from Hacker News

Recreating Delicious Library in 2025?

by felixding on 1/29/25, 12:54 AM with 57 comments

  • by rgovostes on 1/29/25, 3:42 AM

    Delicious Library was the start of a gilded age of Mac shareware focused on style over substance.

    > In the past year or so, Mac development had shifted from applications providing new functionality that appeared at the dawn of OS X to applications (and ideas) built around flash and sizzle, with plenty of marketing hype to fuel the fire. his had created something of a toxic atmosphere in the Mac development world. A rift between the old school, with its plain but functional apps, and the new school of flashy but frivolous apps, has developed. ... I dubbed this new school “The Delicious Generation”.

    https://weblog.rogueamoeba.com/2006/11/06/the-delicious-gene...

    Apple adopted a similar interface for Newsstand on iOS and it seemed to be widely reviled during the pushback against skeuomorphism.

  • by xnx on 1/29/25, 4:12 AM

    Momentarily mistook this for https://del.icio.us/, but related only by name.

  • by kuon on 1/29/25, 7:34 AM

    I miss skeuomorphism. With good UX it makes great UI. It's weird considering I have my head inside a terminal most of the time but I was fond of those UI.

    I wonder if formal studies exist that measure things like "discoverbility" or productivity for normal users.

  • by InDubioProRubio on 1/29/25, 10:21 AM

    Man, were those GUIs back then good- human, quirky, trying to merge into the memories of the users of the real world. Not the abstract monstrosities towards which all template arts decay too (architecture comes to mind).

  • by samastur on 1/29/25, 10:20 AM

    I'm actually working on an app to replace my Delicious Library, but at least at first solely focused on books and supporting multiple users and features I missed in the original.

    If all goes well I expect to have early version ready by middle of this year. While some features will require subscription, features not incurring ongoing costs won't. I like to think of it as an example of social software for introverts :)

    I am hesitant to talk about details, but I haven't felt so excited about something in a long time.

  • by nottorp on 1/29/25, 1:28 PM

    > Sustainable Pricing: A subscription service (I know some people prefer one-time payments, but subscriptions are financially sustainable).

    Sustainable for who? Not for the customers...

  • by dazzawazza on 1/29/25, 10:16 AM

    I made a web delicious-alike many years ago called Beep My Stuff that I happily shut down. No regrets, I hated it.

    What I discovered was:

    * amazon (at the time) will aggressively shut you down by cutting off the only "viable" access to "barcode to product" data.

    * barcode databases cost a lot of money and are full of utter drivel.

    * people had absolutely VAST DVD/VHS porn collections that they want to share

    * there is more red tape in the US then you expect. As a UK citizen I was shocked by how sclerotic any action is in the US.

    * people were and now almost completely have moved to digital "stuff" although I hope that changes.

  • by musicale on 1/31/25, 5:23 AM

    > Sustainable Pricing: A subscription service (I know some people prefer one-time payments, but subscriptions are financially sustainable).

    Managing dozens of subscriptions that drain money out of your wallet every month isn't sustainable for users.

        % ls

    Sorry, you need to renew your subscription for 'ls'.
    Would you like to renew it now? (Yes) _

  • by msephton on 1/29/25, 3:37 AM

    I think it's about time you built it. No better time than now.

    ps: your RSS feed is advertised as https://dingyu.me/blog/feed.xml but is in fact https://dingyu.me/feed.xml (I guessed that as I was adding it to my RSS aggregator)

  • by Vaslo on 1/29/25, 1:42 PM

    I feel like most people just use the Arr suite of apps to track these things?

    https://wiki.servarr.com/

    I guess not an all in one solution but lots of strong features for libraries. Readarr isn’t great if I’m honest.

  • by musicale on 1/31/25, 5:22 AM

    Aren't there apps where you just take a picture of your shelves and it identifies and catalogs everything there?

  • by fmajid on 1/29/25, 4:40 AM

    No. The last thing we need is yet another subscription priced data silo roach motel that sequesters your data. Any replacement I would consider will have to be open source with an open database.

  • by paulxuca1 on 1/29/25, 5:17 AM

    https://www.shelf.im/ comes to mind

  • by pyinstallwoes on 1/29/25, 3:28 AM

    Yes, please. I always wanted a peer to peer version of it in a way. :P