It’s late and I have the dentist early tomorrow but I simply must tell you about this FANTASTIC little application I just found!!
Library Books is a little app created by Harold Chu that sits in your Mac’s Status Bar. It’s function is really simple but astounding: it tells you what books you have outstanding from your library. I didn’t hold much hope for this app as alot of the useful regional apps and widgets for Mac are US based, but Library Books supports a frighteningly large selection of worldwide libraries.
Still, my university’s library wasn’t there but they do use the Talisprism network which is one of the generic options in this app. It took a little bit of fiddling about as the help guide is very bare bones, but all you have to supply is your login id, pin (in my case I only need a pin for borrowing, not for checking my account), catalogue host and date format used by your library’s website.
I got stuck at the library host as the web address didn’t have an obvious one similar to that suggested in the help box, but I found by using the “http://” and IP address at the start of the TalisPrism address it works perfectly! I can now see that I have 3 books (titles and authors shown) outstanding and when they’re due back.
Even better, the app syncs with a calendar in iCal to remind you when books are due and overdue items are shown with a red icon in Library Books itself. This will save me all that mucking about in Safari…brilliant!!
Harold’s website.
