Welcome to the MacNN Forums.

If this is your first visit, be sure to check out the FAQ by clicking the link above. You may have to register before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages, select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

You are here: MacNN Forums > Our Archives > General Archives > Delicious Monster > DL 2 Initial Impressions

 
DL 2 Initial Impressions
Thread Tools
LazarusLong
Registered User
Join Date: Jan 2007
Status: Offline
May 27, 2008, 07:55 AM
 
I paid for my upgrade to DL 2 over the weekend. I must way that I am very impressed so far and think it's been well worth the wait.

I also received an "Automatic Update" to the latest version, so that seems to be working nicely too.

I do have a few comments/suggestions.

1) Allow searching by more than just title and creator. If I want to search for any movie starring Johnny Depp, I can only do this by creating a smart folder.

2) Allow relative dates in Smart Folders. For example, I would like to have a "Recently Added" folder with a date selection of "Added in the last 7 days" or "Date Added is less than 10 days from today"

3. Allow selection of what comes in from iTunes, perhaps by playlist. I have tons of songs which all come in as an album, even though I just have one song from the album. I have playlists set up for complete albums, it would be nice if I could just pick those to come in to DL.

4) When publishing by FTP, if I enter a folder in the Path, such as /Library/WebServer/Documents, I get an error "No such file". I have to leave the path blank to get it to work.

Thanks for the great work Delicious Monster developers!
     
Horsepoo!!!
Banned
Join Date: Jun 2003
Status: Offline
May 27, 2008, 09:02 AM
 
Originally Posted by LazarusLong View Post
I paid for my upgrade to DL 2 over the weekend. I must way that I am very impressed so far and think it's been well worth the wait.

I also received an "Automatic Update" to the latest version, so that seems to be working nicely too.

I do have a few comments/suggestions.

1) Allow searching by more than just title and creator. If I want to search for any movie starring Johnny Depp, I can only do this by creating a smart folder.

2) Allow relative dates in Smart Folders. For example, I would like to have a "Recently Added" folder with a date selection of "Added in the last 7 days" or "Date Added is less than 10 days from today"

3. Allow selection of what comes in from iTunes, perhaps by playlist. I have tons of songs which all come in as an album, even though I just have one song from the album. I have playlists set up for complete albums, it would be nice if I could just pick those to come in to DL.

4) When publishing by FTP, if I enter a folder in the Path, such as /Library/WebServer/Documents, I get an error "No such file". I have to leave the path blank to get it to work.

Thanks for the great work Delicious Monster developers!
For first-time DL buyers, DL2 is a no-brainer. For owners of DL1, there's very little improvement over DL1.

DL2 was rewritten to make use of new frameworks to speed up larger libraries, to interface with iCal "the right way", and to make use of more eye-candy. DL2 also looks a lot more elegant than DL1. However, there's very little in DL2 (outside the cosmetic and performance improvements as well as better scanning with iSights) that justifies a $20 price tag.

For DL1 owners, I'm not convinced DL2 was worth the insane wait. That said, I'm a sucker for solid apps, and DL2 is a nice app which uses a lot of Leopard UI elements (DL1 was not so nice with all its custom widgets). So I have upgraded.
     
turtle777
Clinically Insane
Join Date: Jun 2001
Location: planning a comeback !
Status: Offline
May 27, 2008, 10:08 AM
 
Originally Posted by Horsepoo!!! View Post
For first-time DL buyers, DL2 is a no-brainer. For owners of DL1, there's very little improvement over DL1.
I don't know DL1 too well, but one thing I like about DL2 (and I think this wasn't around in DL1) is the download script to retrieve Library of Congress Call Numbers, and then have the shelf be organized by Call Numbers.

I like that very much.

Also, the export function to have your library / shelves be exported to various styles (APA, Chicago, Turabian etc...) is great.

-t
     
sefton
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Join Date: May 2008
Status: Offline
May 27, 2008, 11:09 AM
 
The improvement in scanning alone was worth the money to me.
     
