A Delicious way to keep track of your library
Delicious Library takes the stock numbers and associated bar codes that appear on modern CDs, DVDs and books and produces a visual accounting of your library with plenty of text detail.
When you first run Delicious Library, you see an empty set of bookshelves. Start through the primitive method of punching in the ISBN (International Standard Book Number) found on the back cover or inside front cover of virtually all books since the early 1980s, and the shelves start populating with covers. The demonstration version lets you load 25 items of all kinds.
Typing in these numbers is tedious, and thus the Monster lets you use an Apple iSight camera as a bar-code scanner. Plug in the iSight, point it at the bar code on a media item, making sure the code is in the lined-up sights of an onscreen targeting preview, and, bleep! The book, CD or DVD is in.
You can get even fancier — crazier? — by purchasing a $174.95 Bluetooth bar-code scanner when you register the program for $40. This requires Bluetooth on your Macintosh, which comes with all PowerBooks, and is available as a built-to-order option or a later add-on via USB for about $40 to $50 for other models.
As you add items, Delicious Library uses Amazon.com's Web Services system to retrieve details about each item over the Web, and then loads them into a panel you can view next to the item, including a photo of the cover or front of the item with Delicious-added shadowing.
This Amazon approach has its limits because while the world's biggest what-have-you is generally accurate and mostly exhaustive, it doesn't have everything, especially older items. (Disclosure: I worked at Amazon many years ago making it more exhaustive.)
A related, more complicated problem is that Delicious Library retrieves the wrong item number when scanning books of a certain age: books that have a 12-digit UPC and not a 13-digit EAN bar code that starts with 978. (The 978 prefix denotes the mythical BookLand in an international system, apparently a place books frolic.)
On those books, the ISBN bar code is found on the inside front cover. In my testing of books from the 1950s to 2004, the program would often look up entirely incorrect details of older titles, which were then difficult to correct. (I'm a peculiar expert on aspects of book information, and have offered unsolicited advice on this issue to the Seattle-based company, which hasn't taken me up on it yet.)
Frequent lenders will enjoy the Borrowers feature, which the cut-ups at the company prefill in your initial library with anyone from your Address Book that has your last name. You can assign items to borrowers, and thus be sure that your brother one day returns that copy of "Fahrenheit 451" you loaned him. With a linkup to PayPal, perhaps you could charge library fines?
The polish on this program is at a very high level, which you'd expect from the founder of Omni Group and several current and past employees.
These folks take their style seriously, and the gorgeous program design and presentation makes it feel very mature. There are few unpleasant surprises with this monster.
Skype in, and SkypeOut: Skype has the sound of hype in its very name, and that's part of the good nature of the folks who released this peer-to-peer instant messaging and voice over IP (VoIP) program (www.skype.com). Skype comes from the fine people who developed the Kazaa file-sharing network, and who currently operate out of a variety of undisclosed locations to avoid music-label lawsuit subpoenas, according to Fortune magazine.
But Skype threatens telecommunications companies, not artists or record companies, by avoiding a central bottleneck for voice services. As you talk, your voice is broken up into packets that are passed to your peers, which in turn forward them on their way.
There's no center to Skype except its user directory and registration system. Skype also encrypts all of its traffic so your voice data can't be intercepted by those intermediate peers.
Skype for Mac OS X is currently in beta, and it lacks conference calling, a feature expected for the final release. Skype works among several platforms, including Windows and Linux. Calls between computers are free.
A newly added SkypeOut service allows calls from most of the world to most of the world for about 2.5 cents per minute.
As a journalist, recording my calls is very useful for later transcription of quotes and checking facts. Combine SkypeOut with Audio Hijack Pro (www.rogueamoeba.com) to redirect the sound from Skype into an MP3 file, and I've suddenly got high-quality recordings I can refer back to.
Glenn Fleishman and Jeff Carlson write the Practical Mac column for Personal Technology and about technology in general for The Seattle Times and other publications. Send questions to gfleishman@seattletimes.com. More Practical Mac columns at www.seattletimes.com/columnists.