Delicious Library

» see delicious-monster.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Delicious Library shipped in November 2004 for Mac OS X only and took $250,000 in its first month. The first half of that sentence is what put it out of my reach. A Mac in Turkey in 2004 was a customs problem with a keyboard attached, and the machine I used was a tower I had put together from parts listed in my forum signature.

What it did was keep a catalog of the physical things you owned. You held a book up to the iSight camera in the lid until it caught the barcode, or waved a scanner gun at it if you owned one. The cover then appeared on a wooden shelf that filled from the left. It knew who you had lent things to, because it read your Address Book.

It was made by Delicious Monster in Seattle, a company of about three people with a houseplant for a name. Wil Shipley had co-founded the Omni Group before it; Mike Matas did the interface and left for Apple in 2005. Apple gave the app a Design Award in 2005 for user experience and another in 2007 for the Leopard release.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the cuecat years ~

The supported ways to get a barcode into it included a modified CueCat, the cat-shaped scanner Radio Shack had given away by the million in 2000 and which hobbyists spent the years afterward defanging. The feature list named it alongside the Bluetooth scanners, as an ordinary supported input.

It also talked to you. A Star Wars item made it whisper "I am your father," and a Harry Potter book got "Voldemort." Adding A Brief History of Time set it monologuing about physics in a synthesized voice.

~ section 4e ~

Amazon had taken something away once before. In July 2009 it had the Delicious Library app for iPhone removed from the App Store, citing section 4(e) of the Product Advertising API terms, which said you would not use Product Advertising Content in connection with any site or application designed for use with a mobile phone or other handheld device.

So the dependency was visible from early on, written out in a numbered clause. The Mac app carried on for another fifteen years because the Mac was not a handheld. That is a thin thing for a product to rest on, and it held anyway.

~ twenty years of borrowed metadata ~

Everything that made the app feel magic came from somewhere else. The cover art, the titles, the author names, the prices: all of it arrived from Amazon's catalog in response to a scanned number. Nothing in the Mac ecosystem killed it. A feed switched off inside a company that had never sold a copy of it did.

~ what is left on the shelf ~

Shipley posted on 24 November 2024 that Amazon had shut off the feed and that nobody had contacted him about it. He was pulling the app and the site, he wrote, so that nobody would buy something that no longer worked. Both actions are visible from here: delicious-monster.com has no DNS record on either scheme, and the Mac App Store page for Delicious Library 3 answers 404.

The copies already installed still launch. Shipley described what was left of them precisely: an app limited to what users already have or enter manually. The last release was 3.9.3, and it still opens a library built over twenty years.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »