Delicious Library restricted to looking up items on Amazon US and Amazon Canada only.

Hello friends,

Today I have unfortunate news: the Amazon sites in Germany, Italy, France, Japan, Spain, and The United Kingdom have all decided to terminate their relationship with Delicious Monster this week. This means Delicious Library can no longer look up or recommend items in those stores.

Amazon sites in the United States and Canada continue to work for all users of Delicious Library 3 worldwide (but obviously are largely only in English and carry mostly items for sale in North America).

—

I received a variant of this notice from five of the affected Amazon sites at 11:54AM on October 25, 2017:

Amazon Associates
Your Amazon.co.uk Associates Account - deliciousmons-21
To: William Jon Shipley

Hello from the Associates Program,

We are writing to tell you that effective as of today’s date, Amazon is terminating your Associates account. Under the terms of the Operating Agreement, we may terminate your account at any time, with or without cause. This decision is final and not subject to appeal.

It is important that you immediately remove all Amazon Content from your Site(s). Please be aware that any other accounts you have, or may open in the future, may be closed without payment of any fees. Amazon reserves all other rights and claims.

Because you are not in compliance with the Operating Agreement, Amazon will not pay you any outstanding advertising fees related to your account. Amazon exercises its right under the Operating Agreement to withhold fees based on violations, which include the following:

-You are using Content or Special Links, or otherwise linking to the Amazon Site, on or in connection with a browser plug-in, toolbar, extension, or other client-side software.

Thank you for your participation in the Amazon Associates Program.

Warmest Regards,

Amazon.co.uk http://www.amazon.co.uk/associates

Since 2004, Delicious Library has used Amazon’s Product Advertising API to look up the titles and authors and cover images of items that users scan in. Over the years Amazon has changed how they want their Product Advertising API used, as is their right as the owners and maintainers of this database. Delicious Monster has tried to make sure our relationship with Amazon has stayed beneficial to them, by providing back-links inside the app to Amazon (and only to Amazon) for recommended items and items on our users’ wishlists. We do refer quite a bit of business to Amazon; that isn’t the issue as far as I know.

The stated reason (above) that non-North-American Amazons dropped us appears to be that we’re linking to Amazon from a program instead of from a website, which isn’t something we can change — Delicious Library is definitely a program! (I believe North America hasn’t dropped us because they understand our business model better, and because we have managed to turn off our advertising fees in the U.S. We'd love to turn them off in other countries, if we knew how, and were accepted back.)

Again, this is their right — it’s their database, they can set any rules they want, and change them if they want.

I urge customers to not write to Amazon about this: the last time I had issues with Amazon’s Product Advertising API I got e-mails from Amazon saying they did not appreciate having Delicious Library’s users writing them mean notes, and it wasn’t helping my case — I am absolutely not issuing a call to arms against Amazon. Yes, I think it’d be great if they wanted to work with Delicious Monster but it’s totally their call if it’s not worth it for them!

If, however, anyone at Amazon would like to talk to me, I’m at wjs@mac.com. I’d love to work something out.

—

I’d like to close by apologizing to my customers worldwide for this loss of functionality in Delicious Library. I have tried everything I can think of but I will continue trying to think of new things.

-Wil Shipley
Chief Monster
Delicious Monster Software

Mavericks 10.9.2 released yesterday; Delicious Monster recommends updating

Hello, friends. You look extra-tasty today! Just kidding, the monster doesn’t eat people. Well, not customers, at least.

Since the release of Mavericks, Delicious Library 3 has been very crash-prone for some of you. DL3 would often go kaput when adding items, deleting items, or inspecting them. It turns out there was a new bug in the graphics drivers for machines with NVIDIA GeForce GT 640M, GT 650M, GTX 660M, GTX 675MX, GTX 680, GTX 680MX, and GT 755M chips.

Chief Monster Wil ran some tests yesterday under 10.9.2 on a machine with a GeForce driver. Whereas under 10.9.1 the app would crash every 5-10 items, yesterday he scanned 98 items without a hitch and stress-tested inspecting items. The bug appears to have at long last been squashed.

The problem appeared when you would add an item (or inspect it); we would use the 3D graphics engine to make a tiny static snapshot of it that appears in the “Acquire History” area on the left of the screen (or in the inspector window). That tickled an OpenGL driver bug in the first versions of Mavericks on the affected machines.

We've appreciated our users' patience SO MUCH the for the last few months—we know the bug rendered DL3 almost unusable for a lot of you. We asked everyone to be patient till 10.9.1, only to have the fix Apple had initially planned for pulled from that release. Doing damage control on this has held up a lot of the other work we've wanted to do. Now, finally, we can get back to making DL3.2 as delicious as humanly possible.

Download and read more about the Mavericks update here: http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1725. The new Mavericks also contains important security updates that you'll want even if DL3 has been operating swimmingly for you.

Thanks for reading. Happy scanning!

