Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past six months, you’ve probably heard of Delicious Library by Delicious Monster. Delicious Library has quickly earned a reputation for being a good-looking application that leverages Mac OS X technology. Does this necessarily make it a good application, however? I decided to give Deliciousa Library 1.5 a thorough look. Despite some ommissions, Delicious Library is an outstanding solution for those who have a mountain of stuff to sort through.

One of the first things users will notice when installing and launching Delicious Library is the painstaking attention to detail exhibited in the app. For example, the bookcase motif features a rich woodgrain texture that remians smooth even as you zoom in on items. The application icons are crafted with care. And even the covers show painstaking attention to detail; a hardcover book, for example, has a different texture than a paperback or trade paper book. A CD jewel case reflects light. In a nutshell, Delicious Library uses Mac OS X’s graphics technologies to their fullest potential.

But enough about looks. Delicious Library makes it ridiculously easy to add items to your collection. Delicious Library uses Amazon to find information about the items in your collection. To search for information, you can use the title or the bar code, then press the return key. Delicious Library will fetch data about the item as well as its cover. Adding items via this method is quick and easy as it is, but Delicious Library has another trick up its sleve: you can use your iSight or other digital video camera as a barcode scanner. Just scan the barcode and Delicious Library will find the information like before, no typing needed. Bluetooth scanners work as well. Unfortuantely I didn’t have the chance to try this out being I don’t have a firewire camera. If you do have one, please test this for me, and let me know how well it works and update this review. [UPDATE: readers inform me that iSight barcode scanning works very well with Delicious Library.]

If you’re constantly lending your stuff out to your friends or family, you can keep track of who borrowed what. Delicious Library is integrated with Address Book; within three clicks, you can add a borrower. With a simple drag-and-drop, you can lend an item to a person. You can set due dates and everything.

Delicious Library utilizes Tiger technologies well. It uses .mac Sync to sync calanders with iCal to help keep track of lent item due dates:

Delicious Library uses Spotlight for searches and includes a Spotlight plugin so you can organize items in the Finder and search by metadata elsewhere. Delicious Library also has a Dashboard widget. Even though most people likely won’t find a purpose for it, it’s still cool and worth toying with at least once.

But wait, there’s more! You can search items by speaking their names, using OS X’s speakable items capabilities. You can buy ir sell items on Amazon.com. You can send an email to a friend recommending an item. All-in-all, it’s packed with angood number of useful features.

About the only thing I can complain about is that you can’t organize more items. Delicious Libraryt can only handle books, movies, music, and games. I’d like to see the developers add more items you can add, like software for example. Also, some may find the $40 price tag a little steep. However, those are about the only glaring weaknesses in this otherwise outstanding prodict. The final verdict? Delicious Library is a winner. It’s beautiful, fun, and flat-out useful. I highly recommend it.

--Nick