Daily Archives:November 20th, 2004

Of Macs and Monsters

[Original Link]

The Delicious Library application is out for the Mac, and it’s appropriately named. I have never really felt the desire to catalog my books and CDs. I certainly never felt like putting in the time and effort to do so. But on the other hand, I tried this software and almost immediately registered it.

Why? Well, in a bizarre way, almost because I wanted to reward the creators and because it was something beautiful that I wanted to own. It’s very rare that a bit of software does that to me! I was going to write a longish piece about it, but I came across the Ars Technica review by John Siracusa and it says it all. Anyone involved in software development should read this, or at least the first couple of pages. Anyone who wonders why we Mac enthusiasts become Mac enthusiast should at least read page 2, which asks some serious questions about the nature of the software & platform experience.

This is an example of the best kind of peer pressure. There is simply a “climate of excellence” on the Mac platform. Any developer that does not live up to community standards is looked down upon, or even shunned. Commercial, open source, freeware, shareware, it doesn’t matter: pay attention to detail, or else.

In the meantime – a couple of screen shots:
Part of my library:

How did I get this information in to my machine? By scanning barcodes with my iSight:

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser