Wanna be the first to use our iPhone app?

Our iPhone application is in its final stages of production, and we are going to need some beta testers for it. Don't worry if you've never beta tested an application before, what we need is real users who are willing to spend some quality time using our app.

We won't be able to give everybody copies of the application, so I'm putting together a small list of people who are enthusiastic about being able to use this and give us feedback.

If you're interested, fill out this questionnaire and send it to me at jessie@delicious-monster.com

1) Do you have a name? If so, what is it?

2) Is your iPhone edge or 3G?

3) About how many items do you have in Delicious Library?

4) Do you use shelves and/or smart shelves?

5) Do you use the friends features on Delicious Library (checking items out, viewing other libraries)?

6) What is your favorite iPhone app, and why?

7) Is there anything else I should know about you?

Don't worry too much about my questions, I'm just trying to find a nice variety of beta testers =) Depending on how many emails I get, I'll try and respond to all of you when I have more information on our beta timeline.

The application is going to be a Delicious Library 2 viewer that wirelessly syncs your library onto your iPhone, so you'll have to be a DL2 user for the application to really work. iPod touch users welcome also!

UPDATE: Our beta list is full right now. Thank you to everyone who applied!

Macworld 2009

Ah, December! As most of us are winding down from the holiday season, we here at Delicious Monster are gearing up for the biggest holiday of them all: Macworld Conference & Expo (Jan 5-9).

We've chosen quite a clever theme for our booth this year: Delicious Library (like, an *actual* library-- get it?). Packed with shelves, books, a team of Delicious Librarians, and a handful of other Library-ish gimmicks, our booth will be something you don't want to miss. And though Steve may not be there this year, we can guarantee that the Delicious Librarians will be much hotter.

Wait, what was that?
You really want to come see us at Macworld?
Aww, we would love to see you there too!
If you're going to be in the area, but don't have a pass to the expo, send a request maja@delicious-monster.com, and we'll give you a pass. Because we like you.

DL2: The Ultimate Gift

• It's on sale for $30 (that's 25% off)!

• You don't have to wrap it. Saves paper, saves money, saves time!

• Trust me, everyone already has a scarf.

• You don't have to ship it. No waiting in line at the post office, and no paying $20 to have it sent to your grandma in Tennessee.

• It doesn't take up any space, so she won't secretly resent you for cluttering her house with more stuff.

• It's Delicious and has no calories.

• Scanning stuff is fun, plus it's like, useful and stuff.

Delicious Library 2.0.3 Released

The big changes in this release are mostly around publishing and subscribing to friends' libraries, with some publishing methods being re-written from scratch, and every method being tweaked in some way. As well, a common issue where it would appear Delicious Library 2 is being extremely slow when in fact it was loading a friend's collection from the internet (often unbeknownst to the owner!) has been fixed, as well.

Automatic currency conversion works much better in this release, so users with collections whose values are in mixed currencies will now find that their items correctly sort by their real relative value. Delicious Library 2 is the only catalog application on any platform that automatically tracks the world's currencies.

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Existing 2.0 customers will be automatically upgraded when they launch the app, or they can download the latest version from its usual home at http://delicious-monster.com/download.

Here are the release notes for 2.0.3 only, and the release notes for all 2.0.x releases together .

I'm pretty happy with this release — I've fixed some issues that were really ruining Delicious Library 2 for some users, and I have been feeling just awful about that. As always, if you have problems please check out our support pages.

-Wil

Wanted: Bugs. $100. Cash money.

I need my beta releases of Delicious Library 2 to be tested, for serious; otherwise I might miss things I've broken when I was fixing other things, and put out a general release that has new bugs in it in addition to the fixes. Nobody likes that.

I've never had much luck with full-time paid testers. I'd happily go this route if I thought it'd work, but, honestly, in 25 years of writing software, I've NEVER had a paid beta-tester that found half as many bugs as volunteer beta testers. It's a mind-numbingly boring job to test software, and one naturally tends to fall into patterns and test the same things over and over. It takes a variety of users, who actually _use_ the software because they want it, to discover things like, "Shelves without names can't be published to the iPhone." (This was a real bug, fixed in 2.0.3.) I would never think to create a shelf and not name it, then publish it.

There are a million issues like this.

Here's the problem: volunteer beta testers generally like beta testing because they get to play with new software before anyone else. In the point releases I'm doing now (eg, 2.0.1, 2.0.2), I'm not really adding features (well, one or two), I'm just making Delicious Library 2 more robust. That's, like, not very exciting to test.

