Software Review: Delicious Library 2

Delicious Library 2 finally shipped with lots of new features. I've been using it for a couple of days and like some things and dislike others.

It's definitely faster, which is very welcome. Also smart shelves are finally here which is also very nice. But my biggest complaint is that the search box is now limited to doing either a title/creator search or an isbn/upc/ean number search. In DL 1 I used to narrow things down by genre, illustrator, actor, a bunch of other fields and now I can't. You can do these things (and more) with smart shelves but I don't want to have to create them for all of these searches. Also there used to be a button next to creator to search amazon for that person, that functionality seems to have been dropped.

Smart shelves do have some clever features. You can search the image for a color so you can do "all my blue items" which might be better for clothing which DL 2 can also scan (though I can't imagine ever using this feature). But of course the first thing I wanted to search for was "has no cover art" (so that I could use the new Search for Cover Art feature), but I can't do that search. While text searches have both "is" and "is not" operators, there's only a "contains" and not a "does not contain". Also it would be nice if the huge popup list of fields were ordered in some way, maybe indented like the sort by popup or alphabetically like in the Export dialog. Wouldn't it be nice if all three places used the same order?

The publishing options look nice, but I don't think I'll have much use for them. Printing uses a new template that fits many fewer items on a page with bigger pictures and large star ratings. I preferred the older compact listing but appreciate that the pdf file is a couple of order of magnitude smaller. The new export features are a nice addition but it will need some formatting to make things pretty. I'll probably end up making a new template for printing, which is another nice addition. But it would have been nice if the old format was an included template.

DL2 looks even prettier than DL1. Superfluous animations are used when adding and deleting items but they're fun. Items are sized via their dimensions which helps a lot for oddly shaped books; however I found I had to select each item individually for them to be resized. I don't want to arrow through 1600 items individually. d It should happen on it's own for all items or at least allow it to happen on multiple selections. Backgrounds are removed from item images which is really nice since many amazon images are larger than the actual item and the image used to be scaled badly. I used to save the image and crop it in preview before adding it in DL. You can now add virtually anything with a upc code and I've added gadgets include all my Apple stuff. The edge finding of the background colors screws up the white of the AirPort Express and Time Capsule mistakenly making parts of them transparent.

One visual change that I really don't like is that the details pane is now at the bottom. it seems much more obtrusive and often needs resizing which isn't remembered. There's also a mini mode that shows just title, creator and rating which is nice but toggling it gets confused with the other modes. I'd like the mini mode at the bottom and the details moved back to the side. With widescreen macs and given this narrow info, it makes much more sense. Also the synopsis has a huge image of the item next to it that almost always needs to be scrolled. I think it should be smaller or not there at all and I'd like a QuickLook-like zoom on an image by hitting space to replace the now missing details window that used to appear by double-clicking.

My biggest problem with the synopsis is that it seems to overwrite the custom synopsis entries I made in DL1 with info from Amazon. I changed it for a reason and I sometimes see my version flash before it's changed to Amazon's. I hope it's just a display issue and my data isn't being lost.

Scanning barcodes with the iSight built-in to my MacBook Pro seems to work much better. Fields now autocomplete which I'm finding very useful. The upgrade went smoothly and it leaves the old version one library in place which is nice.

I've been looking forward to this update for over a year, mostly to address the speed issues and to see what wonderful new things enabled it to win an Apple Design Award a year ago. I have to say that all of the above issues are really dampening the experience. I've opened 17 bugs already. The help system hasn't been updated and is still for DL1, that just seems sloppy to me. However, I think all my issues are relatively easy fixes and I expect to see them addressed in point releases. I'm still using DL2, but if my library was a little smaller I'd stick with DL1 until some of these issues are fixed.