At first I would like to thank you for this great application. I'm currently trying out the trial and will buy it afterwards, since I'm unsatisfied with two competitive products I have used in the past.
There are some things I'm missing and I will just list them up.
1. Datasource-support:
-www.themoviedb.org (http://api.themoviedb.org/2.1)
-www.thetvdb.com (http://thetvdb.com/wiki/index.php?title=Programmers_API)
They are both open-source, have a large library and are well-documentated.
2. Ratings
-Show IMDB/Amazon/TheMovieDB (TheTvDB)/RottenTomatoes-ratings and let us refresh them easily
-Show the ratings as stars and numeric values (✱✱✱✱✱✱✱✱✱✱ 8.0/10)
3. Badge icons.
-Small icons like this one:
to mark items in addtion to the flags. This checkmark-icon could used for flagging items as watched/read/... whatever media-item you're attaching it to-In addition i would like to see an: Favourite-icon (A yellow star) and maybe something like this:
for marking imporant items. ("Hey, I always wanted to watch this movie, but I just forgot it")
4. Advanced
There is this issue:
http://www.imediaman.com/smf/index.php?topic=2254.0
http://www.imediaman.com/smf/index.php?topic=2246.0
with importing informations from multiple sources and refreshing it after time.
The first Star-Wars-IMDb-entry will be more accurate than the Black-Swan-IMDb-entry. Why? Because the movie is older and people got more time to feed the page with data. As you see it absolutely is a valide point.
In addition to my TheMovieDB/TheTvDB-suggestions I would appreciate a feature for more advanced users who want to import information from multiple sources. Get Extra from IMDb (for Amazon) seems to be a good start. I don't know how other applications work, but some of them do have ways to achieve this. There are different approches:
-Import content from IMDb/TheMovieDB resp. TheTvDB/Amazon, show the available content and let the user decide which content to import
-Import content from one source and fill in missing information from the other available ones
-In addtion I have illustrated a way how experiences users could update single content-fields:
Just please think about it. There has to be way to achieve this and my illustrated approach isn't too bad is it? But at first I would like to see the three previous suggestions integrated, they are definitely easier to integrate.
Thank you very much. I hope my post will get any positive attention, since I don't want to switch my media-catalogue again.
-Kestra
PS: Could you add an episode-overview for TV-series too? You may grab it off MyTvDB
PPS: Adding these features would make this application perfect and I could write some testimonials in some other forums.
PPPS: If I were a programmer, I would even help you for free lol
Re: A bunch of suggestions By: He.Shiming Date: January 21, 2011
Thank you very much for the suggestions. I'll definitely consider to include the open APIs in future releases. Thanks for letting me know if this.
The badge icons might be redundant as flags are already provided. But I do think the icons to be more intuitive. I've made a note of this and I'll see what I can do.
And I do understand that information on those web sources are constantly refreshing. The primary problem of reloading the content is the user interface complexness. Lots of people edits the actor field to include only ones they thought were important. Historically, MediaMan doesn't record which field has been changed through editing. So to perfectly minimize the interface weirdness, and implement such a function might take some time. I'll have to think about this.
For your "advanced suggestion" section, MediaMan isn't opposed to fetching content from lots of sources at a time. It has been doing so since 3.0. The problem of this would be the network connection speed. IMDb is a headache, it slows everything down and I always wanted to replace it.
Now, displaying lots of choices of content sources might appear complicated for many users. This is a behavior I'm trying to avoid. But I can understand that for advanced users, this seemed to be a limitation. I'll run some researches on those new open source APIs I discovered lately, and figure out a best way.
Re: A bunch of suggestions By: Kestra Date: January 21, 2011
Thank you for this fast reply. I can absolutely feel your position since it's always a point of maintainability too. You should have a look at this topics too:
http://forums.boxee.tv/showthread.php?t=13492
http://forums.boxee.tv/showthread.php?t=13467
Maybe you'll find a good solution in the future, it's nothing to hurry with.
You may check if TheTvDB and TheMovieDB are good enough for a start.
I could imagine the same thing you're doing with Amazon:
"Grab info from TheTvDB + IMDB/Amazon-Extras" or whatever may work for you.
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Howver the other requests number 2. (Ratings), 3. (Badge Icons) and my PS: (Episode Lists) are important too. In addition to the additional ratings in have requested, it would be fine to give us the possibility to refresh the ratings after time.
Another good feature would be custom category icons and the possibility to see the number of items in sub-folders as well:
That's the current state and it could be tweaked as describes.
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Last, but not least, regarding the badge icons, you could see it as an extension of the flag-system. As stated before I suggest:
Seen/Read/Played/Listened => Obvious, mark the media-item you have already experienced.
Favourite/Loved => 5/5 stars are not enough because this media-item was extra-awesome.
Important => Something to remind myself: "Hey, that's what I want to read/watch/play/listen to next".
Have a look at this blog-post:
http://blog.karachicorner.com/2010/02/25-best-gui-icons-for-web-designers-developers/
There are some beautiful icons that may fit in. Some of these icons are free to use for commercial projects!
As an example, here we have favourite-icons:
or an important-icon:
Free to use from this package:
http://www.icojoy.com/articles/44/
http://www.icojoy.com/articles/46/
But there are other icons as well, just check the blog and watch out for other free-to-use-icons.
Have a nice day
-Kestra
PS: End of next week I'm getting my salary and first thing I will do is buying this great application. Hope that's another small appeal to work on my suggestions
Re: A bunch of suggestions By: doncht Date: May 11, 2013
+1 on the badge icon. Any updates on it so far please?