Delicious Monster
Saturday, January 15th, 2005
Delicious Monster has been out for a while but it took me a while to get around to experimenting with it and now that I have, I’m hooked.
What is it?
It’s a piece of software for cataloging books, music and movies. Yes, I know, sounds like the old Apple II days of “buy this computer for keeping your recipes…” but hey, we already have computers and this is one more fun and useful thing we can do with them.
The software works like this:
Use an iSight camera or their bluetooth barcode scanner to scan the UPC codes on the back of movies, books, and CDs. You’re online via broadband (hopefully) and the software than uses that UPC code to query Amazon’s huge library, pulling back the entire listing on the item and listing it with all information in your database.
I scanned my entire DVD collection (about 150 titles) and the few video tapes we have left in 30 minutes. It was easy. Maybe 10 out of the 150 didn’t scan well and I had to type in the title for Amazon to find.
The software allows you to keep a lending library of people you’ve loaned things to (it uses Apple’s address book nicely) and future plans include social networks and other catalog categories.
I bought the software for $30 during Macworld although that price might remain, I don’t know.
WIRED recently had a piece on the company: Monster Fueled by Caffeine which is amazing to read. The two heads are ex-Omni group folks (one is the ex-CEO of Omni, the other 19 years old). They have no office, preferring to work in a Seattle coffee house where there is free wifi.
This company is going places and their software is well made, fun to use, and has a big future.
I like thier software, but sadly, most of the functionality of looking up info on scanned items is not available overseas (Europe). I hope they will be able to user other servers or so, because I was only succesful scanning books, not CDs or DVDs.
davidn.
Really. I’m surprised as I thought Amazon would be available anywhere on earth. How does DM know where you are? Maybe the CD and DVD thing is a region related issue, and DM needs to know which Amazon database to check. Intersting.
I don’t know the details, but they do use UK and German Amazon stores (if I remember correctly) when you are based in Europe. However, those stroes apparently do not have all the info the US store has on bar codes etc. The codes on European products are apparently not the same as those used in the US so the US store cannot provide the needed info either.
david.
Richard, David,
there’s a similar piece of software for Windows called MediaMan. It works with all available Amazon stores US, UK, Germany, Japan, France & Canada. And it’s even free! :)
Regards
Christoph
Great, thanks for the info Christoph. The intersting thing is that I got all fired up about this software and now, never use it. I’ve taken it off my dock and rarely even look at it. Not the fault of the software, just that once you’ve got all your stuff in it then what? There’s a limit to how much I want to browse and paw through my stuff. Again, not the fault of the software which is well designed, just the impulsiveness of the buyer (me).
Thanks for the note, Richard. That’s interesting. I think both Delicious Library and MediaMan are working on several interesting new features which could re-ignite your enthusiasm by letting you do some interesting stuff with your collection once you’ve built it. So keep your eyes open….I think you may end up adding it to your dock again. :-)
Christoph… of course, I get the Delicious Monster feed, if/when they do something I’ll hear about it. Thanks.
Does this software allow you to create custom categories for the books? And if so, would I have the capability of searching/sorting using these custom categrories?
Sure, it’s just like any iApp: you have all of your stuff and on the right side you can make numerous sets and put the same book into as many as you like.
I believe you can download a fully functional copy and try this out.
I saw your comments on delicios monster and i was wondering if there is something else out there that allows the sanning of barcodes and then would go into a database so that i could number my CDs and then attach a # to each listing so I could easily find a CD and yet house them by simply numbering each one in sucession and not worrying about sorting them
Gary: there are a number of pieces to this all of which Delicious Monster has sorted out very well.
1. the scanning part and DL allows us Mac users to use our webcams. Not sure if it works with webcams other than iSights but it might.
2. the UPC database. Amazon’s the thing here and DL uses Amazon’s open API to get at all the info stored on each item. Pretty slick idea.
3. The UI of the local collection. DL uses the same UI as many of Apple’s iApps so it’s familiar to Mac users and they can use it immediately. Not sure i’d want to muck with that.
All of that said, I’ll bet there’s something along the lines you’re looking for in the fileMaker Pro world. You should maybe poke around there. And, if you find anything, do let us know back here.