Eug
Clinically Insane
Join Date: Dec 2000
Location: Caught in a web of deceit.
Status: Offline
May 27, 2008, 11:20 AM
 
I guess I have to finally upgrade my main computer to Leopard.

(Most of my Macs are already Leopardified, but my main desktop isn't yet.)
     
jokell82
Professional Poster
Join Date: May 2001
Location: Hampton Roads, VA
Status: Offline
May 27, 2008, 04:00 PM
 
I'm going to have to try this app out again. Did the demo for DL1 and thought it was OK, but the new features in 2 are compelling enough for me to try again.

All glory to the hypnotoad.
     
wickedclown213
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Join Date: Apr 2008
Status: Offline
May 27, 2008, 05:55 PM
 
Is anyone else having problems with itunes shelves not showing up?
     
anyrandomthing
Junior Member
Join Date: Dec 2006
Status: Offline
May 27, 2008, 06:24 PM
 
hate the horizontal pane. i really expected a respectable "Preferences" control panel too (can't customize much). doesn't seem like it's worth it for most people, except those with very large, slow libraries and the desire for eye candy. or those who need to catalogue routers and tables saws and sweaty tee-shirts.
     
Peter
Addicted to MacNN
Join Date: Oct 2002
Location: England | San Francisco
Status: Offline
May 27, 2008, 08:19 PM
 
I'm pretty underwhelmed.
Can we get a screencast showing whats new?
we don't have time to stop for gas
     
stoplis
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Join Date: Jan 2008
Status: Offline
May 28, 2008, 10:11 AM
 
I like the 'Smart Shelves', makes it easier as I like to seperate my HD-DVDs, and Blu-rays from the rest of my films.
I would have to say I much prefer the info bar down the right hand side of the screen, instead of along the bottom.
Also I HD-DVDs and Blu-rays don't work. Anyone else had this problem? Does anyone know how to get them to display in the right cases, instead of DVD cases?
     
balthazar_b
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Join Date: May 2008
Status: Offline
May 28, 2008, 10:25 AM
 
Originally Posted by wickedclown213 View Post
Is anyone else having problems with itunes shelves not showing up?
Yes, I'm having the same problem with my iTunes not showing up. Do you have multiple iTunes libraries? I've got a smaller one on my MacBook and then my full library on an external hard drive (you can create multiple iTunes libraries by holding the Option key when opening iTunes). When I have the iTunes library on my MacBook hard drive open it shows up in DL, but when I have the iTunes library on my external hard drive open it doesn't show up in DL.
     
jokell82
Professional Poster
Join Date: May 2001
Location: Hampton Roads, VA
Status: Offline
May 28, 2008, 10:36 AM
 
The info pane really should be on the right. Especially since all Macs ship with widescreen monitors.

All glory to the hypnotoad.
     
stephanieleary
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Join Date: May 2008
Status: Offline
May 28, 2008, 10:42 AM
 
Allow relative dates in Smart Folders. For example, I would like to have a "Recently Added" folder with a date selection of "Added in the last 7 days" or "Date Added is less than 10 days from today"
YES. The Recent Imports shelf was my home base in DL1, and there doesn't seem to be a way to duplicate its functionality in DL2. Very frustrating.

I also agree that the info pane should be on the right, or that it should at least be a preference. I have a wide monitor, and I loathe having it at the bottom.
     
stoplis
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Join Date: Jan 2008
Status: Offline
May 28, 2008, 10:54 AM
 
Has anyone managed to get HD-DVDs, Blurays, PSP or PS3 games to show right? Mine are just coming up as DVD cases.
     
ajmas
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Join Date: Nov 2006
Status: Offline
May 28, 2008, 10:54 AM
 
wickedclown213: My shelves show up, but then Delicious Monster stops responding (I have about 20000 entries). Its almost as if the thread taking care of communicating with iTunes is given more priority than the one dealing with the user. Its probably something to do with fetching the cover art.

