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You are here: MacNN Forums > Our Archives > General Archives > Delicious Monster > Thoughts from a Collectorz.com User

 
Thoughts from a Collectorz.com User
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wwarby
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Join Date: Apr 2009
Status: Offline
Apr 14, 2009, 07:08 AM
 
Hi all,

I've been using Movie Collector from Collectorz.com for years to manage my DVD collection and I've never liked it. The user interface is unappealing and it's not easy to keep your library clean and well organised with that product, and it has far too many fields in it's database that are completely irrelevant to most users. Recently they made a change though that I just couldn't stomach. They used to use various internet sources for harvesting data about movies including IMDb and Amazon, but then they introduced their own user-maintained database, and in the latest version they switched to using only their own database, which just isn't up to par - a lot of the details you get from it are wrong, and the data entry is hopelessly inconsistent because it isn't maintained to any well defined standard. Suffice to say I've given up on it and I'm currently looking for a better solution. So far, Delicious Library seems to be it. I would have bought a licence already if it were possible without a credit card (I cut all mine up ages ago) - as it is, I'll have to wait until PayPal or Google Checkout or Maestro cards are supported.

Anyway, I've been playing with the trial version and I have some thoughts on how it compares with the previous tool I used...

Firstly, the UI is just gorgeous - it is the best looking application on my Mac. Besides looking nice, the user experience is well conceived too - everything works as I expect it to. I particularly like the barcode scanning through the iSight web cam - that makes a huge difference to the speed of data entry. Now for some improvement suggestions:

1. I wish it would re-write the DVD titles as they come off the Internet. Every single one seems to come down with a title like "Angel Heart [DVD] [1987] [Region 1] [US Import] [NTSC]" which I then have to clean up. The import routine should include a few regex patterns to remove anything in brackets at the end of the title, the words "DVD", "VHS" etc. and force lower-case conversion of words like and/of/the.

2. I don't know how you'd get it exactly, but I wish you could import the IMDb number for each movie and ideally also the star rating from IMDb.

3. Speaking of star ratings, I want to rate my movies from 1-10, not 1-5. You should allow half-stars in the user ratings.

4. I'd like a "title sort" field like Collectorz.com has, so that I could arrange my movies in the order in which they appear on my physical shelves which in some cases is not strictly alphabetical. For example, "Die Hard with a Vengeance" comes after "Die Hard 4.0" in the alphabet but that is clearly not the order you would use on the physical shelves. Similarly, I want the sorting to ignore the word "The" in the title "Disney's The Lion King". It should be an optional field that is used instead of "Title" when sorting by title if the field is populated.

5. I could do without the "creator" field on movies, or rather the fact that it is automatically populated. It doesn't make sense - it just seems to randomly pick out a couple of actors from the movie to the title. I'd like the option not to use this field for movies, or at least not to populate it automatically.

6. Add some new payment methods so I can actually buy this product!!!
     
jessiemonster
Monster Rep
Join Date: Sep 2008
Location: Seattle
Status: Offline
May 4, 2009, 01:22 AM
 
Thank you for your suggestions, we are always interested in hearing what people have to say about our product.

For now, cards are the best way for us to handle transactions. We might open up to other options in the future, though!


Jessie Monster
Delicious Monster
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