Delicious Library Crosses Over

Okay, this one hurts. Amazon has finally turned off the thing Delicious Library used, so the app has been discontinued.

Over at Daring Fireball, Gruber has a really nice writeup about how Delicious Library was the exemplar for the era of apps as art in their own right that seems to have mostly passed: Daring Fireball: The End of the Line for Delicious Library

Personally? I have a Delicious Library that contains (almost) everything I own. “Dad, did you scan these yet” was a standard phase of any new purchase or gift. Books, games, toys, whatever, the thing where it could pull data on anything with a UPC or EAN from Amazon was amazing. Even more amazing was the barcode scanner app for the iPhone that used the camera. Just walk around the house zip, zip, zip.

You know how they say you should have a list of everything you own for insurance purposes? I had that! Plus, the ability to see when something was bought was surprisingly useful. “What birthday was that?” You could answer those questions! I loved it.

It was clear DL was on its way out: Wil Shipley has been an Apple employee for years now, the app hasn’t been updated in ages, the Amazon link was getting… “sketchy.” But there just isn’t a replacement.

This is the sort of think where all you can do is throw your hands up and make a sort of “ecchhhhh” sound. One more great thing we used to have that’s gone because the easiest way for some middle manager somewhere to make one of their KPIs was to break it.

Although, maybe the most maddening thing about this one is that I would have absolutely paid some kind of subscription fee to Amazon (directly or indirectly) to keep this working, and… nope. Not an option.