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May 23, 2006
Organise yer life
A few years ago, I had an idea. My DVD collection was growing at a rate of knots, and I could never remember what I had. I also could never remember what I'd lent to people - my collection did tend to atrophy every now and then.
I thought, "wouldn't it be cool if I had an application where I could just list and categorise all my movies. If it was online then it could grab data about the movies from IMDB or Amazon. I could share lists of stuff I have with friends. It could be expanded to include CD's, games, etc etc. Hey - all these things have barcodes on them - how about plugging in a barcode scanner, to make cataloging everything really easy!". See - my ideas are really kinda genius sometimes.
Anyhow, I never really got any further than creating a database and playing around with a little bit of PHP. Not being a developer means I never really get any of my cool ideas off the ground. I'd like to think that I squished my eyes together really hard and sent my creative thought juices off through the stratosphere though, because today I discovered that someone has come up with pretty much the exact same application. The Delicious Monster team have released an application called Delicous Library, which - in their words - lets you "Catalog, browse, and share all your books, movies, music, and video games". It keeps track of whom you've lent your stuff to, it grabs metadata about your stuff from Amazon, but possibly most impressively - if you have a webcam attached to your computer, you can use the webcam as a barcode scanner. Wave your DVD box in front of your webcam, and the title appears in your library.
There is no function that I can see which lets you browse your friends collections yet. Part of my original idea was that you could browse your "universe" of titles, and then email your friend, asking if you could borrow one. Perhaps I should email them and suggest it. Or just squish my eyes together really hard again and wish.
Posted by scally at May 23, 2006 11:38 AM
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