Recreating Delicious Library in 2025?

https://dingyu.me/blog/recreating-delicious-library-in-2025

by felixding • 1 year ago

64 57 1 year ago

Yes, please. I always wanted a peer to peer version of it in a way. :P

Clent• 1 year ago

I created a similar product to Delicious Library years before its launch and peer to peer version of it was the direction I had been planning to take it. This was all long before mobile devices, long before Apple SDK's had any support for syncing such data, etc but the idea was there and wasn't just mine, I had users requesting this as well.

But alas the revenue dried up with Delicious Library hitting the scene. It received crazy levels of press about how beautiful it was. I recall feeling at the time like they were paying the press to cover their product but knowing what I know now, I'm quite certain that was the case. The reviews never mentioned any competitors. There were several all at a cheaper prices with more tons more features.

incanus77• 1 year ago

“Tons more features” is exactly why I would prefer Delicious Library over them.

WoodenChair• 1 year ago

This sounds like a really good story. Do you have postmortem written up somewhere?

pyinstallwoes2• 1 year ago

What’d you learn to make you more certain that was the cases?

msephton• 1 year ago

I think it's about time you built it. No better time than now.

ps: your RSS feed is advertised as https://dingyu.me/blog/feed.xml but is in fact https://dingyu.me/feed.xml (I guessed that as I was adding it to my RSS aggregator)

felixding6• 1 year ago

Thanks! The RSS feed has been fixed.

rgovostes2• 1 year ago

Delicious Library was the start of a gilded age of Mac shareware focused on style over substance.

In the past year or so, Mac development had shifted from applications providing new functionality that appeared at the dawn of OS X to applications (and ideas) built around flash and sizzle, with plenty of marketing hype to fuel the fire. his had created something of a toxic atmosphere in the Mac development world. A rift between the old school, with its plain but functional apps, and the new school of flashy but frivolous apps, has developed. ... I dubbed this new school “The Delicious Generation”.

https://weblog.rogueamoeba.com/2006/11/06/the-delicious-gene...

Apple adopted a similar interface for Newsstand on iOS and it seemed to be widely reviled during the pushback against skeuomorphism.

saagarjha• 1 year ago

This is amusing to read now because this post bemoans the transition from useful applications to pretty ones. Little did they know the next stop in that line was that the pretty applications became not so pretty without picking up anything new. Mac software today would leave you begging for a Delicious Library…

wmf• 1 year ago

Or we could admit that UI design didn't start in 2004 and skeuomorphism vs. flat is a false dichotomy.

Hamuko2• 1 year ago

I think the worst part of modern Mac software is that there really isn't any. More often than not new software is just the web application wrapped in Electron.

tpmoney• 1 year ago

A weird complaint given that Delicious Library had plenty of substance behind it, including barcode scanning with web cameras back when that was novel.

gyomu2• 1 year ago

Yes, I’m also really confused by this criticism. Delicious Library was a super useful, featureful piece of software?

m4632• 1 year ago

I thought it was wonderful until I realized all the amazon links were rewritten to be amazon associate links (even though I paid for the app)

swiftcoder2• 1 year ago

Does that actually negatively affect your use of the app?

kalleboo• 1 year ago

When I reminisce with people about that age, we mostly fondly remember how much fun software still was back then. Sure Disco was just a thin veneer over OS functionality but it was absolutely hilarious when you ran it. I still miss Apple's "shredder" animation when removing items from the iOS 6 Apple Passbook, and how OS X widgets had this crazy water ripple effect when you dropped them.

rgovostes2• 1 year ago

There was definitely a whimsicality in Mac OS going far back, both first- and third-party, that has receded lately. I miss Time Machine's wormhole animation, the iOS 6 pull-to-refresh "booger", and the Shift-key slow-motion modifier.

The new iPhone Mirroring app exemplifies this. A few years ago, Apple would have given it a fun name like Magic Mirror or Teleport. Instead we got an unimaginative name and an icon with a grey background and a centered image of an iPhone. Clever.

al_borland• 1 year ago

I was a happy Disco user. A lot of the Mac apps from that era were fun and made me want to find excuses to use them, rather than look for excuses to avoid what might otherwise feel like work. In the case of Delicious Library that would be the unpleasantness that would most likely be using a spreadsheet to track similar data and a lot of manual data entry.

Going the opposite way with discs, to rip my DVD collection at the time, I used RitIt. While the UI was seemingly unnecessary, it is initially what led me to find the concept of ripping all my DVDs more tolerable. After the novelty wore off, it had a feature to automatically start ripping on a disc being inserted, and would auto-eject at the end. This let me keep a stack of DVDs next to the computer and simply feed in the next disc when I saw one sticking out. After a few days I was done. I probably would have put this off for years (or forever) with more utilitarian software. The same can be said for AppZapper. Is it silly to make a ray gun sound when uninstalling an app, sure, but it makes it fun to delete unused apps, which is something a lot of people never do.

