Recently rediscovered Alexandria, the rocking Book Collection Manager again. The project was apparently a bit dead for a while, but has some new people working on it again.
It’s a pretty nice piece of software for keeping track of your books. You can add notes if you loaned it to someone, export your library as html for impressing your friends and stuff like that.
The process for adding books is particularly nice, as you can either add books by their ISBN-number (apparently you can scan the isbn with a catscan, need to get one of those) or via text search for title/author/keyword. It uses the data from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Spanish Culture Ministry, Adlibris etc.
I wish there were more cool, slightly useless software like this.
Some new icons for the upcoming version.
Lovely work! It’s nice to see a revived application. You rocks!
Can you also look over this bug which is for gThumb?
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=465576
The author is looking forward to updating all icons to Tango style. And your help is grealy welcomed.
Jones: couldn’t you just have added me as cc on the bug?
Will look into it!
Nice application!
Regarding the Online Desktop, it would be fine to be able to sync the book library” with online services (i.e. “My library” of Google Books).
I dont know how possible it would be right now. By the way, Google’s My Library has and import and export option, and an RSS.
Would it not be awesome to be able to “scan” the barcode with your webcam, as there was so much talk about a year or so ago? This might be the perfect application for it
Hey Andreas! Your icons are great! I started to create a mockup of Alexandria some time ago, but I didn’t published since it wasn’t done. Take a look at the test I started out: http://img62.imageshack.us/img62/5426/alexandriamockupph7.png
Hi,
i read your blog and tried “alexandria” immediatly.
I like it! But in my opinion it lacks 2 features to really rock:
1. The possibility to add a url to a book, so you can start it with a pfd-viewer.
2. Support fpr the Adobe-E-Paper-System, so that you can integrate your loaned university-e-papers into the program.
vdepizzol: look at the New Library icon, such an art
andreasn: i am thinking about pushing Libre Art set active since gThumb will use many graphic tool icons. Might be a next milestone after gnome-icon-theme?
Andreas, thanks for the mention!
I’m one of the new developers working on Alexandria (Joseph Method is the other one, he’s done way more work in re-organizing the codebase and fixing bugs) We’re trying to get a beta released sometime soon (maybe the next day or so). In the mean time, be warned that the existing release 0.6.1 is nearly 2 years old and has known bugs.
Vinicius: I really like your bookshelf icons, I think it’s easier to see what the books are!
FloKo: ideas for new capabilities are always welcome. After the next release, and any bugfixes following on, there will be a substantial redesign of the core of Alexandria. Included in that, hopefully, will be the ability to attach arbitrary properties to any book – so that would allow a URL at which to read it. Alexandria was really designed to catalogue physical books though, I have no idea what an e-Book manager would function like.
.fosk. : similarly, Google’s “My Library” seems to be about managing a collection of non-physical items. If I knew what kind of features would be useful for these purposes, there’s no reason we couldn’t incorporate them into future versions of Alexandria.
zith: I’ve given some thought to the webcam option; there is existing free software which does image recognition of barcodes, but tying a webcam interface into any user-interface in GNU/Linux is fairly non-trivial as far as I know. Maybe there are some easy-to-use webcam drivers for Linux out there…
Jones: sure! I did the library icon before andreas publish his one!
The main change proposed in the mockup is the toolbar, without the refresh button and with zoom like nautilus
It’s a shame that Alexandria isn’t listed on the OpenSUSE 10.3 repositories.
I’m using the GNOME (like Andreas) x86-64 version.
nice.
Andreas, vad sägs om http://www.fscons.org/ ?