Delicious Library 2 - Interesting what the Monster left out
With the latest MacHeist I got a license to Delicious Library 2. I played with the program for about an hour and indeed, it is beautifully designed, the Delicious Monster team clearly popularized the shelf metaphor (and perhaps inspired to the wooden background in the Byline iPhone application, where it makes a lot less sense). The iSight scanning support is marvelous. For one, combined with the automatic Amazon search, it allows for a very fast library building. I managed to import 160 books in one hour, and some of them were German books without barcode, or out of print, so I had to resort to typing the name and author of the book.
What I find interesting is not the features that they added, but some obvious omissions they made with Delicious Library 2, which was released just last year.
Number one is help: there is help on the website, but it is not entirely accurate and up to date, for instance it does not cover the advanced export options that have been added with Delicious Library 2. Secondly, looking for integrated help yields this result:
Number two is the lack of social features: The application was released 2008, appeals to an early-adopter audience and uses social media for viral distribution, yet social features outside the desktop (there is addressbook and iCal integration) seem to miss completely. There is the ability to publish the library to the web using two templates, but neither has support for RSS. The services that the library can be uploaded to include iWeb, MobileMe and FTP, but no blogs, no twitter, no WebDAV.
With a good publishing mechanism like RSS (and perhaps RSS subscriptions to friend's libraries) I am sure services like Shelfari and Goodreads would have rushed to offer deep web-desktop integration. Without this mechanism they leave an opportunity for the competition.
Before I forget: iPhone support would be another obvious feature, but it is already in the works and I will write an update once it is out.
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