While thinking about it, I would be curious to see how well cover flow would work in DL2.
     
mwyner
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Join Date: May 2008
Status: Offline
May 28, 2008, 02:44 PM
 
I'm not that impressed honestly for waiting 2 years for this upgrade. The info pane needs to be back on the right. The publishing feature is pretty poor - all you get is basically a pretty list - no way to search if you use the Paper Stencil template, so my friends have to click through 42 pages of movies just to see if I have something they want. I'm not sure what else is new that I'd use since it's hard to see the other new features. I haven't paid for the upgrade yet, and I'm honestly not sure if I'm going to. I dislike that there's very little to customize - I would've expected a whole slew of options by this point.
     
Eug
Clinically Insane
Join Date: Dec 2000
Location: Caught in a web of deceit.
Status: Offline
May 28, 2008, 02:53 PM
 
Originally Posted by stoplis View Post
Has anyone managed to get HD-DVDs, Blurays, PSP or PS3 games to show right? Mine are just coming up as DVD cases.
Hmmm... That's pretty disappointing, assuming it's a universal problem that is.
     
jokell82
Professional Poster
Join Date: May 2001
Location: Hampton Roads, VA
Status: Offline
May 28, 2008, 03:06 PM
 
Originally Posted by Eug View Post
Hmmm... That's pretty disappointing, assuming it's a universal problem that is.
No issues here, but I've only imported HD DVDs and 360 games (and one PS2 game). All look like they're supposed to.

All glory to the hypnotoad.
     
bbbobbb
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Join Date: Sep 2004
Status: Offline
May 28, 2008, 04:59 PM
 
Blu-ray identifies fine....and I swear with 10.5.3 it does scroll faster, of course everything else seems peppier as well...

     
rickla
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Join Date: May 2008
Status: Offline
May 28, 2008, 09:24 PM
 
Originally Posted by mwyner View Post
I'm not that impressed honestly for waiting 2 years for this upgrade. The info pane needs to be back on the right. The publishing feature is pretty poor - all you get is basically a pretty list - no way to search if you use the Paper Stencil template, so my friends have to click through 42 pages of movies just to see if I have something they want. I'm not sure what else is new that I'd use since it's hard to see the other new features. I haven't paid for the upgrade yet, and I'm honestly not sure if I'm going to. I dislike that there's very little to customize - I would've expected a whole slew of options by this point.
My reactions are of two types. In a general, unfocused way, I'm disappointed that, after all the hype (some generated by Delicious Monster, some by idiots at news and commentary sites who have bought into the notion that DL represents a whole new paradigm , and almost wilfully ignore established alternatives) and after a shockingly long string of delays, there's nothing mind-blowing about the new version.

On the other hand, from a practical point of view, the upgrade isn't particularly expensive, and it appears to have two improvements that should actually be key in daily use: better scanning (and 1.0's scanning was already quite a bit better than alternatives), and the ability to handle larger numbers of items. Version 1 was a real dog from that point of view; I get the feeling that the typical user they had in mind at the outset was someone with maybe 50-200 books (though that does make you wonder why they used the term "industrial-strength" on the website right from the early days).

I switched to Bookpedia quite a while back when I realized that the developers were more focused on regular and real improvements in the software and considerate support than fascinating blog posts and grandiose claims. But I still kept DL in mind and I still think that, if you have enough items, using DL for scanning and Bookpedia for management might make sense.
     
stoplis
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Join Date: Jan 2008
Status: Offline
May 28, 2008, 11:53 PM
 
can you post a p
screen cap of the details pane on one of your Blu-rays so I can see if it is something there that is wrong for me.
Cheers
     
FineWine
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Join Date: May 2008
Status: Offline
May 29, 2008, 02:39 AM
 
OK - I originally posted this in the MacTalk forums.

As you can see from the following not all that impressed with DL after my initial excitement when I found some reviews about months ago. Up until today had just been using MS Excel then Numbers, awaiting the release of DL2. Never looked at any other products. Well I have spent this week doing so and the results are below.

Sorry Wil and the rest of the DM staff I know you have put a lot work into this program. But that's life.

