Version 2.0
What's New in 2 from 1
- Publish to the web in one click
- .Mac users are automatically configured &mdash just press the 'Publish' button on the lower right, and DL2 will build a website for you and put it up on your .Mac account
- A special version optimized for the iPhone or iPod touch is also published automaticaly when the main web pages are published, as well as a binary version for other Delicious Library 2 users to view
- Alternately, publish your collection as web pages into your iWeb site or a local folder
- Experts can publish to any FTP site — Transmit's sites are automatically added, or FTP sites can be manually entered
- Publish the entire collection or only selected shelves
- Choose from multiple templates, or create new templates using HTML and CSS (with a few extensions)
- Mark private items with a flag so they don't get published
- New categories — tools, toys, software, gadgets, and apparel — join version one's books, music, videos, and videogames
- Cover view changes
- CoreAnimation gives us the power of OpenGL, the framework used by game writers for fast 3D graphics
- Fast, beautiful animations when resizing or scrolling
- Funny animations added for adding and deleting items
- Covers are loaded lazily and, under 10.5.3, in the background — on separate cores if available — so scrolling is always smooth and responsive, even with thousands of items
- Books now use their real cover dimensions when drawing, toys, tools, and gadgets draw with correct relative sizes but aren't exact
- Toys and tools and gadgets automatically have their white borders removed and are drawn as if in 3D
- Apparel includes shoes and jewelry and draws items as Polaroids™
- Tools and gadgets and apparel all have special shelf backgrounds (pegboard, metal shelves, corkboard)
- Loaned-out items appear as "ghosted," except tools draw a chalk outline on their pegboard where they should be put back
- Zoom in and out using shift-scrollwheel or trackpad gestures on Macs that support them.
- Large collections — now using an industry-standard SQL database
- File format is changed from flat XML to sqlite database
- Delicious Library 2 has no absolute item limit, but will obviously get incrementally slower with more items
- Performance depends on machine’s available RAM, its graphics processor, and its disk speed (in that order — on our laptops Delicious Library 2 will launch in seconds with five thousand of items in its database.
- Updating or adding an item takes under a second to save, no matter how big the database, now. (As opposed to minutes for thousands of items, before.)
- iTunes shelves automatically read in iTunes collection
- iTunes shelves automatically stay in sync with iTunes media — albums, TV shows, movies, & audiobooks
- Editing a song's info in iTunes updates it in Delicious Library 2 seconds later
- Individual songs from iTunes are automatically grouped into albums for display in Delicious Library 2 (iTunes 7 copied this).
- Delicious Library 2 is the easiest way to publish your iTunes collection to the web
- Publish to other Delicious Library 2 users
- Use Delicious Library 2 to browse other users' published libraries from inside DL2 instead of the web
- Find users automatically, if they use .Mac or if their site is linked into Google, or enter a URL manually.
- Local users automatically share libraries with each other over Bonjour (preference)
- Smart Shelves
- Build smart shelves using almost any attribute of your media
- Smart shelves support drag-and-drop editing
- You can build arbitrarily complex smart shelves using logical and, or, and not subgroups as deep as you'd like to nest them
- You can search for items based on the color of their covers. There are two fields for this -- one simplifies the cover to primary color names, the other uses fancier names (like 'ecru' and 'salmon') to be more specific. There are also color wells so you can just pick the color visually
- Smart shelves autocomplete from your library and from lists of standard words as you type
- User-created shelves now always appear in alphabetical order, instead of order of creation
- Friend shelves
- Friends' collections are automatically viewable from inside Delicious Library 2 if they have a .mac account on their Address Book entries
- Friends' collections can also be found automatically if they have been indexed with Google.
- Delicious Library will now re-connect to the correct user if your Address Book has been rewritten but the original user is still present (but with a different id), instead of replacing the friend with "DELETED"
- Loans are tracked in iCal (as in version 1), but using the new Leopard framework, making this feature much faster and more reliable. Changing a loan's date in iCal will change it in Delicious Library 2 instantly, and deleting it will delete it from Library as well.
- iSight scanning is much easier with our new guides, algorithm is slightly tuned up
- Bluetooth scanners now auto-pair and auto-connect when enabled
- Autocomplete
- Editing common fields in the details panel (actors, creators, composers, platforms, etc) autocompletes from other media you have entered
- Certain fields also have built-in autocompletion presets: languages, formats, platoforms, conditions, MPAA ratings, and ESRB ratings
- Autocompletion also works when building smart shelves
- Currency Conversion
- Delicious Library 2 now continually tracks the relative values of the world's 25 most popular currencies
- Sorting shelves by any currency attribute (eg, retail price, buy price, current value) now compares different currencies correctly using current approximate exchange rates. Eg, if you buy a Harry Potter book from Amazon UK for £20, then it'll be valued at approx. US$39 for sorting
- Smart shelf rules with any currency attribute (eg, retail price, buy price, current value) automatically convert other currencies to your local currency using current approximate exchange rates. Eg, if you are in America and make a shelf for "Items Under $30", your Harry Potter book that you bought from Amazon UK for £20 will NOT be on it
- [Due to a last-minute change in Leopard, in this release the currency conversion feature requires that you have launched the Dashboard conversion widget at least once. We hope to address this in a future release.]
