Category: Tips + Tricks

I have read about Delicious Library at quite a few places. But I never really thought much of it. So last night, I decided to kick the tires at this award-winning software…. Boy, was I blown away or what!!

Once you use one of the three methods (Title, Author, ISBN) to search for your item (books, DVDs, CDs and games), the result is returned fairly quickly from Amazon.com’s database (needless to say, you need to be connected to the Internet to use this).

But there are still things I was annoyed at:

• It only searches at Amazon’s database: I had some books that showed up only at Barns and Noble but not at Amazon. So I ended up having to hand code those. I also had to borrow pictures of some books from BN.com from time to time.
• It gets confused on locale: Sometimes it returns results from Amazon UK or Amazon France when the book was clearly available in Amazon’s US site
• Because it only looks at Amazon’s database, you can forget about foreign titles. All the books I got in Chinese (or even English titles from Singapore, Hong Kong or Australia) don’t show up even thought the ISBNs are valid.
• The damn interface doesn’t scroll with the mouse. Using the scroll bar becomes a hassle when you have 100 items to enter

But the software was amazing overall. I spent about an hour and a half entering everything I own (less games and CDs) into its database. Despite its shortcomings, this thing is great. I can now keep track of who’d borrowed my books and DVDs!!

And damn it, I own 100+ books. I thought I’d shed most of them with all the moves I’ve had!

UPDATE: The comment Jeff made got me interested in finding out what else’s out there. Booxter from Deep Prose Software makes book entry WAY easier than Delicious Library. But it does require that I am on Amazon’s site as well. Too bad it doesn’t support DVD collections (or does it?).

This “trick” puts whatever you have on your Screen Saver as the desktop image. While it’s not all that useful, it’s a pretty cool trick to show your geeky friends. Sorry, Mac OSX only.

1. Open “Terminal” (Applications –> Utilities –> Terminal)
2. Type in exactly (no spaces or new lines):

1 2 3

/System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/ Resources/ScreenSaverEngine.app/Contents/MacOS/ ScreenSaverEngine -background

3. Press “Return”; watch the magic
4. To stop it, press: “ctrl” + “c” keys (in that order) within the Terminal

Cool huh?!

References from this Mac Dev Center article.