MacTalk forum post
As you know from my previous post I beta tested DL2. Here is my list of bugs and suggestions re the area I tested, which was importation from MS Excel and number data bases.


BUGS
1 - Not importing in alphabetical order. Creator field is sorting by Creator but not then sorting alphabetically overall by Creator.
2 - Column drop down header labels list in Import do not match column drop down header labels list in Library "Show as List" View, i.e. there is "I.S.B.N." label in Import but not in Library "Show as List" View or there is no "Labelled Note" in Library "Show as List" View but there is in the Import list.
3 - Import by Amazon.com URL dragging not working.
4 - Import "From other applications" not present.
5 - Can not drag item to "Shelves" from "Show as List" view only from "Cover View"
6 - "Labeled Note" column information not importing.
7 - In Import function column fields will only Import if "First row contains headers" is unticked. Make unticked the default.
8 - Not all column fields are importing.

SUGGESTIONS
1 - Add Co-Creator, Author and Co-Author labels to Column Field Label List in Import function and to Library "Show as List" View - Column Field Label List.
2 - Add a column/s "Sort & Filter" function just like in iWorks '08 Numbers.
3 - Import directly into "Shelves".
4 - Scan directly into "Shelves"
5 - If "I.S.B.N." is present after Import enable automatic item information checking and Cover Art fetching.
6 - Enable Cover Art fetching even if I.S.B.N. is not present after importing.

After three weeks I have NOT heard back from them.

I also looked at two other programs:

Booxter
CDPedia and DVDPedia

Booxter gave me no end of trouble. It would only intermittently start and never quitted. I always had to do a Force Quit. So I gave up on that one.


After evaluating all three programs settled on CD/DVD Pedia (A$35.71 bundled) as the best.

* It has better book look-up facilities (more sites)
* The iSight scanner is far more accurate and faster
* The UI is easier to navigate around and is far more functional. (Looks very like iTunes) Does not hog screen real estate like DL2
* Love the view options: List-Shelves-Cover View
* It has a custom field facility (10)
* Easier access to lookup sites from the book to a site page
* Drag and drop from browser to cover art insertion point for cover art if cover art not automatically found
* scanning of cover art from iSight - though not all that great - better quality via printer/scanner to desktop then drag and drop
* by far the best "txt" format importation from MS Excel plus DL, Booxter and others
* after importation and on book/s selection it went away and found all the info and cover art with 98% accuracy (except for my professional nursing collection which is quite old now)
* it has a neat little function in the Info view panel where it will show more books by the author in that series, clicking on the + symbol it adds that book automatically. Great if you have a series collection, you scan in one book then click the + symbol to add the rest one by one.

As far as DVDPedia goes the only down side is the lack of Australia to have a central data base or an Amazon.com.au site. Luckerly we only have 125 DVD's most of which are Bali specials. So we just manually entered these and browsed or print/scanned in the artwork.

Ok that is it. As you can see we far preferred CD/DVDPedia over the others. Even though we imported from MS Excel we are going to re-enter all our books and DVD's. This will enable us to re-sort all our book shelves. We have close to 1000 books so a good spring clean is required.
     
-LD
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Join Date: May 2003
Location: Twin Cities
Status: Offline
May 29, 2008, 10:09 AM
 
Originally Posted by LazarusLong View Post
1) Allow searching by more than just title and creator. If I want to search for any movie starring Johnny Depp, I can only do this by creating a smart folder.
The Pedias have been able to do this for some time.

2) Allow relative dates in Smart Folders. For example, I would like to have a "Recently Added" folder with a date selection of "Added in the last 7 days" or "Date Added is less than 10 days from today"
The Pedias have been able to do this for some time.

