Bluetooth Scanner Sale!

We've managed to negotiate a MUCH better price for the bluetooth scanner we sell as an accessory to Delicious Library (the Microvision ROV Bluetooth Scanner) and because of that, we're offering you a sale! The scanner which was originally $215 is now only $150. Hurraaaaay!

If you've already purchased a license for Delicious Library 2 from us, and you now want the scanner, you'll need to purchase a second license through the in-application "Delicious Licensor", and add the scanner to your order. Then just email us at support at delicious-monster dot com, and we'll refund the price of the extra license. It's a hassle, but it's how we keep from becoming a bluetooth scanner retailer instead of a independent software company.

Cheers!

Be a Delicious Advisor. Please.

We’re forming an advisory committee, and you’re invited!

“How is an advisory committee different from a bunch of beta testers,” you say? Good questions! I’m glad I pretended you asked it.

We’re going to gather a small group of Delicious Library users (and hopefully a couple ex-users) and periodically ask you questions on how you use our app and what functionality you like and what you don’t and what you need that you’re not getting. (And, if you’re an ex-user, why they don’t use our app any more.)

What do you get in return? Well, honestly, mostly you get the pleasure of helping design good software. I mean, it’s why I do what I do. Well, that and all the hot software groupies.

BUT, we want to show you you’re extra-special, so we’re going to give you everything we do, free and early. Delicious Library 3? You can start using it now. Our first new app in eight years, Delicious D________? You’ll see it grow as it happens. Our game for the iPad? Yours.

RULES: If you sign up, you’re going to be on a mailing list, that we hope will be relatively low-traffic, but you will be talking with other people of your ilk. So, if you’re afraid of ilks, don’t sign up. You’re expected to keep everything we tell you that was a secret still a secret. If you intentionally don’t, there could even be legal repercussions, but most probably we’ll publicly berate you.

We won’t be able to accept everyone who applies (it has to be a small group or it doesn’t work), so tell us a tiny little bit about yourself and how you use Delicious Library 2 (or why you stopped, or why you bought a competing app), so we can get a variety of users.

E-mail support@delicious-monster.com with your subject line containing the phrase “Delicious Advisor,” if you’d like to sign up.

And thank you! I’m excited to work with you.

-Wil Shipley
Chief Monster, Delicious Monster Software

Indie Mac Gift Pack... because no one wants an ugly sweater

Eliminating the middle-men, we got together with some of our indie-Mac-developer friends and put together a premium software bundle for the holidays. If you still need a gift for someone special, (or for yourself–we won't tell) you still have two days to purchase!

Purchased separately these apps would cost you $270, but we're selling them all together for $60! Check out the Indie Mac Gift Pack website here.

Included:

Delicious Library 2

MarsEdit 3

SousChef

Sound Studio 4

Acorn 2

RadioShift

Not included:

Ugly holiday sweater

Stinky lotion set

Pictures of Fluffy in a santa hat

Thanks for supporting us so we can go on to make even cooler software for your Mac!

Buy Now!

Merry New Year!

 

Yes, we're still alive and kicking!

From the frequency of our blog posts, it would be fair for you to assume we’d picked up and moved to Antarctica, thereby limiting our internet access, and, in turn, our ability to let you know what we’re currently up to. Surprisingly, that’s not the case, and we are still in San Francisco and we do have internets and we have been working–not only on bug fixes and feature additions to Delicious Library 2, but on some brand new projects both for Mac and for iOS.

Just a couple weeks ago we released Noogle Noggles for iPhone–a Google Goggles client which allows you to do a visual search just by snapping a picture with your iPhone. You take the picture, we send the picture to Goggles for processing, and then we tell you what it is you took a picture of. Pretty cool, huh? Right now Noggles isn’t hooked up to Delicious Library 2 as an input system, but we think it definitely has some potential.

In addition to Noggles, we have a couple other projects up our sleeves that we can’t wait to share with you. Not only are we analyzing all your feedback about Delicious Library 2 to try to make an even better product, but we’re working on another completely new project that you don’t even know you need, but you do. Take our word for it!

Last but not least, our number one project right now is getting iSight scanning for late-model iMacs working. We recognize this is a huge problem with Delicious Library 2 at the moment, and it’s one that we’re working to fix before everything else. In late 2008, Apple changed the iSight cameras that went into iMac computers, making them focus much further away than the other iMac and laptop iSights. On top of that, the iMac screens are so ginormous, that they emit tons of light, and that light means glare on the item you’re trying to scan. We tried a number of things to try to work around these issues, including using the edge of the iSight’s light of sight to focus, turning down the brightness on monitor while the scanning window was open, and completely re-writing the scanning algorithm altogether. You’ve said it’s still not good enough, and we agree with you. Recently we’ve made some breakthroughs which we hope will fix the problem, so please bear with us as we try to get that new code available for you to test in yet another beta. We’re sincerely sorry for the frustration that many iMac users have faced, and please rest assured we’re doing everything we can to resolve the issue to everyone’s satisfaction.

