Product Reviews

Though it's simple for Mac users to catalogue and organise digital music and photos, it's tempting to resort to quick and dirty methods when keeping an inventory of physical items - text files and spreadsheets are common but lazy methods. Delicious Library is a pre-built database for managing collections, with entertaining presentation and slick features for adding items to the library.

It now records details of toys, gadgets, tools, apparel and software, as well as music, movies, books and video games. Among the various fields, the one for location is handy to record box references when moving home.

The window layout is reminiscent of iLife, with collections for each item in the left pane, and their contents shown on the right - either in tabular layout or on snazzy faux wooden shelves that show off cover art in their full glory. Item details previously appeared in a third column, but it now appears beneath the shelves, much like Mail's preview pane. Reviews are downloaded from Amazon along with a description and recommendations, and the pane can be resized or hidden. It's a pity it can't be restored to the old layout, though.

Adding items is as easy as scanning their barcode with an iSight camera, which Amazon then looks up on its website. A text-based search can be used as well, with results presented inside Library along with links back to Amazon for the full details - handy for distinguishing similar editions. Details can be edited or you can start from scratch, but online lookup remains this application's major strength, encouraging you to keep adding more content, which can be almost addictive rather than a chore.

There are new animations when items are added and deleted. Optical discs shatter when deleted, while books somewhat disturbingly burn away. It's a neat touch if a little superfluous.

To keep an eye on specific items, shelves can be added to the left pane. Drag an item onto it and you can keep track of the current selling price of unwanted possessions. This has been extended with smart shelves, which automatically retrieve items based on criteria.

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It's a trend that we've seen in a wide variety of different applications, from iLife to EyeTV, but the implementation needs a little work before it can be relied upon.

It works well for some fields, such as genre or video game platform, but looking for a minimum value returned no results, though there should have been many. Prices are only retrieved from Amazon, and we'd like to see integration with other sites - particularly eBay - to use as guide prices.

Library already tracks music and movies, but it now has a separate iTunes group in the left pane to show audiobooks, movies, TV shows and music. Track names, cover art and other details are also retrieved. It works as an alternative graphical interface to Cover Flow - especially for large libraries where that view is too restrictive. Hovering over a cover shows a play button that fires up iTunes. Integration is one way; cover art can't be added in Library, nor can you attach new information such as an Amazon reference, so you'll still need to scan CDs to keep track of their worth and who has borrowed them.

Like the real-world equivalent, items can be loaned from the Library. Add a friend from Address Book and drag items to their name in the left pane. This is where the counters next to each collection comes in handy; they aren't just for bragging rights, but serve as an instant reminder that someone hasn't returned an item.

This is complemented by the new online publishing feature, which also includes an iPhone stylesheet. Friends can look up items they want to borrow, though very long item descriptions were truncated on an iPhone. More importantly, there's no option to exclude them and speed up the export process, and we hope this will be refined in future.

Updating to Mac OS X 10.5.3 gives a massive performance boost when scrolling through the iTunes library. Before we installed it, scrolling would freeze the Library for a while, but this problem disappeared after the update. The transfer of covers from iTunes remains slow though, even on a fast iMac with the maximum amount of Ram. Despite the update, we still encountered the occasional crash - one while the application was left to grab art from iTunes.

It's inevitable that you'll need to learn how Library works, but the overwhelming sense of familiarity with its presentation and tools such as smart shelves helps to reduce the learning curve to near a plateau. An iSight camera helps to build the library quickly, too. The new features lean in the right direction, but we are dismayed by the remaining stability issues and quirks, otherwise we'd have rated Delicious Library 2 highly due to the barcode scanner and online lookup.