I’m writing this) and tempting to put to full use. Given how many things are already claiming my time, as well as realizing how many books I have pre-date barcodes, it’s unlikely I’ll create a full library.
I like the fact that, as a Mac application and the product of an Omnigroup alumnus, things work as you expect, even if it doesn’t seem obvious they will. I found a book with a barcode that wouldn’t turn anything up. So I ended the Amazon SKU and hey presto, the Monster located all the details.
Could be interesting, especially if you loan books or other stuff: I don’t and on the rare exceptions, I regret it. But at least I would be able to know where something went and perhaps have some way of extracting a replacement.
[addendum, in response to some comments] Apparently, you can share a Library, but it’s not recommended. The Export<->Import of recent changes seems the best way, the safest at any rate. I suspect a Library on a shared volume (afp, nfs, etc) would work too, but the lack of any kind of locking could mess things up.
Regular backups would be a Good Thing and if I was a feature-requesting guy, I could ask for a backup or export routine that doesn’t require user input.
I want to like Delicious Library, but it makes one assumption that’s a deal-breaker for me: it assumes that only one person will be using it. I can’t install it on both Cam’s computer and mine, point both copies at a data store on the network, and have things work. Some things would certainly work, but none of the attributes it makes sense to store per-user rather than in the monolithic XML file are stored per-user. Alas. I could probably write some godawful wrapper to copy the central data store off the server, strip out the per-user settings and merge them with a local user-specific data store, then merge any non-user-specific changes back into the central copy when the program closes. But that sounds ugly, and like a lot of work.
I wondered at the [im]possibility of a shared or household library as well. I didn’t dig deeply into it to see if that could be made to work. I thought it was interesting that it created library users out of anyone in my address book with the same surname, but that was what pointed out the limitation.
Might be worth stopping by Zoka and bugging them about it ;-)