It's $40, it's gorgeous, and it works! The Delicious Monster website has been swamped most of the week, but I've finally been able to download the Delicious Library demo and check out the details. For a v1 product, it's great. Minus some keyboard shortcuts and context menus, the design is Mac-alicious and elegant. The display in general is great fun, especially the clever use of Amazon.com product images. The use of Amazon Web Services in general is especially thorough and brilliant, including the automatic downloading and storage of product descriptions and statistics. Find-as-you-type search of a large library rocks. And the killer feature, barcode scanning with a camcorder, works flawlessly and speedily, given enough light and holding the item close enough to the camera. Red laser scan lines appear over the camcorder image, animated to look like a real grocery scanner—and it beeps, and pronounces the title of the item (using the speech synthesis Mac users are used to, because it comes with the OS).

It's still v1, and so far the most notable flaw is the application speed. On my G4 Powerbook, it can take a second or two to get feedback for some actions, and I'm not used to that. More ickily, it appears to slow down everything else on my machine. I've already found a reproducable crash condition, though it's not one that I'm bound to run into every day. And the aforementioned lack of context menus and keyboard shortcuts is a whole layer of intuitiveness and user expectation missing. (Pretty much every action can be found by selecting something and clicking on the gear drop-down menu.) But the camcorder scanning is fast enough that I'll gladly buy it now, scan in our thousands of books and DVDs, and hope the final touches come as a free upgrade.

MacMinute reports that the Bluetooth barcode scanner costs $175. I don't see a way to buy the Bluetooth barcode scanner directly from Delicious Monster yet (did I just overlook it?), and haven't found an alternate store with this particular model of scanner. I see a corded model and a "wireless" model with a USB dongle, but I'm going to wait for Bluetooth.

ArsTechnica has a thorough and entertaining review, including commentary on the genius attention to detail in the graphics. It also mentions some background on the developers: They're from The Omni Group.