So, I'm going to try an experiment. I'm going to offer EVERYONE the possibility of making $100 by finding and reporting a regression bug in a current beta release, which I think is important enough to fix. Note that it has to be a "regression" bug, which I define as "this worked in a previous 2.x release, but doesn't work in the current beta release."

Note that I'm also ONLY offering this bounty on the current beta, not on production releases. The logic is, if you find a bug on the product AFTER I've released it, well, the horse has already left the barn — my customers are already affected by the bug. You have to find the bugs BEFORE I release them to the public.

The latest beta is always at: http://delicious-monster.com/downloads/Delicious%20Library%202%20Beta/DeliciousLibrary2.zip - I rebuild that every few days, and the build number in the about panel will go up. (Note that if the beta build number is less than the current release build number, there's nothing to test right at the moment.)

The latest release notes will always be here: http://delicious-monster.com/downloads/Delicious%20Library%202%20Beta/DeliciousLibrary2.html.

Here's the rules, to hopefully make some lawyers happy:

• Bugs should contain the word "regression" in their title in order to be found for this hunt.
  
• Bugs have to be filed by either sending mail to <bugs@delicious-monster.com> or by using the in-application bug reporter. Don't send 'em to me directly. Don't post 'em.
  
• You can report multiple bugs and get multiple prizes. However, if you report a bunch of crap, we'll start ignoring you.
  
• I have to think the bug is important enough that I fix it before I do the real release in order for you to get the bounty.
  
• If multiple people report a bug, I'll only give money to the first person who reported it. (Well, I might give money to multiple people, but I'm not promising anything.)
  
• I'll use a reasonable effort to find the earliest person who reported any particular regression bug, but I might not find your report. Use good keywords to make sure that I'll be able to look up your bug - all awards are final.
  
• I've initially set aside a $4,000 for this. Beyond that, I may increase the budget or may discontinue the bounties.
  
• If it's not legal for you to get money for this (like, your country doesn't allow it, or something), then I can't pay you.
  
• If this whole thing ends up being illegal, then I'll cancel it.
  
• I can cancel this at any time by posting in this blog. (I'll do this if I'm just not getting good reports, for example, and this turns out to be not worth the hassle.)
  

Obviously, if you want to only use stable software, stick to the latest release builds, which are always at: http://delicious-monster.com/downloads/DeliciousLibrary.dmg. If you're a current version two user, note that by default your application will auto-update itself whenever a new release build comes out, but NOT to beta versions — you have to go get the first one of those yourself, using the link above.

So, remember: Only regressions, in beta versions, from 2.0, that I fix. $100. Cash money. (Well, check, unless you insist.)

We'll see if this works, and if people like it. If not, meh, nothing lost. At least we're trying new things!

Happy hunting!
-Wil

Support Update.

As of July 15 Terry managed to get caught up with all our support mail, which was a Herculean achievement. We'd received about 35,000 e-mails in the two months since Delicious Library 2 was launched, and Terry sorted through most of them herself. (We respond to every request for help, but for bug reports we usually file them without a response.) Sure, a lot of that was spam, but a LOT of it wasn't. She got a very large bonus check on that day and we had a huge party where we rented the best restaurant in town and invited a ton of people and got kind of drunk and watched Step Up 2.

We've also opened a new forum on Get Satisfaction, which has this neat logo that you can click on to join in:

Woot! Both Terry and I are on there, and we have RSS feeds to it in our browser windows, so every day when we are on the web we see anyone who posts there. I can't promise we'll respond personally to everything, since part of the point of having a forum is to allow customers to talk to each other, but we'll try very hard to stay active on this forum (assuming it doesn't get over-run with crazy noise-posts — we aren't moderators on Get Satisfaction, so we're curious to see how the site will deal with miscreants as it expands).

We've linked to these forums on our help page as well, so if you have an issue that's not in the FAQ we've made you can look it up on the forums without having to leave that page. I think that's nifty.

Again, I apologize that we were caught so flat-footed by this deluge of e-mail, and especially apologize to those of you who wrote us and ended up waiting a month for a response. But, we're caught up now, so if you have a support problem that has NOT been responded to and it's been more than four days, please write again — we finished the whole mailbox, so either we never got your mail or your spam filters ate our response. (The mail comes from kind of a funny address, so check your spam box.) Note again that if you filed a bug we usually will NOT respond unless we need more information or have something fixed and are offering to let you test it.

Thank you, as always, for being our customer.

-Wil

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