We made the wish, or should we say the Developer Challenge, for a decent IMDB client for Symbian and so it happens, a developer decided to take it up and turn it into a reality. This developer is Moubail who has brought us great widgets for Symbian^1 touch devices with extremely nice UI, like iSearch, Device Info, Checkers, Dilbert and Match’Em.
The new IMDB Client from Moubail does what it sets out to do: it provides a simple and elegant way to browse for information on the Internet Movie Database website. The main screen is flush with simplicity with a text box and an option to search for either a title (movie or tv series) either a person (producer, actor, director…).
When the search is performed, you are presented with the results in the same manner as the IMDB website, with exact matches or close matches. Clicking on any of these opens the full page for the title/person.
When viewing a movie’s details, you are presented with a first general information area featuring the poster, year, runtime, ratings and number of votes. Next up is the alternate names for the movie, tagline, plot, genres, keywords, followed by the directors, writers and actors with their role. The last bit is a 5 movie recommendation list based on the one you’re viewing.
When browsing a person, the general information area gives their date and place of birth with their image. Following that is a mini biography, awards and movie titles sections.
If you search for a TV Series, the main view will give you the year it started, its regular runtime, IMDB score and votes, tagline, plot, genres, keywords and list of actors. Wait a few seconds and it will refresh showing you also the number
Three features make this IMDB widget really good:
- First is the fact that all titles and persons are interconnected, so when browsing a movie, if you click on the name of an actor in it, you get to their dedicated page, and vice versa.
- Second is the cached history support. If you click on the Back bar, you are taken one step back to wherever you came from, and that page is loaded instantly as it’s cached in the memory.
- The third feature is the links to the full IMDB page, (imdb.com/title/… and imdb.com/name/…) which lets you directly hop to the corresponding IMDB website page if the information you find on the widget isn’t enough.
I’ve been in contact with Markus Meriluoto, the developer behind Moubail, ever since he started working on this IMDB widget and am seriously proud of the results he’s achieved. Given that there is no official IMDB API (the base for any developer to work on), he had to look for an unofficial ‘scraper’ and try to build on it. Unfortunately, this means that this IMDB widget relies on that scraper and needs to be updated frequently when the scraper is modified. It also means that the scraper data needs a good server to host it, and that is why Markus had to wait a long time before actually being able to build this widget. That is definitely a lot of headache and explains why there was no other IMDB client until now. It is also a good motive to reward Markus for his dedicated work.
The new IMDB widget from Moubail will be available in the next few days on their website, and we’ll make sure to tell you when it is. Until then, please check Markus’ official preview of the widget on Moubail and leave us or him some comments to share your opinion about its usability, looks and features.