Where I think some of this software really got a bad name was so much of it becoming abandonware. TheHitList todo app was really hyped, and I got it in a software bundle (MacHeist or something), which was popular at the time. However, it seemed like once the dev had their money, they disappeared. Once burned me a couple times, I became wary of investing in any app that looked too nice…

I do miss a lot of those apps, and the hardware, of that era. It has so much charm. Great third party software devs who seemed to really have passion for what they were building, were one of the big reasons I enjoyed using OS X so much in that era, and a big reason to pay the Apple tax. I still use Transmit from Panic from time to time, and find it much more enjoyable than something like FileZilla (which was what seemed to be the standard last time I looked at other FTP apps years ago).

xnx• 1 year ago

Momentarily mistook this for https://del.icio.us/, but related only by name.

tetrisgm• 1 year ago

Thought the same

stlhood• 1 year ago

It was (mildly) irritating at the time for those of us who were working on del.icio.us.

fmajid2• 1 year ago

No. The last thing we need is yet another subscription priced data silo roach motel that sequesters your data. Any replacement I would consider will have to be open source with an open database.

bjelkeman-again• 1 year ago

This may meet your requirements

https://www.librarything.com/app/

fmajid2• 1 year ago

Thanks for the recommendation! I do use Delicious Library for other things than media like electronics or cameras, however.

paulxuca1• 1 year ago

https://www.shelf.im/ comes to mind

kuon• 1 year ago

I miss skeuomorphism. With good UX it makes great UI. It's weird considering I have my head inside a terminal most of the time but I was fond of those UI.

I wonder if formal studies exist that measure things like "discoverbility" or productivity for normal users.

rsynnott• 1 year ago

It's cyclical; here's an attempt from the 90s: http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/phone.htm

No doubt aggressive skeuomorphism will be back again at some point.t

felixding6• 1 year ago

I'd totally pay for a Linux distro that resembles early Mac OS X's desgin.

dazzawazza• 1 year ago

I made a web delicious-alike many years ago called Beep My Stuff that I happily shut down. No regrets, I hated it.

What I discovered was:

* amazon (at the time) will aggressively shut you down by cutting off the only "viable" access to "barcode to product" data.

* barcode databases cost a lot of money and are full of utter drivel.

* people had absolutely VAST DVD/VHS porn collections that they want to share

* there is more red tape in the US then you expect. As a UK citizen I was shocked by how sclerotic any action is in the US.

* people were and now almost completely have moved to digital "stuff" although I hope that changes.

felixding6• 1 year ago

This sounds like a really good story. Is there a postmortem written up somewhere?

samastur2• 1 year ago

I'm actually working on an app to replace my Delicious Library, but at least at first solely focused on books and supporting multiple users and features I missed in the original.

If all goes well I expect to have early version ready by middle of this year. While some features will require subscription, features not incurring ongoing costs won't. I like to think of it as an example of social software for introverts :)

I am hesitant to talk about details, but I haven't felt so excited about something in a long time.

kome2• 1 year ago

can't wait for pinboard.in to buy you

samastur2• 1 year ago

Why would he, he buys bookmarking services and this won't be one :)

0xxx• 1 year ago

pinboard.in is kind of legacy awesomeness.

felixding6• 1 year ago

That's awesome. I'd like to follow up on your progress. Is there a Twitter account, mailing list, or wishlist I can follow/join?

InDubioProRubio• 1 year ago

Man, were those GUIs back then good- human, quirky, trying to merge into the memories of the users of the real world. Not the abstract monstrosities towards which all template arts decay too (architecture comes to mind).

nottorp• 1 year ago

Sustainable Pricing: A subscription service (I know some people prefer one-time payments, but subscriptions are financially sustainable).

Sustainable for who? Not for the customers...

felixding6• 1 year ago

For software authors. Otherwise how is it supposed to be sustainable for software users?

Vaslo• 1 year ago

I feel like most people just use the Arr suite of apps to track these things?

https://wiki.servarr.com/

I guess not an all in one solution but lots of strong features for libraries. Readarr isn’t great if I’m honest.

musicale2• 1 year ago

Aren't there apps where you just take a picture of your shelves and it identifies and catalogs everything there?

musicale2• 1 year ago

Sustainable Pricing: A subscription service (I know some people prefer one-time payments, but subscriptions are financially sustainable).

Managing dozens of subscriptions that drain money out of your wallet every month isn't sustainable for users.

    % ls

    Sorry, you need to renew your subscription for 'ls'.
    Would you like to renew it now? (Yes) _

felixding6• 1 year ago

If it’s not sustainable for software makers, it’s not sustainable for users.

Recreating Delicious Library in 2025?

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