In my spare time, I’ve been playing quite a bit with Delicious Library, and it remains pretty delicious. As I scanned in 13 books, 71 movies, and 748 761 CDs (to date) I’ve had some time to think about things I would change with the application.
- Smart shelves: give me an opportunity to do advanced searches on a bunch of criteria, including signed items, rare items, and other attributes, and save them as persistent “smart shelves”
- iTunes integration: There are a ton of opportunities in this area, including:
- Check the iTunes library to see if the CD has already been ripped to iTunes
- Smart lists to show albums that have not been ripped
- If it has, allow playing the CD by double clicking the album cover
- For music bought in the iTunes store, I’d love to see a way to list them in the inventory, separately from CDs, and using the standard iTunes 99 cent prices, figure out how much I’ve under- or overpaid by using the iTunes store instead of Amazon
- Images: I’d love to be able to paste my own cover art in, either for albums that aren’t in Amazon or ones where the cover art isn’t brought back with the rest of the information (um, never mind—apparently you can do this by drag and drop, though I still would like to see paste supported). I’d also like to be able to copy the art out.
- Looking up information by keyword: This is probably my biggest gripe. As I mentioned in my original post, I have a lot of CDs with no bar codes as a result of too many years spent in CD clubs. Unfortunately, for classical CDs the search facilities that Delicious Library offers—title and “source”—are completely inadequate. The problem with classical discs is that the title of the disc is often three or four different releases, the “artist” can either be the performers or the composer (or even the conductor), and often there is little or no agreement between two sources about how the release should be filed. This means that I got quite intimate with the search functions on Amazon, trying the advanced classical search but increasingly giving up and using Google to find the album on Amazon.
- HTML export of a catalog wouldn’t hurt either.
- And how about user definable fields on items? I’d love something to indicate whether I’ve posted an item to my blog already; one or more URL fields for additional info about the item; and even a catalog number (LOC and Dewey Decimal format)
- And while I’m asking for silly things, how about skinnability? Normally this isn’t a feature I look for in an application, but the default woodgrain on the library shelves really hurts my eyes.