Less than a year ago, we wrote about the TodoMovies app for iPhone, the app with the absolutely stunning UI that you could use to quickly and easily add movies that you wanted to watch. It worked like a Todo list for movies, pulling in meta data about the movie from TMdb and neatly laid it out for you. It was the perfect utility to pull out from your pocket when a friend recommended a movie you’ve never heard about before or one that you saw mentioned on your social media feeds. And for a big movie buff like me, it was an instantaneous hit.
Today, the team at Taphive has released version 2.0 of the app. TodoMovies 2 is a major update to the app (and a phenomenally good one) that brings some incredible new features and enhances the way you interact with the app. The biggest feature in this release is the ‘Movie Discovery’ feature. Unlike the previous version, where you could only look up movies, TodoMovies 2 now puts the focus on letting you browse and explore movies sorted by Upcoming, In Theaters or Genres. The catalogue is neatly categorized and the Genre sections include featured movies curated by the team. The Upcoming and In Theaters tabs have a gorgeous grid of movie posters that you can skim through while the Genres tab has custom movie mastheads for each genre. This Movie Discovery mode makes TodoMovies an infinitely better app now. With so many new movies coming out these days, the “Upcoming” tab is a great way to keep an eye on what you want to see.
TodoMovies 2 has also updated the movie information view. You still get to see a stunning full-size poster of the movie and believe me, it looks incredible on the taller iPhone 5 screen. Instead of two buttons at the bottom, there are now five of them. The first lets you view a trailer of the movie, in HD & within the app. The second shows you a Gallery of photos, which are nicely presented on a film roll. Tapping on one takes it fullscreen, after which you can swipe through the entire gallery. You can quickly share a photo or even save it to Dropbox. The center button lets you add the movie to your Watch List. The fourth button is a ‘Store’ button that pulls up all movie-related media from the iTunes Store. This way, you can quickly purchase and download the movie soundtrack, games, iBooks or even the movie itself, if available. This layout incredibly good looking, with spotlights on each item and the price listed below them. The fifth and final is a button to share the movie to the usual destinations.
When viewing a movie, double tapping the movie’s poster or tapping the button at the top right reveals the information about the movie. TodoMovies pulls off an great feature here as well. The app has its own movie rating system called ‘TodoMovies Score’ which it calculates from the data from sources like RottenTomatoes, Netflix, TMDb and ratings. You can swipe from right to left to view the individual scores from each source if you want. Other meta data about the movie is also neatly laid out for you, including the release date for your country. Another nifty feature is one where TodoMovies 2 will display an icon if there’s an end credits or Bonus scene for that movie. You’ll never miss the end credits scene in a Marvel movie again.
Every upcoming movie that you add to your Watch List has an option to notify you when it releases in theaters. You can also add a little Note to be displayed with the notification. TodoMovies 2 also now comes with iCloud sync, so your data is backed up into the cloud. There are some very nifty shortcuts in the app. When viewing the grid view of movies, you can tap and hold on a movie which puts it under a spotlight and reveals an action sheet to watch the trailer or add it to your Watch or Watched List. Overall, this is a mammoth 2.0 update to TodoMovies which makes it a must-buy for everyone who’s into movies. My only complaint about using the app is something that’s largely credited to my ISP — it’s takes a really long time for some movies to load in the app.
TodoMovies 2 is a free update to existing customers and costs just $1.99 on the App Store if you haven’t purchased it yet.