Everyone who's into theatrical movies knows the drill: what do I want to see next? What have I already seen? What's available now in theaters? iTunes? What's coming out soon? Let's view the trailer. And so on. ToDoMovies is an iPhone app that manages all that beautifully, and it's a must for movie fans.
The basic ideas behind ToDoMovies is discovery, a movies to watch list, information about the movie, sharing, and purchases.
All images from an iPad 3 in 2x mode.
The first thing you do is start a list of movies you want to watch, “To Watch.” Then hit the “+” sign to discover or identify movies to be added to your list. You can search by genres, what's in theaters now, or earmark upcoming movies.
Multiple ways to discover movies for Watch List
You then manage your list of movies to see by the order in which you added them, by release date or alphabetically (A-Z). What's cool is that each entry in the list contains the movie poster, the release month, and the genre.
For any movie panel, slide left to delete it or slide right to change its watched/towatch status.
Click on the poster to bring up an action page that has a tool bar at the bottom: view trailer, view photo gallery, see what purchase options are related to the movie (iTunes, sound track, even iBooks, and related items), and sharing.
L-R toolbar: view trailer, photo gallery, log to be watched, purchase, share.
Action page sharing includes Twitter, Facebook, messaging and email. Click the info icon on the top right to see details of the movie. (See below.)
Swipe ratings R to L at top to reveal more ratings.
Movie ratings from Rotten Tomatoes, Netflix, and tmdb are available just by swiping the rating section at the top of the movie's info page. You can sync all this data to another iDevice via iCloud if desired.
Settings
The Settings page controls the badge on the app icon (for the number of movies in your list), Notification control, iCloud control, HD or standard video quality for the trailer and your iTunes store location.
Scroll up to see more, minor options.
Issues
The first “Lists” page is a bit ambiguous. You must first tap the “To Watch” button to get on with things. On the “To Watch” page, top right, is a “+” sign, and that's where you start the discovery process. I think the UI here could have been a but more intuitive, more logically laid out. For example, we should be able to go straight to discovery without first going into the “To Watch” list.
Still photo gallery. Not highly populated for minor movies.
Aside from that, the app is simple and easy to understand. It is essentially self documenting.
System Requirements
This app is designed for iPhone, but looks pretty good in “2x” mode on an iPad as can be seen in the screen shots in this review. It's compatible back to iPhone 3GS, iPod touch 3G and works on any iPad in 1x or 2X mode. It requires iOS 6.0 or later. It's been localized to Czech, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish.
Summary
This is the app I've been looking for. It's focused on the user, but has some sensible and low-key sharing options. It's nicely laid out and very visually oriented. Instead of each item being just a boring text name of a movie, each item on the list is, instead, a gateway to exploring more about the movie, viewing the trailer or even watching the movie itself.
While this is a keeper, I'd love to see the UI at launch made more intuitive and the developer deliver a Universal version for a full Retina experience on iPad 3 and later.