Delicious Library 3.0 Release Notes

Major New Features

Fully 3D cover view

• All items are drawn in full 3D [industry first], with multiple light sources and normal, reflection, and environment maps
• Books are rendered at actual thickness based on page count
• Live lighting changes as items are selected
• Shadows draw dynamically behind all items
• Many gorgeous woods to choose from for shelves

New "Recommended" pane

• Makes smart recommendations by considering everything the user owns and has ever rated
• User can now rate items they don't own to improve recommendations (using search widget)
• Recommended items that user's friends own have badges so they can be easily borrowed
• Add recommended items to the wishlist with a single click

New "Wishlist" pane

• To populate the wishlist, drag items from recommended items in the right pane or from search widget at the upper right
• Or drag URLs or entire blocks of text from Amazon webpages to add items
• Wishlist items that user's friends own have badges so they can be easily borrowed

New Flexible Smart shelves

• Instead of discrete "smart shelves" (with rules, like "Author is Larry Niven") and normal shelves (with hand-picked items), all shelves are now both [industry first]
• User can add extra rules to any shelf or drag items into or out of any shelf, in any combination
• Double-clicking on a shelf shows all its rules and manually added and removed items, for editing
• Custom shelves can now be re-ordered by the user or automatically sorted

New global search

• Displays results in a table/popover like iTunes 11
• Searches through user's collection, friends' collections, and online
• Can be used to find existing items or new ones
• Can be used to rate items user doesn't own but has opinions on
• User can also search by speaking or selecting a cover color

New iOS barcode scanner app

• Our most requested feature!
• We invented video barcode scanning in 2004, and with Delcious Library 3, we're unveiling our fourth-generation, multi-threaded, vector-accelerated recognizer engine, new from the ground up for iOS and OS X
• No need to carry items from their shelves to your Mac
• Synchronize immediately with your Mac or save items if you're too far away

New interactive charts mode

• Our second most requested feature!
• Provides a gorgeous collection overview
• Changes interactively as items are added or removed
• Shows the total current value of and total amount paid for user's collection, with all prices automatically converted to local currency [industry first]

Double-high media table mode

• New double-line table view always shows the most relevant information in first column, compactly and beautifully
• All fields can now be edited in table-view mode directly (finally)
• User can specify multiple sort criteria by option-clicking on headers (in addition to using sorts widget at bottom of the window)
• Column titles are now media-type specific; e.g., movies have a "director" column, but books have "author" and music has "artist"
• Media table resizes automatically with OS X's global "Sidebar Icon Size" from System Preferences

Entire UI redesigned to be bookshelf-centric

• Show covers, a table, or charts using buttons at upper left of the window
• Switch between owned items, recommended items, and wishlist items at the upper center
• Find existing or new items in search widget at the upper right
• Switch between media types with buttons at the lower left
• Change sorting at the bottom middle
• Show and hide auxilliary right pane using button at the lower right
• Source list is hidden by default but available for advanced users

Medium-sized New Features

• We've eliminated the "Preferences" panel—all options are set where they are actually used, instead of in a single global panel
• iTunes books will be read into Delicious Library 3 when iTunes is launched.
• Two new Amazon stores are now accessible: Italy and Spain

Popover Details

• Dates entered manually remember their precision, so if the user specifies "Jan, 2000" for a book's release date, it won't switch it to "Jan 1, 2000." However, dates are still formatted according to the user's localization settings in System Preferences.
• When editing multi-line fields, the "return" key goes to a new line as users expect (no need to figure out "option-return")

Sorting

• User's favorite sorts are remembered and can be re-applied anywhere
• Improved per-language article-stripping; e.g., ignoring "a, an, the" in English, "der, die, das" in German

Publishing

• Now remembers multiple places; e.g., set up publishing both to Dropbox and FTP site
• Live preview the generated web pages
• Privacy options moved to publishing shelves

Printing

• Added "Compact" template to minimize paper use
• Added "Insurance" template to show fields insurance companies care about in the event of theft
• Interface cleaned up so template selection is obvious

Scanning history

• User's last 500 added items are shown above scanner window for easy rating or deleting
• Provides context if a book isn't found online so it can be entered manually

Import from another library

• Import libraries from other machines without removing current items
• Importing the same library twice applies the changes but doesn't duplicate items
• Can be used to easily sync libraries between computers
• Multiple people can scan in items on multiple computers, then merge all the items into one collection
• Importing is now undoable

Friends

• Loans now appear in friends' sidebars instead of in main bookshelf view, to reduce confusion
• Send loan reminder e-mails with a single click
• Friends can be re-ordered in source list. If friends are dragged into a sorted order, they'll stay in that order automatically.

Help

• The "Search:" field in the main menu's Help searches our online forums for relevant answers.

Tiny New Features

• When user first launches the app, most panes explain why they are empty and what to do
• All item types from Amazon are supported (user prompted for the type if item is from a store we don't recognize).
• More descriptive titles for most menu items; e.g., "Delete 4 Books" or "Delete Shelf" instead of "Delete"
• Added expand-on-hover, so if titles or authors are ever drawn truncated they can still be read
• Cover view responds to some EMACS keybindings for selection movement
• Items can be dragged from and to more places
• Items can be dragged to the trash can to delete
• User can copy media with command-C and paste into text areas or URL-taking places.

New Features from OS X

• Scene Kit: for fast, gorgeous, interactive 3D graphics
• Sharing Services: tweet, iMessage, Facebook, or e-mail items to friends
• SQLite write-ahead logging: user's database can no longer be corrupted if machine crashes
• Full-screen mode: added and optimized
• New drag architecture: multiple items can be dragged in or out at once
• Spotlight: Library items are written to Spotlight, can be found quickly in the global Spotlight search pane (command-space) with structured queries like "media:book color:blue" (standard Spotlight keys include: kMDItemAlbum, kMDItemComposer, kMDItemContentCreationDate, kMDItemDirector, kMDItemGenre, kMDItemMediaTypes, kMDItemPerformers, kMDItemRecordingDate, and kMDItemMediaTypes)
• QuickLook: Spotlight items (or media dragged onto the desktop) are viewable in QuickLook with full-color covers and complete descriptions
• Retina graphics: high-resolution graphics used throughout
• State restoration: Delicious Library opens up exactly as it was last closed
• 64-bit: for unlimited memory, and because it's faster
• Obj-C 2 runtime: faster, future-proof
• ARC: eliminates certain categories of crash bugs
• Constraints-based layout: makes the layout of all buttons and text much more natural
• NSSupportsSuddenTermination: quits instantly when it's safe
  • If it's not safe to quit, user can force quit if there's a long operation in progress, or the app will auto-quit when long operation is over
• Automatic termination: can automatically quit under memory pressure
• Power assertions: the machine won't idle-sleep during long operations (publishing, importing, etc.)

Some Bugs Fixed

• Deleting thousands of items (and undoing that deletion) is now close to instant instead of taking minutes

Friends

• Friends' libraries now download in the background, NOT blocking the program from running. Yay.
• Friends' libraries aren't re-downloaded every launch but only if the friend has changed something
• Friends' libraries are imported MUCH more quickly
• If friends are removed from Contacts, the app doesn't forget their names
• Undoing the deletion of a friend restores items loaned to that friend
• Adding a new friend doesn't spam Google when automatically searching for the friend's published library
• Adding friends is undoable