3. Allow selection of what comes in from iTunes, perhaps by playlist. I have tons of songs which all come in as an album, even though I just have one song from the album. I have playlists set up for complete albums, it would be nice if I could just pick those to come in to DL.
Not sure if CDPedia can do this, but I suspect it could.
     
bbbobbb
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Join Date: Sep 2004
Status: Offline
May 29, 2008, 02:19 PM
 
Originally Posted by stoplis View Post
can you post a p
screen cap of the details pane on one of your Blu-rays so I can see if it is something there that is wrong for me.
Cheers
Here you go in edit mode:
     
Protoplasm
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Join Date: Jul 2006
Status: Offline
Jun 4, 2008, 07:20 PM
 
First up, despite the polls and posts I've read in this forum, I have no intention of going back to Delicious Library 1.

That said, I am disappointed in DL 2.0. For mostly shallow reasons. This is Delicious Library (well, duh); it spawned the term Delicious Generation. It won an Apple Design Award despite still being in alpha for Best Leopard Application... The expectation was there, but never met.

1) I'm the gazillionth person to say it, but I don't like the "Item Details" box being at the bottom.

a) It takes up too much room, it eats [more] valuable vertical screen real estate.

b) If the bar is shrunk down, there's no edit button. If it's up, there is. How unintuitive is that? Why can't it leave the icon and dynamically resize the "Item Details" box to fit, if the user clicks the button.

c) If you click on the title of the item, you can edit it. Click once. Not twice. And if you did that by mistake? You have to click on the shelves or the source bar to get out of edit mode. Not just click anywhere outside of the highlighted edit box, no sir. That'd be far too easy. The escape key doesn't work either...

d) ... you can hit TAB to move around to other controls but it's all too easy to hit another key and all the textual parts are in edit mode now so you lose information if you do that.

e) You can use the space bar to hide/show the bar. Sometimes. I'd rather not have it than have the inconsistencies. At least the method shown in the menu seems to work consistently.

f) The gear menu by the item name. What's wrong with the margin on the left? I've had a quick gander and I can see no precedent for this. Menus with a smaller font height, yes, but without the margin? No. That looks wrong.

g) Also looking wrong is "Buy from Amazon (null)" and the other Amazon links in that gear menu and the main "Item" menu in the menu bar. Bug?

h) In the gear drop down I can't choose to "Edit Item", despite the vanishing edit icon mentioned in b)?

i) Oh, my bad, "Edit Item" is in the the "Edit" menu of the menu bar, not the gear drop down. D'oh, of course!

j) Unlike "Delete Item" or "Duplicate Item" which, while in the gear drop down, are in neither the "Edit" menu in the menu bar nor the "Item" menu? EDIT: They now show up in the "Edit" menu... so I retract this statement and apologise. I shall continue to see if that is always the case, as I checked at the time I first wrote this point.

k) Do these gear-drop-down-only functions appear in the "Edit"/"Item" menus in the menu bar when the "Item Details" box is hidden? Of course they don't, as that'd show some UI savvy. EDIT: As written above, those two features do. Although I can't say that I see "Search for Cover Art" anywhere?

l) Right now, if I hover over the i button at the bottom of the "Item Details" it says "Show Collections"? Bug?

m) It's not really the "Item Details" box/pane (though it might as well be, since clicking in the "Item Details" box doesn't remove focus from the darn thing) but, in the status bar, but the search box for "Title or Creator" crops its glowing blue focus outline when it, well, has focus.

I was intending to write a quick post and go to bed. I've written more than I intended already, without touching on other irritations such as selecting the "LIBRARY" item in the source list (firstly the inconsistency -- is there another Leopard app which allows you to select a source header like this and, secondly, the selection bar is aesthetically out-of-whack and encroaching into the territory of "Books").

Don't get me wrong, Delicious Library 2.0 is an improvement when all things are taken into consideration. It obviously harnesses a lot of stuff new to Leopard, hence their ADA, and, having paid for the upgrade, I don't feel ripped off and will continue to use it.

