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Yesterday, I was complaining to Joe about how I wish Google Docs had a batch export feature. A few hours later, he sent me a link to Google’s Data Liberation Front, a project to help get data out of Google. (The Data Liberation Front claims to want us to want to use Google products, not to corner us into it.)

Today, I found out that Read Write Web published a post yesterday entitled All Your Docs Belong to You: Google Docs Now Exportable. My wish came true!

As of today, several bloggers have reported seeing this new feature, which allows users to grab all their Google Docs and batch export them as a zip file. Files can be exported in a number of formats, including Microsoft Office and Open Office formats.

I tried it and it worked. Hooray for backups!

See also: Data Liberation Front Blog’s Liberating Google Docs.

I’m currently in California, been here since Friday (June 6), and will remain here until June 29. We’re here for conferences, mainly, as this week is WWDC08 in San Francisco, a conference for Apple Software Developers like my boyfriend, and the last week of my stay in this state is the (previously mentioned) American Library Association Annual Conference in Anaheim.

I am not attending WWDC with my boyfriend, but he will be attending ALA with me. Even though I did not sit through the Keynote and watch SJ deliver the next surprise, I’m still pretty gaga about Apple. I use a MacBook Pro, and I’ve preferred Apple computers since I started using one this time last year. As a recent convert, the differences between Apple’s OS X and Windows XP/Vista are obvious and fresh in my mind. I don’t miss my old large and clunky Dell laptop. When working in the library, I can use both freely, but I prefer a Mac.

Everything I produce on the computer seems all the more valuable if I do it on a Mac. Programs are simple and intuitive: their functionality adheres to the metaphors that inspired them.

One wonderful application for the Mac is Delicious Library 2 by Delicious Monster. Delicious Library 2 allows the user to catalog everything: books, movies, albums, software, videogames, toys, gadgets, tools, and apparel. (The first version of Delicious Library only allowed the user to catalog books, movies, and albums.)

Delicious Library 2 Screenshot

What’s particularly awesome about this application is that it does not require the user to do much work, as far as typing in long strings of numbers or metadata for each object. If the application is installed on a Mac with a webcam, it can be used as a barcode scanner. The barcode scanner picks up the UPC or ISBN and looks it up in Amazon’s database, and then collects the metadata from Amazon associated with that item (e.g. publisher/label, release date, genres, format, dimensions, number of pages, retail price, current value, purchase date, ISBN, Dewey Decimal, EAN, and country for books). And if a working webcam is not available, it is also possible to search by a known metadata field such as title, author, or ISBN. The application also works with a bluetooth scanner, the Microvision ROV Scanner with Bluetooth, which would greater enable cataloging of a larger collection, such as the collection of a small library.