Delicious Library 2 has Arrived!

We've been working on Delicious Library 2 since November of 2004, with six months out to do internationalization of Delicious Library 1.5, and four or so months to rewrite iSight scanning for internal iSights in Delicious Library 1.6 . Delicious Library 1.0 only took seven months to write, so, obviously, this one was a lot harder.

There are over a hundred new features in 2, and hundreds more bug fixes. I'm very proud of it, and very exhausted. I could blah blah blah a lot about it, but basically the entire delicious-monster.com website has been re-written to sell DL2, so please explore it.

Or why not just download it from http://www.delicious-monster.com/downloads/DeliciousLibrary2.zip — I mean, it's free to try out, and DL2 makes a copy of your Delicious Library 1 collection so you can always go back.

Note that DL2 only runs on Leopard, so I'm going to keep selling Delicious Library 1 as long as there is interest, but for $20 instead of $40. However, the free upgrade offer from DL1 to DL2 ends at midnight on May 26, 2008 (with the lowering of DL1's price), so if you later buy Leopard it'll cost $20 to go to DL2 as well. This totals to $40, which is what DL1 alone cost before May 27, so it's not really much of a change except you have to pay less up-front, which I figure nobody will complain about.

Delicious Library 1 isn't currently linked from the main site (I'm not sure where to put it) but you can get it from http://www.delicious-monster.com/downloads/DeliciousLibrary.dmg.

-Wil

Localization

A week or so ago Wil gave me a generous time budget and one simple mission: solicit localizations in as many languages as possible, no matter how underrepresented they are in our user base. I pondered the wisdom in those words for a while, then banged out a post on my indelicately-named blog.

The gist of it was this: universities and other organizations trying to preserve pre-colonial languages should help software developers localize their applications. If you're going to truly preserve a language, people must be able to live in that language, including time spent at their computers.

Unfortunately, post-colonial nations are often economically disadvantaged, and public universities are themselves frequently starved for funds. Why would you be interested in localizing an application you can't afford?

Any developer would happily exchange a copy of their application for a localization, but Wil decided to take our initiative one further.

If you are part of a reasonably-sized non-profit organization — or a reasonably-sized department within a non-profit — and you would be willing to localize Delicious Library, we will grant you a site license. When Delicious Library 2 comes out, we'll upgrade you for free.

I hope that will provide a very real monetary answer to the question of "what's in it for me?" Localizers will also have their names listed on the credits panel within Delicious Library 2.

There's also a larger, less tangible benefit. Assuming this crazy plan works and people start adding localizations to Delicious Library, other developers are going to notice. Delicious Library is frequently held up, by Apple and others, as an example of best practices in the industry. If you want developers to start localizing their applications in your language, localizing Delicious Library is a great first step.

So, OK, great, but what if you don't have a lot of time, or access to a Mac? No problem; we've developed special localization routines as part of our Golden%Braeburn project to eliminate the need for any special tools. All you do is translate lists of strings. There are about 30 lists, but most of them have just a few items.

Please drop us a line if you're interested.

Unscheduled Store and E-mail downtime.

Starting Thursday, January 31, two of our host machine lost internet access. The DSL people are working on this, but I am told it may take from five to seven(!) days.

Our website is up but our store is down, so you cannot buy Delicious Library until the DSL is restored. We also are not able to read or answer support mail right now, but we're hoping to come up with an early workaround for getting to the support mail, so we can at least keep our existing customers happy.

I apologize for this outage, and any inconvenience it causes. Believe me, I am literally sick about this.

Chief Monster,
-Wil Shipley

Thank You for Complaining.

I wrote a semi-famous web comic creator recently, after reading his strip for years. I'd written him a couple years ago, telling him I liked the strip, but, I said in this latest message, I felt his strip had lost its heart recently, and I told him specifically what it was that I thought caused the change.

I ended with this:

I'm sorry to just write to you and complain -- I know you put a huge amount of effort into the strip, and obviously I read it every day, and enjoy it. I've written you before as an unadulterated fan, so now I feel like maybe it's ok to write you as a freelance critic.

As always, I recognize you are a famous cartoonist and I am not, so I expect my comments to be placed in an appropriate context.

His replay was scathing, asking why I'd bothered to write him, since I was clearly not going to change the strip, and thus must be intending only to hurt him, and told me my account with him was "heavily overdrawn." (?) He invited me to post on his fan forums so that his supporters could tear me a new one, which I declined to do.

--

I thought about this interaction with regards to my own business. I must honestly say that, yes, when people write me to tell me I have disappointed them, there is a part of me that gets all ruffled up. And if a customer is rude on top of that, it's often very tough to bite my tongue and just politely say, "I am so sorry you aren't satisfied, please let me refund your money."

But I do so. Not because I am a saint, or because you are the Customer -- I do so because I realize that when you take the time to complain to me, you are paying me an incredible compliment. I believe you have better things to do with your time than try to make me feel bad. You are complaining because you want to like my software, but something got in your way. And you're trying to help me get rid of that thing. Trying to make my product better, so you can give me money.

When you think of it that way, it's a hell of a nice thing you are doing. Go you!

