IWGuide for Netflix — Free (ad supported) from JeTap, is a weekly magazine format app for any iPad running iOS 5.0 or later. It gives you a listing, with some detail, of streaming Netflix movies that are new as of the end of the next month, just released as of the last week, vanishing from Netflix in the the next month or so, and a handful — 72 at last count — of the best rated films since 2007.
Detail Screen for IWGuide
Each tab shows a screen that can be sorted by Average Ratings, Release Year, High or Standard Definition, Genre and Title. These show up on a summary page that has a number on the right side of the screen bringing you to a page with a bit more detail about the movie or video, along with five others similar to your choice. You can turn the page by swiping to give it a magazine feel.
Page turns give a magazine feel
IWGuide works exactly the same in portrait or landscape mode giving you the same amount of information any way you decide to hold your iPad. There are a total of 30 pages that can be flipped through with a few pages designated to any particular genre. Click a selection on a page, and it highlights, offering a bit more information including the director and some of the cast.
Detail screen
Along with that, you can share a movie find on Twitter or create an email containing a link that will take the recipient to the Netflix site where they can start watching the movie.
What it does, is quite nice, but it’s very limited and often wrong or incomplete. For example, most of the SD/HD information is quite incorrect. I checked a good number of movies that the app showed as standard def to find that it was in high def on the Netflix site. Aside from HD/SD, other information on many pages is correct, but the titles and genre’s are missing.
Too much Unknown information
Overall IWGuide for Netflix gives you information that’s hard to come by anywhere else. It’s quite useful to know when a film or show is going to vanish from Netflix to give you a last chance to catch it. It’s also nice to know what’s upcoming. However pages and pages of empty pictures and the word “unknown” is certainly not to my liking. Neither is the total lack of accuracy when it comes to SD/HD content. It would also be quite nice to hook into the Netflix site so a program can be chosen in iWGuide and instantly viewed. As it stands, the app is a fair to middling reference that’s not completely dependable. It does provide some useful information as to what’s coming and what’s going, but everything else is fairly suspect. IW stands for Instant Watch and that’s one thing that it doesn’t do.*
Pros: A nice listing of new programming coming to Netflix Streaming as well as a listing of programs that will be taken off the service.
Cons: Lots of incomplete information, totally undependable listing of which programming is presented in HD, a random selection of highly rated shows, the inability to choose a show and then instantly watch it.
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* Apps like Cinetap and MovieBuddy do have that option.