The problem is too many movies which results in information problems:
- deciding what to watch
- what movies are available for loan
- what movies are yet to be watched
- what movies do your have that are romantic slasher comedies
The solution is of course a database. I've thought of building one from scratch using mysql and php and while it would be fun it would take time i really don't have, both for the development work and then the immense amount of data entry. Last year or so i remember seeing a utility program that used a webcam to scan bar codes and then to retrieve the data from Amazon.
So we went looking and found a program called delicious library at http://www.delicious-monster.com/ which looks good. It is osx which is ok as we can use either the macbook or the imac to scan. We tried an old logitech webcam on the dual G5 but no joy as there are no osx drivers.
The program goes in your applications folder. Double-click to run. The older version ran fine on my dual G5 and even offered to move itself to the applications folder and then updated itself to the current 2.3 version. You can try out the program in demo mode for up to 25 items. You can add an new item by entering info like the ISBN but the webcam is great. Click Window, Video Camera Barcode Scanner and hold up the UPC symbol to the window. Make sure it is the right way, if a beep is not heard in a second or two then turn it the other way round. It picked up Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, La Chambre des Morts, Trailer Park Boys, Blade etc. It was able to identify 5 out of 10 movies by barcode scanning. It is neat that it speaks the title to you once it is identified. For the rest i entered the title of the movie and it found all of them and added them to the database. You can also add books by ISBN etc.
Once your movies or books or electronics are entered you can publish. The publish button allows you to publish to a folder on this machine or your network, put to an ftp site, or to iWeb or mobile me. We decide to try a folder for now.
Backing Up
The program stores its data in your home folder at ~/Library/Application Support/Delicious Library so to backup your database, make a copy of this folder. (or use Time Machine). There is also a backup and restore option on the file menu. I successfully backed up the 12 movies to my folder on the dual G5.
You can also export your data to excel, BibTex, XML, rtf, http://or comma delimited for import to a database.
I saved the file to my folder on the mac and then opened it in Safari to take a look. It's a nice display but the information retrieval options are restricted to only browsing as it is a static web page. Without a link to the underlying data there is no open of answering questions such as what movies do you have by genre or bw vs color or less than 120 minutes starring Scott Baio with a rating of 5 stars.
The web site says you can do a voice search but it did not seem to work for me. The keyword search worked ok.edit
I notice another problem with the browse, the shelves are incorrect, a lot of the items are cataloging as being "" on the first shelf. No problem, right just edit the title info to remove the erroneous quote marks. No can do. So now items are out of order. If you select Edit, Edit Item you get a properties pane. Here you can edit some info as well as adding DDC and LC numbers. It would be nice if the program built display pages based on indexing this data. There doesn't appear to be a way to edit the title. I try to search the forums on the web site but the following error is returned:
gsfnResultsCallback([{"date":"about 3 hours ago","
You can get help in the program but there does not seem to be a way to edit the title! The program has some nice features but is clearly a work in progress. The other issue is that it costs $40, which seems like a lot, particularly with the tie-ins to Amazon for buying like items etc. It would make sense for Amazon to fund the development and give the program away to drive sales from the online site. I can see using it to make a static web page so that friends can browse to see what's available but not sure the cost justifies the value added at this time. Still, a very innovative use of technology. If the amazon data was loaded into a sqlite database in the app and then had some useful searching functions and if the problem with quote marks in the titles was fixed i would then definitely recommend this product.Update
Figured it out (with help from my neighbour). The quote marks are because the default is to sort by creator and it is blank for many. Click on the top of the window and sort by Title and now the bookshelves are in the proper order. It's quite fast to a dd stuff and the developers just updated to 2.3.3 so they are active. I want to test out exporting the data and bringing it into a database to offer a search page...here is a pic of my neighbour's collection:
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