Perhaps it's just that, in the past, Wil and his crew have set such high standards and that has made me overly critical of this release. I expected better, though. Quite a bit better. Here's hoping for some great updates in the near future.
( Last edited by Protoplasm; Jun 4, 2008 at 07:38 PM. )
     
CaptainHaddock
Grizzled Veteran
Join Date: Apr 2004
Location: Nagoya, Japan • 日本 名古屋市
Status: Offline
Jun 4, 2008, 08:59 PM
 
Does it take anyone else like 5 minutes of holding a book in front of the camera for it to scan?
     
turtle777
Clinically Insane
Join Date: Jun 2001
Location: planning a comeback !
Status: Offline
Jun 4, 2008, 10:11 PM
 
Originally Posted by CaptainHaddock View Post
Does it take anyone else like 5 minutes of holding a book in front of the camera for it to scan?
Sometimes takes a while, sometimes it's real quick. I guess it depends a bit on the book and the barcode.

-t
     
Protoplasm
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Join Date: Jul 2006
Status: Offline
Jun 5, 2008, 04:41 AM
 
Does anyone else think the incredibly small covers in list view are essentially useless? Is there a way to make them bigger? I can't even discern a book from a DVD. Strikes me that more useful would be a simple icon that represented the type, for when you're viewing your whole library rather than particular non-smart shelves. And be able to click a header to sort by type, too.

I guess I was hoping to see a lot more [optional] columns in list view, to allow more sorting options but, again, perhaps I'm just missing something.
     
:haripu:
Dedicated MacNNer
Join Date: Jun 2002
Status: Offline
Jun 5, 2008, 07:27 AM
 
Originally Posted by turtle777 View Post
Sometimes takes a while, sometimes it's real quick. I guess it depends a bit on the book and the barcode.

-t
and the brightness of your room. Switching on the light often helped, when it wouldn't recognize barcodes.
     
Thinine
Mac Elite
Join Date: Jul 2002
Status: Offline
Jun 6, 2008, 03:55 PM
 
Yeah, I've found that a light source behind the camera really helps with the speed of scanning.
     
k2director
Senior User
Join Date: Sep 2002
Location: Los Angeles
Status: Offline
Jun 9, 2008, 07:18 PM
 
DL2 wouldn't recognize my DL1 library, and I couldn't see any options to import it either.

I emailed tech support more than a week ago, but no response so far.
     
philosopherjake
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Join Date: Jun 2008
Status: Offline
Jun 10, 2008, 07:22 PM
 
Originally Posted by FineWine View Post

5 - Can not drag item to "Shelves" from "Show as List" view only from "Cover View"
You can, but you have to drag the tiny little covers in the left-most column. (Took a little while to figure out.)

Originally Posted by Protoplasm View Post

I guess I was hoping to see a lot more [optional] columns in list view, to allow more sorting options but, again, perhaps I'm just missing something.
If you control-click the headers row, you can set which columns appear in list view. (You have to set it separately for each library, shelf, friend, etc.) This took quite a while to figure out; I was expecting a tab in Preferences to set which columns displayed. If, but only if, there are enough items in a list so that a scroll bar appears, then there's a little hammer-and-wrench icon at the top of the scroll bar. Clicking that icon lets you set which columns are displayed.

Also good to know, the "creation date" field (a.k.a. "Date Entered") stores the time as well as date, even though only the date displays. So you can sort by that column and see your items in exactly the order in which you entered them. Especially since (as far as I can tell) you can't scan things directly into shelves, this at least makes it easy to select the last N items you entered and drag them by their tiny little covers to wherever you want them.
     
MDNZ
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Join Date: Mar 2008
Status: Offline
Jun 11, 2008, 12:37 AM
 
There are a fair amount of control click (right click) context sensitive menus in the application which is great, so keep an eye out for them.

However some are not always consistent (eg right clicking on shelf, vs right clicking on smart shelf) and in this case renaming or editing a smart shelf requires you to double click.
Various aspects of consistency and usability have been raised as bugs early on but would expect to lower priority than stability and correctness of application.
     
hmelman
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Join Date: Jun 2008
Status: Offline
Jun 25, 2008, 08:58 PM
 
Just found out about this forum. Here are my impression from when DL2 first shipped. Using it for a month now they haven't changed (I really want to search other fields and I want my custom synopses restored.)