Delicious Library and Mavericks

With the release of OS X 10.9 "Mavericks" comes a bunch of improvements—it's faster, it's got neat new features, it's got bug fixes—and a few hiccups, some of which affect Delicious Library 2 and 3. Delicious Library versions "2.8.1" and "3.1.2" were shipping at the time of Mavericks 10.9.0 release; if you're reading this in the future some of these issues will have been resolved by new versions of our Delicious Library, and of Mavericks.

Here are the known bugs that were introduced in Mavericks [Updated 2013.12.21; resolved issues struck out in update on 2014.2.26]:

Delicious Library 3.1.2: Mavericks Issues

• Symptom: The shelves source list (on the left side of the window) lays out bizarrely. Sections of it are often unclickable.
  Effects: Sometimes iTunes cannot be disabled or enabled, and sometimes shelves can't be reordered or deleted.
  Cause: Apple changed how a class called NSTableCellView positions its "textField" and "imageView"—NSTableCellView is a relatively new class and its positioning code Apple wrote is incompatible with Apple's autolayout, which was introduced at the same time.
  Notes for Apple: We've filed RADARs 11713245 and 15359487 on this issue.

Workaround: For Delicious Library 3.1.4, we coded around Apple's bugs in a way we hope is future-proof.

• Symptom: Shelves no longer animate when the window is resized or zoomed.
  Effects: Cosmetic only.
  Cause: Apple changed how a class called SCNTransaction deals with nested transactions turning animation on and off.
  Notes for Apple: While we consider this change an improvement, we requested that it be documented in RADAR 15369412.

Workaround: For Delicious Library 3.1.4, we changed how we disable and enable animation to account for the new system.

• Symptom: Items without covers draw as transparent.
  Effects: Users can't see the title or creator of items without covers.
  Cause: Apple changed how a class called SCNMaterial interprets the 'anchorPoint' of an attached CALayer.
  Notes for Apple: We've filed RADAR 15562662 on this issue.

Workaround: For Delicious Library 3.1.4 we've changed the anchorPoint on Mavericks systems.

• Symptom: Library crashes when drawing covers in lists.
  Effects: Crash!
  Cause: There is a bug in glReadPixels() on the "GeForce" graphics chip driver under Mavericks.
  Notes for Apple: We've filed RADAR 15318354 on this issue.

Fixed: Apple repaired this bug in 10.9.2, and there was much rejoicing.

• Symptom: Crash when drawing 3D covers.
  Effects: Crash!
  Cause: There is a bug in gleGenMipmaps() on the "GeForce" graphics chip driver under Mavericks.
  Notes for Apple: We've filed RADAR 15316200 on this issue. So far we've seen it only on machines with NVIDIA GeForce GT 640M, GT 650M, GTX 660M, GTX 675MX, GTX 680, GTX 680MX, and GT 755M chips.

Fixed: Apple repaired this bug in 10.9.2, and there was much rejoicing.

• Symptom: Spotlight can't find Library 3 items.
  Effects: Any items modified or added under Mavericks won't be findable with Spotlight.
  Cause: There appears to be a permissions problem with the Sandbox under Mavericks when indexing stub files.
  Notes for Apple: We've filed RADAR 15488237 on this issue.
  Workaround: None is possible on our end.

Delicious Library 2.8.1: Mavericks Issues

• Symptom: Low-res covers draw as black-and-white, horizontally compressed, and striped.
  Effects: When scrolling or zooming, covers will flash the corrupted "striped" version before being replaced with the hi-res versions.
  Cause: Under Mavericks a class called CALayer doesn't draw JPEG2000 images correctly when in "32-bit" mode.
  Notes for Apple: We have filed RADAR 15532513 on this issue.

Workaround: For Delicious Library 2.8.5, we copy the cover image extra times to get it into a format Mavericks likes.

• Symptom: Hi-res covers sometimes stop drawing on large collections, so some items have only low-res covers.
  Effects: Some items appear to have "blurry" or "stripy" covers.
  Cause: Apparently under OS X 10.7 and beyond, a class called CATiledLayer occasionally gets "stuck" and will stop drawing itself.
  Notes for Apple: We have filed RADAR 15552267 on this issue.
  Workaround: We have not figured out a workaround yet, although one might be possible.

• Symptom: Video barcode scanner can crash application.
  Effects: Crash!
  Cause: We don't know.
  Notes for Apple: We are still talking with customers to get details on this, this could be the same as RADAR 15318354.

Update: We haven't received any crash reports on this in 2.8.5, with the exception of users with 3ivx drivers on 10.7.5.

• Symptom: Something will lock up entire Mac.
  Effects: System lock!
  Cause: We don't know.
  Notes for Apple: We are still talking with customers to get details on this.

Update: Customers have reported that Delicious Library 2.8.5 fixes this lock-up, although we aren't sure what's different from 2.8.

Industry practice is that if a bug appears in a shipping application only on a newer version of an operating system, it's defined to be the OS vendor's fault, unless the app developer did something egregious. To wit: OS vendors are expected to either make new OS releases "binary compatible" with their old ones, which means that existing shipping apps will continue to run without bugs, but newly released apps may be required to change, Alternatively, the OS vendor is expected to document any incompatibilities ahead of time so independent developers can move off them.