Noogle our Noggle!

We get hundreds of emails a day, many of which are from you requesting new features, and one of the top requested features happens to be the ability to scan stuff into your Delicious Library from your iPhone. Sure, we sell a bluetooth scanner that allows you to scan barcodes, but you think it would be cool to be able to scan with your phone, and we agree with you!

Enter our newest iPhone app: Noogle Noggles–an experiment Google Goggles client!

Noogle Noggles allows you to identify an item by taking a picture of the item on your iPhone. That’s pretty much it. Snap a picture of the cover a book and BAM!, it tells you which book it is. Same with your favorite games, movies, household items, barcodes, and more. It won’t identify everything though. If you take a picture of your cat, Mr. Flufferson, it’s not going to know it’s Fluffy–unless you managed to get Fluffy into Google’s product database, which is where the info is coming from.

Why did I call it experimental? Well right now Noogle Noggles isn’t hooked up to Delicious Library 2. So if you take a picture of your favorite Pioneer Speakers, it should identify them, but after that there’s no way to add them directly to your library on your Mac.

Why not? Because Noogle Noggles is only experimental. We’re playing with the interface and how the search functionality works, to make sure it’s really going to be a pleasure for you to use and a true asset to Delicious Library. We took Google’s Goggle interface and simplified it–making it extremely easy to use. We ditched the forward and back arrows that Goggles makes you use in order to scan a new item, opting instead to keep everything on one screen so that you never have to stop scanning. So go ahead, try it out, and let us know what you think.

Dirty, dirty Delicious Library 2 boxes

So as some of you may know, after being download-only for the past six years, we've finally made the leap to beautiful retail boxes. These sexy little boxes have made their way to Apple Retail Store shelves, as well as to Frys, and possibly some other stores' shelves.

This is awesome! We're happy they're out there in the big, bad world, however there's one little problem. The boxes are required to pass through a number of hands before landing on the shelves, and sometime after they leave out squeaky clean warehouse, they're getting scuffed and more than a little grimy.

We put more than a little work into creating these boxes to be beautiful, shiny, white specimens, and it's vexing to us that they arrive in less-than-perfect condition.

This is where you come in. We've already checked out all the boxes in San Francisco, and found them dirty and scuffed. What we want you to do is, if you happen to be in an Apple or other store that carries Mac software, to check and see if you see any Delicious Library 2 boxes. If you do, snap us a quick picture (you do have an iPhone, don't you??) and send it to support at delicious-monster dot com. Also include the Store and City location. Hopefully we'll be able to track down the source of the filth and stamp it out.

Your help is much appreciated, and again, thanks so much for your support!

Snow Leopard: It's Built for the Future.

[If you parle français, then congrats on being a polyglot! Also, you may have already read this interview I did with MacGeneration.com. For those of us stuck with Americanese, I've asked if I could post the original version here.]

Florian Innocente [MacGeneration]: From the user's perspective, what can they expect from *your* software once you have optimized them for Snow Leopard ? If any kind of optimization is planned. I mean, is there any room for visible improvements, be it in the interface or at the code level of your app (making it snappier, faster, using less RAM or CPU ?). What does 64-bit, Grand Central and OpenCL mean to your apps ?

Me: I'll certainly be optimizing Delicious Library for Snow Leopard. There are a lot of cool things in Snow Leopard for developers; it's really a release for us and for Apple, to clean up and modernize the underlying layers of OS X.

• Grand Central is used all over in Snow Leopard, so it's hard NOT to use it if you're doing new development. In general, Apple has noted that processors can't get much faster – the energy they use, and thus the heat they create, goes up as the square of the processor speed, so we've hit a barrier where they'll burn themselves up the second you turn them on if we go any further. To counter that Intel and others have started bundling multiple processors on a single chip – imagine a kitchen with many cooks, instead of one cook who you keep asking to work faster and faster.
  
  But, like a kitchen, if you have many cooks you need to _manage_ them well, or most of them will sit idle and useless while a couple are tearing around hogging the blender and over or what-have-you. Grand Central makes it simple for mortal programmers to keep all the cooks busy; other operating systems (Windows, Linux, etc) have notions of "multiple threads" but leave it to the programmer to manage them manually, and threaded programming is VERY, VERY hard to get right. (OmniWeb 2.0 was one of the first commercial very-threaded programs, and believe me it was a BEAST to code.)
  
