Since buying an iSight camera for our Mac in November 2005 I haven’t used it much. Not really that into the whole webcam scene so the camera has sort of sat perched on the monitor waiting on a friend.

Over about the same time I’ve been searching for a good way to inventory our collection of movies, games, CDs and books. I’d read and heard lots of good things about Delicious Library (Mac, Regular price $40) but what has kept me away from using that was that it was a Mac-only program.

Sunday I finally downloaded the program and then started scanning our DVD bar codes with the iSight. The virtual shelves started to fill. The demo version of the program lets you scan in up to 25 items. Before I reached even 20, I moved for the plastic. I paid $43 and some change after sales tax. As of this writing — if only I had waited, bummer — the price is now $35 + tax, so you can save a few bones over what I paid.

Delicious Library makes the inventory process fun. It’s like the first time you scan your own groceries.

In a mere couple hours time we scanned the bar codes of most of our DVD collection (over 400 and counting). Unfortunately, some movies didn’t have bar codes like Futurama, The Simpsons, Star Trek The Next Generation and others so I had to use the Enter Title option. To enter a new item just hold down the Apple key + N and type in the title. Though we’re not done entering all the DVDs, and we haven’t even started on the games or CDs, the movie process was fairly smooth and fast. A couple hours may seem like a lot, but I can only imagine if we tried entering in all the information for each DVD by hand, including Amazon review and codes.

A video window that can be sized bigger with red lines allows you to line up the bar code with the iSight. Some bar codes seemed to scan better than others but overall the experience worked pretty good.

Once you scan an item a beep sound will be heard and shortly followed by a speech synthesized voice reading back the title. Our middle teenage son got a kick out of the computer saying Meet The Fockers with a “u” instead of an “o.”

Also, there are a couple of easter egg messages like when we scanned the original Star Wars Trilogy on DVD an additional sound file played whispered: “I am your father.” Clever.

Sorting and searching
The interface is graphically pleasing allowing multiple ways to sort, scale the item’s size and search through your virtual shelf of items.

The search is along the bottom and seemed to work fairly ok. I put in “Vader” and nothing was returned, but a search for “star” returned 23 DVDs including Starship Troopers and Star Trek as well as more unusual titles like Dogtown and Z Boys, Dickie Roberts and Bounce. The search is dynamic and will respond to what you type in AJAX-type fashion, but performed a little on the sluggish side. This might be the fault of my 256 MB RAM eMac and be snappier and more responsive on a faster Mac. Also, the search seemed somewhat limited in scope. For example, I searched for “ben affleck” and nothing was returned. So the search works primarily off the title field? That search should have returned Pearl Harbor, Paycheck, Bounce and more, but the shelf remained empty. Sometimes I don’t remember the title of a movie, only those who played in it, or perhaps a bit of what it is about.

Note: there also is a voice search option which I didn’t test for this review.

As for sorting, these are the following comprehensive options:

- title, creator, amazon users (?), played / read
- secondary stuff: series, numbers in series, genres, publisher/label, release date, edition, format, # of media, language, rare
- movie: starred rating, MPAA rating, theatrical debut, features, running time
- collecting: retail price, currrent value, purchase price, purchase date, used, condition, signed item
- where: location in building, owner
- creation: creation time, lookup time, Amazon #, u.p.c

Import/Export
Even though this is a Mac-only program, it still allows exporting the data to a tab-delimited file so you could take and import into a Windows inventory program. Conversely you can import from a tab-delimited file too, although scanning with the iSight is more than half the fun of using this program. Our kids liked that part anyway.

Borrowers
As the name implies, you can also check out and track any item loaned to other people or even yourself (I suppose this would be useful for tracking items kept in different places?). To create a borrower just click the icon with the person + next to it in the lower lefthand corner of the interface and then choose “New Person.” From there you enter in the first name, last name and email address of the borrower. To delete a borrower, highlight the borrower name and then navigate to Edit -> Delete borrower.

Multiple shelves
For those who want to have multiple shelves, that’s no problem either. Simply click on the shelf + icon in the lower lefthand corner of the interface. Then name your new shelf and start importing, scanning or typing in items.

Final thoughts
Delicious Library is a great example of a feature intensive, but not feature-bloated program. Anybody with a Mac and an iSight camera should be able to use this program without consulting the Help menu first. No surprise that it was chosen for an Apple Design Award for the 2005 Best Mac OS X User Experience and received 4 1/2 mice from Macworld. This is how commercial software should be built and deployed. The creators of the program are in the Seattle area too it seems. They should make a version for Windows, especially now with the switch to Intel Macs. Grade: A

• Looking forward to playing Super Mario Galaxy and other items on the to-do list
• Google green, My Library, Reader search
• Selling a self-published book, CD or DVD on Amazon
• Create and share lists with Listal and Listible, but neither shares revenue
• Incentive for waiting on hold, smart!
• Amazon price comparison with Priceheat bookmarklet