As someone who watches a lot of movies, I have been loving these new movie apps coming out on the App Store. So far, we have seen TodoMovies 2, the app that boasts a ridiculously good design and a powerful feature-set. It has become my favorite app to explore and manage the movies I want to watch and have watched. There was also ‘Watched’ app that offers a much simpler and elegant experience for managing your movies. Today, another major player enters this market. Limelight, by 9:42 AM is beautiful way to browse, explore & organize your movie library.
9:42 AM is the duo of designer Marcelo Marfil (who we have featured here in our Artist Profile series) & developer Oliver Cameron (also known for Everyme). If you haven’t already figured it out, 9:42 AM is named so because it was when Apple first introduced the iPhone in 2007. Limelight is their first app that makes its debut on the App Store today.
Considering Marcelo’s extensive experience, it’s no surprise that Limelight is so gorgeously designed. Your movie library is presented on wooden shelves with the movie posters neatly arranged in threes for you. You can swipe between three sections — To Watch, Watched & Following. Tapping on a movie brings the poster up front & flips around to display the movie’s meta data. You can view the movie trailer is a custom designed video player that also lets you Airplay. The controls are not cluttered like in the default app and they look great. You can view information like the movie’s rating, genre tags & overview on the same screen. Swiping right to left takes you to the Contributors screen that lists all major cast & crew members for that movie. There’s a third tab that lists Similar movies. A little glyph at the top right lets you mark a movie as watched/unwatched, share it with your friends or remove it from your library. Alternatively, you can also bring up these options by tapping and holding down a movie on your library shelves. Movies you have already watched can also be rated.
To add a new movie to your library or explore new ones, you tap the tiny “+” at the top right. The view flip over and changes from wooden shelves to a solid dark texture. The first screen lets you either search for a movie directly or browse various categories like Action, Adventure, Comedy and others. Swiping to the next screens lets you browse through all the Popular movies, Upcoming movies, Now Playing movies & Top Rated movies. This is a great way to explore some brilliant new movies and add them to your library. You can also view the libraries of other users by looking up their username and add the movies from their libraries to yours.
Limelight’s most notable feature is the fact that it lets you share your movie library with anyone. Limelight generates a publicly accessible URL (here’s mine) that anyone can view in their browser. This makes Limelight much more useful than the other apps as you can share the movies in your library with your friends and also see the ones they have added to their own library. Limelight readily lets you share your library via Facebook, Twitter, Mail, Messages or just copy the link.
Limelight is a gorgeously designed app that’s also a great way to manage your own movie library on your iPhone. Hundreds of movies are released every month and apps like this offer an easy to way keep up with what’s worth watching. Since you can view the libraries of other people, you get a readymade filtered and curated list of good movies based on their tastes and liking. Limelight is an obvious buy for movie enthusiasts, especially when it is just $0.99 on the App Store.