Delicious Library 2 finally shipped with lots of new features. I've been using it for a couple of days and like some things and dislike others.

It's definitely faster, which is very welcome. Also smart shelves are finally here which is also very nice. But my biggest complaint is that the search box is now limited to doing either a title/creator search or an isbn/upc/ean number search. In DL 1 I used to narrow things down by genre, illustrator, actor, a bunch of other fields and now I can't. You can do these things (and more) with smart shelves but I don't want to have to create them for all of these searches. Also there used to be a button next to creator to search amazon for that person, that functionality seems to have been dropped.

Smart shelves do have some clever features. You can search the image for a color so you can do "all my blue items" which might be better for clothing which DL 2 can also scan (though I can't imagine ever using this feature). But of course the first thing I wanted to search for was "has no cover art" (so that I could use the new Search for Cover Art feature), but I can't do that search. While text searches have both "is" and "is not" operators, there's only a "contains" and not a "does not contain". Also it would be nice if the huge popup list of fields were ordered in some way, maybe indented like the sort by popup or alphabetically like in the Export dialog. Wouldn't it be nice if all three places used the same order?

The publishing options look nice, but I don't think I'll have much use for them. Printing uses a new template that fits many fewer items on a page with bigger pictures and large star ratings. I preferred the older compact listing but appreciate that the pdf file is a couple of order of magnitude smaller. The new export features are a nice addition but it will need some formatting to make things pretty. I'll probably end up making a new template for printing, which is another nice addition. But it would have been nice if the old format was an included template.

DL2 looks even prettier than DL1. Superfluous animations are used when adding and deleting items but they're fun. Items are sized via their dimensions which helps a lot for oddly shaped books; however I found I had to select each item individually for them to be resized. I don't want to arrow through 1600 items individually. It should happen on it's own for all items or at least allow it to happen on multiple selections. Backgrounds are removed from item images which is really nice since many amazon images are larger than the actual item and the image used to be scaled badly. I used to save the image and crop it in preview before adding it in DL. You can now add virtually anything with a upc code and I've added gadgets include all my Apple stuff. The edge finding of the background colors screws up the white of the AirPort Express and Time Capsule mistakenly making parts of them transparent.

One visual change that I really don't like is that the details pane is now at the bottom. it seems much more obtrusive and often needs resizing which isn't remembered. There's also a mini mode that shows just title, creator and rating which is nice but toggling it gets confused with the other modes. I'd like the mini mode at the bottom and the details moved back to the side. With widescreen macs and given this narrow info, it makes much more sense. Also the synopsis has a huge image of the item next to it that almost always needs to be scrolled. I think it should be smaller or not there at all and I'd like a QuickLook-like zoom on an image by hitting space to replace the now missing details window that used to appear by double-clicking.

My biggest problem with the synopsis is that it seems to overwrite the custom synopsis entries I made in DL1 with info from Amazon. I changed it for a reason and I sometimes see my version flash before it's changed to Amazon's. I hope it's just a display issue and my data isn't being lost.

Scanning barcodes with the iSight built-in to my MacBook Pro seems to work much better. Fields now autocomplete which I'm finding very useful. The upgrade went smoothly and it leaves the old version one library in place which is nice.

I've been looking forward to this update for over a year, mostly to address the speed issues and to see what wonderful new things enabled it to win an Apple Design Award a year ago. I have to say that all of the above issues are really dampening the experience. I've opened 17 bugs already. The help system hasn't been updated and is still for DL1, that just seems sloppy to me. However, I think all my issues are relatively easy fixes and I expect to see them addressed in point releases. I'm still using DL2, but if my library was a little smaller I'd stick with DL1 until some of these issues are fixed.
     
 
   
Thread Tools
 
Forum Links
Forum Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts
BB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off
Top
Privacy Policy
All times are GMT -4. The time now is 03:39 AM.
All contents of these forums © 1995-2017 MacNN. All rights reserved.
Branding + Design: www.gesamtbild.com
vBulletin v.3.8.8 © 2000-2017, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.,