For version 2.5, iWeb publishing was removed, since the format Apple uses is private and difficult to reverse engineer. SFTP-based web publishing was removed recently since it relied on a external library that was produced by someone else, and Shipley couldn't guarantee its performance. The take-away? "If I'd just cut the flaky features, and only shipped the stuff that was really solid, people would have had a much better impression of the app," Shipley told Ars.Īnd take away he did. "It teaches you shyness- are afraid to try things because the machine will 'punish you,'" Shipley said. And when the bugs cause problems or crashes, users stop using new features, or the product entirely. Ultimately, however, the user isn't concerned with the causes of bugs, only that they happen. So the bugs in new APIs were reported to Apple in the hope they would be fixed, but sometimes required less-than-ideal workarounds in the interim. Other problems came from attempting to adopt Apple's latest technologies in Leopard, and later, Snow Leopard. "Who has that kind of time? Well, it turns out, die-hard collectors do," Shipley said. Unfortunately, no one expected users with these huge libraries to attempt to publish their collections to the web. For instance, a memory leak in the display of PNG graphics led to major performance hits and eventual crashes for users with thousands of items. Shipley said there were a variety of reasons that some of the bugs got through testing. "I'd think, 'Yay, I did good, I added a bunch of great stuff to the new version, it was definitely worth $20 to existing customers.' But, that's not how the customers see it-they see the 20 percent that's buggy, and they think, 'This is crappy he released software that didn't work.'" "Let's say, for instance, 80 percent of these features worked great," Shipley explained. The problem is, the sheer amount of changes meant potential for bugs and other problems. It also added web exporting with iWeb integration, a companion iPhone app (which was later dropped due to API limitations set by Amazon), library sharing with friends, improved AppleScript support, and more. But Shipley didn't stop there instead, DL2 piled on new features, including a whole list of new product categories it could track, like video games, tools, and other items. So Delicious Library 2 would ship with a whole new back- and front-ends-in effect, it was like a whole new product. That's a bigger deal than it might sound, though-"it took the entire iPhoto team like three versions before they could handle that many hi-res images," Shipley noted. ![]() "We rewrote the entire display layer, as well, and got it so we could scroll through thousands of items and maintain 20fps or so on any decent hardware," he said. That change alone would be upgrade worthy, since "people with over a couple hundred items could add, remove, or edit an item and it wouldn't take 30 seconds to save-it'd take 0.03 seconds."īut that wasn't all Shipley also wanted to add whiz-bang new UI graphics and animations made possible with CoreAnimation APIs, as well as improve display performance. To improve performance, the old database code was stripped out and replaced with new code based on Apple's CoreData APIs. But the XML-based database became a performance issue as collectors with large libraries-the sort that would be heavy users of the software-began cataloging all their media.įor Delicious Library 2, Shipley wanted it to be a "really valuable" update since, as a major version, it would be a paid upgrade. Perhaps its most interesting feature was the ability to use an iSight as an inexpensive barcode scanner. ![]() The original Delicious Library used an XML-based database file to keep track of all your books, CDs, and DVDs. But it turned out to be a big disservice to my customers," he explained. ![]() "Which is, you know, like being in a job interview and saying your biggest fault is you work too hard. "So, the big realization with 2.0 is that I tried to do too much," Shipley told Ars. That's why version 2.5 consists largely of bug fixes and performance enhancements, and instead of adding features takes a few away. On the release of the 2.5 update to Delicious Library, he told Ars that the ambitious plans for Delicious Library 2.0 ending up resulting in a finished product that, while beautiful and impressive looking, performed poorly for some users. Creator Wil Shipley often brags about how much money he makes from sales, and won't hesitate to mention how fun it is to drive the Lotus Elise he bought with profits he's earned.ĭespite his bravado, however, Shipley can admit when he makes a mistake. The software has won numerous accolades, including two Apple Design Awards and a Macworld Eddy. Delicious Library is, by all accounts, a very successful Mac OS X application.
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