  In Delicious Library 2, for instance, I use a few threads (cooks) already - when you scan a barcode with the videocamera the decoding work is done on a different processor, and when you look up items or publish your collection to the web the network code is handled on a different processor, as well.
  
  With Grand Central Dispatch I can go a lot further with a lot less effort – for instance, I could have it so each frame from the videocamera is handled by a different processor when scanning for barcodes (instead of all of them being handled by one processor), so I could process a lot more frames per second on machines with a lot of processors. (Right now I just skip frames if I run out of time processing the previous one.)
  
  This gives us a great foundation against Windows in the future - as machines get 4 cores (processors) and then 8 and then 16, apps written for Snow Leopard and beyond will continue to be faster and faster, with no changes, while Windows programmers are going to be struggling to make their apps work at all.
  
  
• 64-bit is great, because it requires very little work on my part for a lot of win. First off, it turns out that applications that are recompiled for 64-bit end up running about 15% faster, right out of the gate, just because of efficiencies gained at the processor level. I did the initial 64-bit port of Delicious Library 2 to 64-bit in about two days -- while I still have to beta test it and all that, it's pretty amazing to spend two days and get a 15% speed-up in software.
  
  The funny thing is that this speed-up is kind of a side-effect; the real impetus to go 64-bit was memory limits. In a 32-bit program, the maximum amount of "virtual memory" your program can use is theoretically 4GB – which means, unless the programmer goes to a LOT of effort, the user can't work with data files bigger than 4GB, no matter how much RAM and/or disk space she has available.
  
  And, in fact, the real limit isn't 4GB - the system frameworks and the video display memory are subtracted from that limit, so you actually get to use only about 2.5GB, ever, under 32-bit. (Under 64-bit, you can use essentially unlimited RAM and unlimited virtual memory.)
  
  So, for instance, loading in a 3GB image, or even three 1GB images, isn't possible (without a bunch of extra code), which is important as images get larger and richer.
  
  With Delicious Library 2, we have users who have tens of thousands of items and have assigned each of them a hi-res cover, and their collections have grown beyond this barrier, as well. With a Snow Leopard-optimized version of Delicious Library, collection size would only be limited by the user's available disk space!
  
  In a related issue, even if you have 4 or 8GB of RAM in your machine, a single program can't use more than 2.5GB of it at once under 32-bits (both RAM and virtual memory are limited by 32-bit addressing). So, for instance, if you pack 8GB of RAM in your machine, thinking, "Man, now my huge collection in Delicious Library will really scream," you're going to be disappointed under 32-bit. Under 64-bit, you're going to be blown away.
  
  
• OpenCL is going to be harder for me to take advantage of, because it's a new language for me, and requires extensive rewrites. But, with graphics processors gaining in power MUCH more quickly that main processors, it's another very smart move for Apple to make it relatively easy for programmers to take advantage of them for general use.
  
  In Delicious Library 2, we might see a version of the barcode scanner that is even MORE sensitive because it runs on the graphics chip, and thus has the power to do more transformations on each frame in an attempt to wring a sensible barcode out of it.

FI: There's a lot interrogation among our readers regarding what Snow Leopard will bring in the short term for them and in their daily apps. Som expect a lot, others fear to be disappointed. It would be interesting to have your take based on the future revisions of your own products.

Me: I think short term most users aren't going to get a ton out of Snow Leopard, to be honest. It's a VERY important release that redoes the very heart of the operating system, but intentionally doesn't add a lot of features or chrome.

It's like the user is getting a new engine in her old car, that's much more efficient and much easier for mechanics to tweak in the future. It's not going to make a huge difference out of the gate, but over the next ten years it's going to be invaluable.

Or, to use another analogy, I think of this release as like going from incandescent bulbs to compact-fluorescents or LEDs - tomorrow you're still going to have light, but it's a light that's future-friendly, and every year that goes by you're going to be more happy you made the switch.

The time has come...

...to update to Delicious Library 2.2. As of August 15th, 2009 (that's in four days!) Amazon is requiring all users of their data (us) to digitally 'sign' requests for information.

In English that means Delicious Library is no longer going to work unless you update to 2.2 (or 1.7 if you're still using Version 1.)

When you next launch Delicious Library (1 or 2) it should prompt you to update. Do it! If for some reason you need to download the update directly, you'll find them below.

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Download Delicious Library 2.2: DeliciousLibrary2.zip

Release Notes for v2.2: Delicious Library Version 2.2

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Download Delicious Library 1.7: http://www.delicious-monster.com/downloads/DeliciousLibrary.dmg

Release Notes for v1.7: Delicious Library - Release Notes

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Good luck, and if you have any problems, let us know!

Terry