It may seem as though this monster is just covering its posterior, but, in fact, this is an important distinction—we know that as customers of other people's software we also tire of hearing, "Hey, it's not our fault, it's Apple." This sounds like a cop-out for lazy developers (and it often is).

Of course, we're not angry at Apple—bugs happen, and operating systems are very big projects. But as developers, we typically don't know when the bugs that affect our programs will be fixed. Even when we do know, we're not allowed to say that we do. So, all we can do is shrug our monstrous shoulders and say, "We're with you. We hope these get fixed soon." This sucks for our customers.

We apologize to those of you who are having problems. We want to let you know we're doing everything we can to resolve all the issues as quickly as possible. Thank you for your patience.

Delicious Library 3 Manual

We've had several requests for a more detailed manual than the one that appears in the Help section of Delicious Library 3 so today we're granting that request! 

Click here for the complete manual. 

Please leave any questions in the comments below. 

How To: Add an Item in Delicious Library 3 Part 2

After getting acquainted with adding items by searching the Amazon database it's time to go over adding items to your library by scanning. You can either use your webcam or our handy, totally free, iOS app.

Adding items with your webcam

To start, click the + in the bottom right corner to open the toolbar. Then click on the camera symbol to open the scanning box and your webcam should show you, in the bottom corner of your screen. If the box seems rather small you can expand it by dragging the toolbar to the left, toward the Shelf or List.

That's me, hi!

Now, hold your item up to your webcam. For best results hold the barcode about 3-5 inches away from the camera and aim to get the majority of it within the green outline. It doesn't have to be perfectly lined up, your webcam will still find the item when it's slightly lopsided or blurry.

The item will automatically appear in your library. If the item has already been added to your library it will be highlighted. I like to scan with the Details box open so I can see the complete profile of the item as I scan each one.

Adding items with your iPhone/iPad/iPod 

Start by downloading our free app to your iOS device.

Then on your computer open Delicious Library 3 and click on the iPhone icon in the bottom right corner (if it's not showing click on the + as above). Click on the words "Pair iPhone scanner" and a barcode unique to your license code will pop up.

Open the Delicious Scanner app on your iOS device. The first time you download the app a list of instructions on how to use the app will appear. If you miss them or need to refer to them again keep reading.

The most important thing you must know about syncing your Library to your iPhone/iPad/iPod is that Your Computer and Your iOS Device MUST be on the same wireless network. If this is not the case, they will not sync. 

Okay, now that we've got that out of the way let's continue. Using your iOS camera scan the barcode on your computer screen. This should result in a pop up box on your iPhone/iPad/iPod asking if you'd like to Pair your device with your computer. Go ahead and press Pair now.

Your Library should have a green dot with the name of your device. 

Now you're ready to scan away. Use your iPhone/iPad/iPod the same way you would use your webcam. You can scan as many items as you like while you're away from your computer. As soon as your Mac and iPhone are on the same wifi network the items will upload to your Library. The items will then delete from your phone automatically (if you scanned many items, give the app a minute to delete them all).

A note on scanning: When scanning books, the most reliable barcode will be inside the front cover. Sometimes retailers create temporary barcodes and cover the original ISBN. If you are scanning books and they are showing up as toys (or something other than books) in your library, check to see that you are using the original barcode.

If you have any questions feel free to post below or email support@delicious-monster.com Happy Scanning!

How To: Add an Item in Delicious Library 3 Part 1

So you downloaded Delicious Library 3 and now you want to fill it up with all of your stuff. Use the search bar, your webcam, our scanner iOS app, or even by creating a new blank entry there are many ways to add your items to Delicious Library. Our search results is directly sourced through Amazon (in the US and 8 other countries) so you can search for your stuff in their database of millions of items. Need a quick tutorial? Lets get started.

Option 1: Searching
The search bar in the top right corner is not just for finding out what is in your library. 

For the most specific results, enter the ISBN.

For more broad results search by Title or Author. 

To limit search results to only one category change the Type. 

Expand your search to see all items by one Author. 

Now to add an item simply press the + next to the result you own or drag and drop the item onto your shelf. You'll know instantly you added the item successfully because it will shoot to the top of your list and in the Amazon search results it appears with a big red Owned stamp. 

Voila! Now you can start building your library using our search bar. Next time I'll explain how to add items using your webcam or handy dandy iOS scanner app.

Try The Beta, Library 3.1

You asked, we listened. Library 3.1 is in beta and we've added some of our most popular requests. 

-Users can create their own templates.

-You can now scan items to directly into specific shelves.

-Genres are found and populated with Amazon searches. 

-German, Danish, Spanish and Italian are now 100% supported .

Now dear blog readers, we need your help testing it for bugs before we release to all our customers.  Download the Library 3.1 beta here- http://delicious-monster.com/downloads/DeliciousLibrary3Beta.zip

Let us know what you think by emailing support@delicious-monster.com

Thanks so much for your help!