- Scripting: AppleScripts, shell scripts, and CoreFoundation tools can be put into /Library/Scripts/Applications/Delicious Library 2/ or your home folder/Library/Scripts/Applications/Delicious Library 2/ and they will automatically show up in Delicious Library 2's main menu
- User-supplied script menu items always start with Apple's "S" script graphic, so they don't present a security / crashing risk. Use scripts at your own risk!
- Shell scripts and applications are called with the Delicious Library 2's process id and the current data file's URL on their command-lines. This would look something like: "-pid 5888 -datafileURL file://localhost/Users/yourname/Library/Application%20Support/Delicious%20Library%202/database.deliciousLibrary2"
- Specifying how/where the menu item should appear for your scripts
- An AppleScript has a line that starts "-- Menu Title:" you can specify the title of this script in the application's main menu. For example, '-- Menu Title: [1.5] "My Exciting Script"' Leaving out the [number] adds the new menu item to the end
- An AppleScript has a line that starts "-- Menu Path:" you can specify under which menus you'd like to put your new script, and create new submenus as well. For example, '-- Menu Path: [2], "Import", "Import Scripts"' Leaving the [number] out from new submenus adds them to the end, specifying just a [number] says to look at whatever submenu is at that number, no matter what it is named (eg, in case it is localized)
- An AppleScript has a line that starts "-- Menu Keyboard Shortcut: alt-command-K. For example '-- Menu Keyboard Shortcut: alt-command-K' or 'Menu Keyboard Shortcut: % - * - K' are the same
- Shell scripts can do the same three things (above) by using "#" instead of "--" (eg, using the shell comment prefix instead of the AppleScript ones)
- Applications can do the same thing by including a C string constant somewhere in their source code that starts with "//" instead of "--". For example, a programmer might say:
static char *menuTitle= "// Menu Title: [3.5] My Exciting Helper App";
- AppleScript Support
- Getting values from, creating, changing, and deleting all type of media, user shelves, and borrowers is supported using standard AppleScript syntax (eg, "get", "make new", "set", "delete") whenever it's legal. An example of an "illegal" thing to do would be to change the borrower on an existing loan -- loans are defined to be immutable, and thus you must delete a loan and create a new one if you want to change a borrower
- Example AppleScripts can be installed with a single click from the Preferences panel
- Works with Apple Remote
- Pressing play on a medium will open the file or launch the URL you have associated with the selected medium
- If you don't associate any URL with a medium, some have built-in play actions -- books will open on Amazon's "Look Inside" site, and iTunes songs or movies will simply start to play in iTunes
- Printing is redone with cooler, extensible HTML-basesd templates and a preview mode
- Speech Input
- When speaking a title, you can now speak just the first part (up to a ":") of a multi-part title. For example, you can say "Visual Explanations" to get to "Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative"
- New cover graphics
- New movie types: HDDVD, Blu-ray, and UMD movies
- More music types: Paper CD cases, and 7" and 10" vinyl records
- New video game types: XBox, XBox 360, Wii, Playstation 3
- Legacy video games: Sega CD, Sega 32X and Neo Geo
- Export to comma and tab separated files, Bookends (via BibTeX), Excel (via SYLK), XML, and the six most common bibliography formats (AMA, Turabian, APA, CBE, Chicago, MLA), or back to Delicious Library 1's format.
- Import from delimited files with a flexible import assistant that guesses the file type and then has tweakable settings. (Delicious Library 1 files are automatically and non-destructively imported on first launch.)
- New fields for items
- The type of an item is now a pop-up, so if an item is mis-classified it can be changed.
- The dominant color of the cover is automatically calculated, can be used in smart shelves ('all blue items') and sorting items on shelves
- Private collection marks items as non-published.
- The country field is now obeyed when refreshing an item, assuming there's a web source in the specified country
- Composer is now avaiable as well as creator, especially for classic pieces
- Screenwriter and cinematographer have been added for movies
- Players is now separated into minimum and maxium players for games and videogames
- Serial Number has been added to videogames and software and gadgets and tools
- Dimensions are now editable, and are obeyed when drawing most item types
- Dewey Decimal and Library of Congress are new for books and videos and music, the former is automatically filled for many items, but the latter is not (yet). Both are sorted correctly according to library standards.
- The asin field has been renamed Amazon link and, if present, makes the item auto-refresh its information every couple days (if the item is inspected), but it will not overwrite user changes that were made in version 2
- Details pane redone to be horizontal, supports title-only mode or complete hiding
- Inspecting an item that was loaded from Amazon will automatically update its information (again, on a background thread and separate core if available) if it hasn't been refreshed in a little while.
- Quick Look can inspect items dragged out onto desktop or dragged into e-mail
- Backup and restore functionality built in, to checkpoint your collection or copy to another computer