Platform Shoos
I had an idea yesterday afternoon to locate or build some type of system for keeping a home inventory. Despite being immersed in this saturated era of apps for everything, it took me until this morning to realize that there was already a New York Times article in place to sort out all the competing options for what I thought was a novel idea, albeit written by my least favorite author in tech journalism.
As is normally the case, the fancy commercial offerings enable things like deep-featured smartphone companion apps, bar code scanning, and the like. The good ones are generally for Mac (Mac people seem intuitively to me more likely to drop $50 to make a good list of things, and I don’t say that pejoratively).
My mind goes to Google Keep for a slim solution, since it’s all the hype right now, but it doesn’t let you upload attachments to “notes” aside from pictures. One of my “killer feature” requirements is to upload the product manual PDF along with, optionally, the UPC, Amazon link, original invoice, purchase date and price, and the requisite insurance documentation photos. I’m sure you could make Dropbox public links and put them in the notes, but I could also maintain the whole thing in a file box (my current struggling system), so why inject busted tech into a busted meat-space system?
Microsoft Access, although I don’t know how many versions back I would have to go to locate a legal license in my possession, is not a bad idea for these types of things in general, although with the file upload thing being an annoyingly useful feature, you are turning a bad SQL database into a nightmare file system. Plus, it’s Access.
If you accept Dropbox links as a tolerable requirement, you could actually fall back to Google Docs or Excel, with hyperlinks to manuals and invoices. This is, amazingly, not a bad idea. You have the file system aspect of the project in a real online file system (Dropbox), and this has the pragmatic feeling of using a spreadsheet for structured data where complex SQL operations are not required, especially with the understanding that record size on a thing like this would never approach 200 rows, probably less than 100.
A lot of boxed commercial options here work under the assumption that you’re going to use them for everything (OCD factors in here, I’m sure), and things like bar code scanning presumes that you’re heavily documenting things like DVDs, which, unlike televisions and sofas, retain their bar codes after unboxing and use.
My basic preference would be to write an application myself and host it on my newly-installed Raspberry Pi behind the television. That would be somewhat fun (hopefully), would be customized, and would be a good chance to learn something new like node.js. But it would take a lot of time, and would it even be the right option in the end?
We certainly have no shortage of platforms to build on these days. Finding the right one can end up being a bigger issue than actually developing the system.