I recently updated my Game of Thrones app to support iPad, and am now looking at a new idea for an application. Basically, I often find myself wanting to know one or more of three things about a movie: Its IMDb rating, its Rotten Tomatoes rating and/or its runtime. As far as I can see, no application on the app store currently does this in any easy way, so I’ve been programming my own. Here’s a prototype screenshot:
Searching works fine, it’s not just a mock-up, it’s just done in a very sluggish way at the moment. And I don’t have a good name for it, any suggestions?
Hi Marcus. I really like your Movie Ratings App for iPhone. I’m learning to create mobile apps and thought a movie app would be a good exercise. What I’m wondering is how do you search across Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB data so quickly? Do you have the data all on your server or stored on the phone perhaps? I would appreciate any hints but will understand if you don’t want to share or disclose such information. Thank you!
Hi, thanks, I’m glad you like it. I have zero data locally. I use http://www.imdb.com/xml/find?json=1&nr=1&tt=on&q=query to get search results for IMDb. For Rotten Tomatoes I use their public API specifically they have a call which takes an IMDb ID as a parameter: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/alias?type=imdbid&s=
This means I can use the IMDb search result ID to find the same movie on Rotten Tomatoes.