Movie Genie

If you're like me and have a lot of conversations with people about movies and TV shows, you NEED Movie Genie. I'm constantly waiting for the long load times of IMDB on my iPhone to check who played in what, what year it came out, etc. IMDB hasn't come out with an iPhone app yet, nor has it been nice enough to create a mobile site for people who want a little more speed on their phones. Movie Genie is a quick interface with IMDB, has a simple user interface, and a few cool features.

When you open Movie Genie, the app immediately opens the search screen - this is the kind of thing that I applaud developers for, it's the simple things that help with speed that makes the great apps great. So right on opening the app you type in the movie your searching for, pick it from the list of search results, and start checking out the interface to IMDB. Instead of everything being in one long list, Movie Genie separates the movie details into "Details" and "Cast & Crew". The "Details" section contains the usual quick stuff: release date, genre, plot, etc. Also certain things are able to be clicked, like Trivia and Goofs, so that you can go to a longer page for each of these features. "Cast & Crew" is obviously where you would find the director, screenwriter, other people important to the film, and the cast.

Not only can you access the movies on IMDB but also the actor/actress pages, also with a simple and speedy interface. For the actor/actress pages, instead of "Details" and "Cast & Crew", "Filmography" replaces "Cast & Crew". I love the idea of splitting the pages into two. Having the cast and an actor's filmography at easy access at the top of the pages just helps to further increase the speed of the two most sought after details of a movie. When I jump on IMDB, the two most common things that I am looking for are who plays someone in a movie or what other movies someone played in.

Other than search, at the bottom are two other features that I think are great ideas: history and favorites. Each movie and actor has a star next the the IMDB logo on their pages. If you click these they add them to your favorites list (they add to the list REALLY fast). That way if there is a certain movie or actor that you're constantly looking up, you have them on a list for easy access (thinking about speed again, applause). The history feature is self-explanatory, you can check out pages previously viewed - most recent on top.

Problems, Wishes, and Misses

Problems. Not a single bug or problem was found when I used this app.

Wishes. A lot of my wishes are promised in upcoming updates, see the list below. My favorites include trailers for the movies and landscape use. Here's a small feature suggestion: save favorites to the iPhone so that they load even faster, I'm sure the amount of space this would take wouldn't be much.

Misses. Everything in the app was fairly useful, nothing was without a point.

If you check out the app on iTunes, you can see that the developer is promising quite a few cool features in the update: display photos related to a title or person, better TV series support, trailers, full awards list, user reviews (Rotten Tomatoes, etc), and landscape use.

If you use IMDB a lot then this app is well worth $1.99. I'm going to start using it even when I'm already browsing the internet on my computer, the app is faster than going to the IMDB website.