Of course, sometimes my honest answer has to be: I'm sorry, the software I'm writing isn't really intended to do everything, and what you're asking for is outside of my focus. Or, sometimes I have to say: I'm sorry, you are really the only person who has asked for this, and my gut feeling is that it's not a feature that'd be popular, and there are only two programmers here -- and, who knows, after MacWorld maybe Mike Lee will be on the iPhone team with all my other ex-employees and there will only be one. (Joke!)

But you should know that the top five new features in Delicious Library 2, the REALLY BIG features, the ones that won us the ONLY Apple Design Award EVER given to a beta piece of software (have I mentioned that before?) -- those were your ideas. They are literally our top five requests from you. We collate each piece of mail we receive and keep running scores.

I thank you for that. And I thank you for every complaint you send us. Some we can just solve by explaining something that wasn't clear -- and we learn to make that clearer in the future. Some we can patch in a future release. Some we can't fix, and we'll give you your money back. But, no matter what, in the end we have more happy customers AND fewer unhappy ones, and that's the basis of our business.

It's not just that I get an altruistic thrill out of making people happy: it's that satisfied customers have made both of my software companies very successful. It's always been our theory that the only advertising we really NEED is happy customers, and over the past 17 years of business, I think we've proven that theory.

So thank you for complaining. And -- as much as Mike (and now Terry, our new support gal) will hate me for it -- please keep it up. Please send us your feedback. We'll try very hard to make you happy.

That's our job, and we work for you.

-Wil

Unscheduled Delicious Store Outage

On Friday, January 11, at about midnight, the machine at Covad Networks / Qwest which provides service to a great hunk of Seattle went down. As of Saturday, January 12, at 6:34PM, it is still not up. This machine provides the internet link to our store, but not our main website.

This means you can download our software and view our website, but you can't buy our software for a few hours.

Covad's ever-so-helpful technical support has informed me that usually fixes take between four and six hours (I pointed out it'd been 18 hours) and they had no estimate on when I'd be able to, like, run my business again.

I apologize for the inconvenience.

--

UPDATE: Their service came back at 10:00PM PST. Hooray!

Delicious Library: Buy Now, Upgrade Later for Free.

As you might have guessed after we shipped Delicious Library, we've been working on Delicious Library 2. Shocking, I know.

We've had some nice previews on Theocacoa, Ars Technica, The Unofficial Apple Weblog, and, of course, Apple.

We're working our butts off on version 2 ever since we shipped version 1, but there have been delays - first off, because we had two very major free updates to version 1 (the international release 1.5, and the new webcam barcode scanning algorithm for version 1.6) that took a long time each (as well as some minor updates), and second because we decided when we saw Leopard that we should re-target our release as Leopard-only, which meant spending a year debugging Leopard with Apple.

We're very, very close now, and I'm happy to announce that everyone who buys or has bought a license to Delicious Library version 1 (the current version, for sale now), on or after December 1st, 2007, will qualify for a free upgrade to 2.0 when it's available.

Delicious Library 1 (that will be 2) would make an excellent Christmas gift, or gift for whatever holiday you celebrate at this time of year, if any. Sure, it's too late for חֲנֻכָּה, but, uh, isn't פֶּסַח coming? In a few months, or something?

So buy now! Without fear! Momma needs Christmas presents! Daddy needs to pay the rent on the old Omni building that is now vacant and losing $10,000 a month!

[To make my lawyers happy, I should mention that, SHOULD SOME unforeseen complication arise and we never ship Delicious Library 2, this deal is null and void. Sorry. I will say that we are using out best efforts to get Delicious Library 2 out and do it in a timely manner, and that "best efforts" is a real legal term and does obligate us to really try, for serious, which doesn't really worry me because, seriously, I'm working nights, weekends, weekdays... ALL THE FREAKIN' TIME. Also, I mean, we've already won an Apple Design Award for version 2 -- obviously, we've gotta ship it.]

Child's Play Charity Auction, 2007

Would you sell your pants in the name of charity?

For the third year in a row we had the honor (well, actually, we paid) of attending the annual Child’s Play Charity Dinner Auction, hosted by Penny Arcade’s crowd-pleasing yet surprisingly shy Gabe and Tycho. The night was a success from a fundraising standpoint, raising over $225,000 to buy toys for sick kids! (Seriously, if they could find a way to work in orphaned kittens, this charity would print its own money.)

The only disappointment came when Tycho refused to auction off his pants — despite our generous bids and chanting. Seriously, just wear underpants next year! Gabe and Tycho did a great job overcoming their self-proclaimed social anxiety, and created an entertaining and charged atmosphere for hundreds of developers and gamers from the area, plus some innocents at our table who had no idea who all these geeks were. The bidding wars were outrageous, the company fantastic, and the contributions copious! We couldn’t imagine a better time standing up (well, unless SOMEONE had removed his pants), and the cause—providing toys and games to kids in hospitals all over the world—is something we really believe in.

Delicious Monster won several items, including the grand prize: another guest appearance in an upcoming Penny Arcade strip. However, this time, the strip will feature's Wil's cat. (Hey, it's for charity.)



Delicious Monster the handsomest software company in the world, left to right: Mike Lee (the world's toughest programmer), Lucas Newman (in his last public appearance as a monster), and Chief Monster Wil Shipley.