Fractal app submitted

With graphic design help from my friend Grif Rosser I have built and submitted an application for the band Fractal, that is themed with their artwork, and which fans can use to find out more about the band. Its in review at the moment.

My app reviewed...

http://www.whatsoniphone.com/reviews/instant-queue-add-netflix-review

Quite a good review, they are looking for DVD support, but that's what all the other apps do, and this one is intended to make it easier to deal with instant watching. If I added all the DVD stuff then it would be much more complex. Also the full size boxshots for each movie are only for instant movies, they are used in the HD versions of the on-TV display.

Version 3 is Now Available

I submitted to the App Store on Monday, and just got notice that its been accepted. Please let me know what you think and what you would like to see in the next version.

Some ideas I have:

- add more info per movie, all genres, ratings etc.
- save queue etc. data in the iPhone so it starts up quickly and synchronize using a background thread.
- redesign the user interface from scratch
- allow more movies to be pulled for each search, at present it gets the first 100 and picks out the instant ones

Moving movies in your queue

I decided to add one more thing, and allow re-arranging movies in the queue. This got a bit more complicated since the saved items that appear at the end of the queue can't be moved, and its taking longer than expected to debug everything. Its going to be a few more days before it gets submitted to the app store.

Instant Queue View and Delete On The Way

The latest version is now functionally complete, your instant queue is loaded, movies that are already in your queue are greyed out when they appear in lists, you can see the entire queue and delete movies from it. There is some cosmetic clean-up to do, and more testing to make sure the code is robust. Version 3 should be ready to submit to the app store soon...

Queue add problems

If you have had problems adding movies to your queue in the last few days, this is due to an intermittent problem with the Netflix API service. Hopefully it will be fixed permanently soon. Apologies for any inconvenience.

Version 3 coming soon with Instant Queue

The next version in development now loads your instant queue at startup or when sign-in completes, it indicates movies that are already in your queue whenever they appear in a list, and it changes the [+] to [more] to pull up similar movies. To see the complete queue an option was added to the search menu popup (which now also sets input focus automatically).

The occasional problem where an added movie would not have any similars was a bug in the Netflix API, and it was fixed on Nov 24th, so now every movie should have similars available.

The app now takes longer to startup (depending on your queue size) so some better user feedback is needed, and a delete from queue option needs to be implemented, but a new release should be out soon.

The user interface isn't very "polished" as some reviewers have noted. I have some ideas, and that is likely to be the main focus of the subsequent release. Sales have stepped up to a new level with V2, which is encouraging, many thanks to everyone....