Where it all began

So, I'd been planning to compile a list of all the books Alex and I owned for sometime, to make it easier to know what I still needed to obtain when wandering through second hand book stores or life-line book sales or even places like Dymocks. And you know, I don't think it's just me who thinks this would be a good idea... my sister in law has tried to mention several times to Alex that he should develop something like this as have other people. But Alex said he had enough on his plate and suggested that there'd be plenty of people doing something similar and so it never happened.

Well, eventually we found an app. It cost - or rather could have cost - a couple of dollars, but Alex found a way to download it for free (legally mind!) so we started using it. Except that it's a little irritating... It adds books by barcode preferentially. Which is a problem for any pre-1980 book. (Or so our collection would suggest). The default sorting is by title. (Does anyone actually first sort their books by title? Before author or anything else?) The search feature only allows you to search by title - which means Foundation by Issac Asimov is practically impossible to find (amongst the "Foundations of modern blah blah blah" type books). It also would wipe out the title and year of publication as you went through manually entering details like the author's name (despite these two fields being at the top of the page and all).

There were other issues too, like how poorly it would import the photos of book covers you'd take (for those manual entries), but the thing that really made Alex frustrated was having to wait for it to load 400Mb for around 600 books.

So finally he's decided he can do better, and we've started working on it together... with me doing the graphics (and publicity - how did this happen O_o), and him doing almost everything else.

If you feel like leaving an opinion on what should and should not be included in such a type of app I'd love to hear it. I'd also love to know how people sort their books... especially if there is someone who sorts by title first...