15,000? In a row?

So I had an idea. It was tentatively named “Wasn’t She In?” and it was going to be a web app with two text fields and a do-button. In each text field, you’d type the name of a movie or TV show. When you hit Return or clicked the do-button, the web app would tell you what cast members those two films/shows shared.

The idea is that you’re watching a TV show (say, oh, I don’t know, an episode of The Big Bang Theory) and you recognise one of the cast members (Sara Rue, maybe) from somewhere. You wonder, “hey, wasn’t that person in Movie X?” (in this case, Idiocracy, and yes she was).

Normally, you’d go and find out the person’s name from the IMDb page for the TV show that you’re watching and then do a ⌘+F for that name on the cast list for the movie you thought they were in. “Wasn’t She In?” was going to be a way to streamline that process.

I say was because accessing IMDb’s API costs $15,000 a year.

Let me say that again.

Accessing IMDb’s API costs $15,000 a year.

So, yeah. I don’t think I’ll be following through on that idea.

(btw, Boxee pulls in metadata from IMDb for movies and TV shows, but they don’t pay that $15,000 annual fee. They screen-scrape.)

Movies

I’m back.

OK, so I didn’t get as much time to myself this weekend as I hoped I would. I did manage to make something, though.

Movies is a little iPhone web app for making a list of movies you want to see. You can add movies to your list and tick a checkbox next to a movie’s title to remove it from your list. It’s not much, but in making it, I got to learn about dealing with client-side databases in JavaScript and storing those databases and other files locally with that fancy-schmancy HTML5 offline caching business. If you add it to your homescreen (which was how it was meant to be used), Movies will work offline.

The weekend was a bit of a disappointment, but don’t worry, I have some ideas in the pipeline.