Over the years I have acquired a large collection of movies, music, books and video games. I’ve always wanted to catalog them but have struggled to find the means. I tried the long hours typing away with Excel and Access, but never got the experience I desired. Enter Geek Library a Windows Phone 7 App and Desktop companion App!
Geek Library is designed to make it effortless to not only create a catalog but help you keep track of it, too! Let’s start with the Windows Phone App which I used to easily add 489 movies with a simple scan of the barcode. It then searched for the movie, gave me the results and I confirmed and added each title. It took on average of about 30 seconds to add each title. Those with barcodes missing I was able to search by typing in the title.
Once they are in the library you can specify titles that are for sale or on loan and to whom. We can also create a playlist and rate titles. The app and playlists can be pinned as live tiles. It truly is a great little app for the geek or collector. The only issues I had noticed were minor. After entering over 450 titles the app loaded slower and did on occasion crash a few times. However, I was able to restart the app and continue scanning and adding without further incident. The scanning of the barcodes uses video from the phones camera for a quick read.
Now for the desktop App which is a much newer release and free with the paid version of the Windows Phone app; I found to be very buggy. The first few times running the companion app crashed on me. Once I got the app running I noticed the layout was awkward with the resemblance of Windows Phone tiles spread thin amongst a sea of white. Not bad, but not fluid. The home screen is nice as I can click on the recently added items and edit them or mark them for sale/loaned. However if I click on the tile for say movies I can see a list that cuts off and cannot click any title to edit. It needs work, but at least the two apps work together. They sync through the cloud showing your collection on both. Rather I should say it should. I found that of the 489 in my library on my Windows Phone that only 481 showed in the Desktop companion app.
At $3.99 the Windows Phone app is a steal, though a free version is available with ads. The desktop Companion app needs some serious work, but has some awesome potential. I would like to see both apps add a way to print, e-mail or share via social networks either the entire list or in part. I can’t wait to see the companion app tweaked and improved, but the Windows Phone App is going to be getting some serious use!