After a year of hype, feature previews, leaked screenshots and details, Delicious Monster is finally shipping Delicious Library 2, its (in)famous media cataloging app for Mac OS X. The new version may indeed require Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, but if you're a fan of keeping track of your real world stuff on your Mac, you'll understand why.

For a recap, DL2 brings some pretty significant new features and a freshly updated UI. At the top of the list is the ability to catalog far more than just media like DVDs and books; users can now keep track of their gadgets, toys, tools, and just about anything else that Amazon carries. Speaking of media, though, DL2 now also catalogs your entire iTunes library, including music, movies, TV shows, and even audiobooks. While one of Delicious Library's most appealing features has always been keeping track of things you lend to friends, though, note that you can't really do much with your iTunes media in DL2 besides keep track of it for record-keeping or insurance purposes (certainly a drawback of going digital).

Other great new DL2 features include the ability to publish a browsable HTML library of all your stuff or just a specific Shelf of selected items, as well as the ability to subscribe to your friends shelves to keep track of their stuff. DL2 will also be the first Mac OS X app to allow AppleScripts to live anywhere in the app's menu structure. Per the example, a user could create an "Import from FileMaker" AppleScript for DL2 that lives under the File > Import menu--a script that is not bound to the AppleScript menu.

DL2 also does automatic currency conversion, so searching by value or sorting Shelves will analyze currencies on the fly to compare US dollars against Euros or any combination of 21 of the world's currencies. There is also a new iPhone export, though we haven't tested that feature just yet, as well as an iPhone-friendly version of the site DL2 exports.

One of the most significant changes behind the scenes is dramatically-improved overall performance, thanks to the company making the switch from XML to SQL for storing the library. Developer Wil Shipley has stated that DL2 should handle tens of thousands of records like a champ now, and while our library is only a few thousand records strong, we can definitely see much-improved performance. To our amusement, however, DL2 presents a warning that scrolling large Shelves may be a little jerky until Mac OS X 10.5.3 is released with some fixes for graphic bugs in Leopard. I guess this is what the Delicious Monster crew meant when they said they're doing some "stress-testing" of Leopard's APIs with DL2.

Whether you're a current Delicious Library owner considering an upgrade or you've never sat down to experience how useful your iSight can actually be, Delicious Library 2 packs a healthy dose of new features and overall refinement. You can take the demo for a spin, and for a limited time you can get $10 off its price of $40, or $5 off the upgrade price of $20. (Delicious Library 1 will also be $20 for Tiger users from now on.)