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I recently bought an Apple iSight videoconference camera for reasons too complicated to mention. I have exactly one person I can videoconference with on a regular basis, so I have little use for the cool iSight. The good news is I found a clever application called Delicious Library that allows you to turn your iSight into a barcode reader for cataloging your books, DVDs, CDs, and games.
As anyone who has videoconferencing already knows, there is a common set of stages you go through once you find someone to videoconference with.
1. Call the person. Sometimes this can include several traditional phone calls as you trouble shoot your videoconference hardware/software. Thankfully, Apple’s iChat eliminates this step.
2. I can see you while you’re talking! Full screen video at nearly 30 frames per second! Marvel at the Star Trek feel of the technology. Take that, Picard!
3. Have a kind of pointless conversation, painfully aware that even an innocent nose scratch will be transmitted to your buddy on the other end.
4. Get bored with looking at your friend and the boring wall behind them. Pick up something interesting on your desk and make an impromptu puppet show. Make a hand-butt, and pretend like you’re flashing your friend.
As my boss put it, you know a technology is in trouble when you’ve reached the hand-butt stage.
I searched the web for something to do with my iSight camera, and I came across an application by Delicious Monster called Delicious Library. This application is as cool as its name is embarrassing to say.
The idea behind Delicious Library is simple: provide a dedicated database to help you track physical media, such as DVDs, audio CDs, books, and games — that is, anything that you’d probably lend out to someone. Each record has specific fields to store appropriate metadata. For example, for movies it has fields for format (DVD, VHS, etc), genre, rating, and features. Delicious Library provides integration with Amazon.com to look up information about the movie so you don’t have to type it yourself.
The application feels like it fits in with Apple’s iLife suite. It has the Panther/Aqua compliant look one would expect from a Cocoa application. It provides a sidebar so you can create special categories of topics. I expect in a later version that they will eventually add a “smart playlist” like feature so you can automatically create categories (such as, “Academy-award winning” or “Star Wars-related”).
I was most impressed with how the application handled the artwork. Delicious Library takes the artwork (either downloaded from Amazon, or you can drag a jpeg manually) and applies it to the library icon, which changes the size of the image depending on if it’s a CD, a hard cover book, a soft cover book, a DVD, etc. It even adds a slight gloss to the cover art so it really looks like it’s in a DVD case. Now that’s the impressive, but useless attention to detail that Apple users come to expect!
This is all well and good, but what about the iSight? Oh, yeah! The fun starts when you click the camera button on the bottom. A window pops up and suddenly your iSight becomes a bar code scanner. If you have enough light, scanning in all your media is easy and fun. The only problem is if Amazon doesn’t have the item, then you have to enter the information manually, a problem more common with books than with the CDs. Still, using your iSight makes the input process pretty fast. I entered more than 450 items into my library over just a few hours, with the biggest slow down being when the information wasn’t available on Amazon.
At version 1.0.6, Delicious Library still has some room for improvement. Even on my 1 GHz PowerBook G4, the application seems to bog down a bit (particularly when scrolling), so I hope they can find a way to speed it up. I have to admit– I got a little annoyed with the Amazon-pimping. Maybe there should be a little less Amazon integration since I personally don’t care how Amazon users have rated my books.
On the other hand, I’d would like to see more integration with iTunes. For example, it would be cool if it could get my ratings for albums from iTunes instead of having it make me do it separately (this would probably involve getting an aggregate from the individually-rated songs). Or for more fun, it would be cool if when you scanned in a CD, Delicious Library grabbed the top rated song from that CD and cued it in the Party Shuffle.
However, these are more like suggestions than complaints. I’m surprised at how much fun it was to create a virtual library for my books and movies. Plus, now I have two uses for my iSight.
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