First Big(ish) Update: Here’s what’s new and what was fixed
I’m gonna call this version 0.5.1, I think. I fixed a ton of things and made a lot of changes that I wanted to make a while ago. Most of the fixes and changes are under the hood, but I’ll still go through what’s different and what’s better.
Better Search
Searching is a huge element of Super DVD Robot! as it is currently the only way to add movies to your collections and wishlists (this is changing very soon). Now, more relevant items are pushed to the top of the search results. No more digging through 50+ pages to get to ‘Up’. If you like, you can now also sort by release date and running time. I plan to add more search criteria, but for now, this is what was suggested and I’m only one guy. You can also sort by format. Great if you want to filter out DVDs or Blu-rays in your search.
New Movie Action Widget
The movie action widget is that thing you see that lets you quickly add movies to your wishlist or collection, as well as rate them. Now, most of the changes are under the hood, but what I’ve done will allow me to quickly expand the action bar site-wide and turn off features if something goes buggy. You may not realize it, but the new Movie Action Widget (need to rename that to something cooler.. DragonWidget, maybe?) is used to display every movie on the site, now. This is going to be really cool when you see what I have in store for the near future.
It’s also prettier, now and uses some icons instead of checkboxes and text.
New Home Page
This was mostly to get rid of that issue where the Vimeo was blocking the login. All that should be good, now. A lot of the home page will be changing as I add new features. As for now, I want to focus on the blog, the new people, and the discussion board. Before January is over, I plan to add all kinds of cool stuff that will actually be useful.
New User Action Widget
Like the Movie Action Widget, the user action widget has been overhauled to be more universal, heavily modular, and look prettier. Now you can see how many movies a user has right from the action bar. And as for the “Action” part of “User Action Bar”? Well… stay tuned for all that. I know it’s obvious that you all want to be able to friend each other on this thing, but I asked myself “why?” and came up with a bunch of cool things that are going to make this very fun to use.
The Way We Interact with Best Buy’s APIs
A few of you have reported getting an error when searching for things. This is because we’re asking Best Buy for too much information at a time. So, I’ve revamped the way the site “talks” to Best Buy’s system and hopefully we shouldn’t see any more problems. Not only that, but we should be able to build up our own database exponentially faster than before. Once we have a nice, hearty database of information, we can start offering up our own information that you won’t be able to find anywhere else.
So what’s next?
Glad you asked. I have a lot of cool things planned for the social side of Super DVD Robot! and have features lined up to start filling out the movie pages to make them the absolute most informative movie pages on the web. Seriously… you’ll never hit IMDB or Wikipedia, again, once the movie page is 100%.
Lists are coming. This was a feature that I was working on for the original Super DVD Robot! (I’ll have to write a blog about SDR!s history, later) but never completed. Well, I’m much smarter and much better at this than I was back then and you can bet that lists are coming and they’re coming VERY soon.
More information on the user profiles is coming. You may not realize this, but as you build up your collections and wishlists, Super DVD Robot! is analyzing your collection and silently judging how many hip-hop dance movies you own. We have some fun things planned with that. Most likely, I will simply flesh out the user bio section to include more info like your favorite actor, favorite genre, etc. etc. We could probably turn it into an automated quiz, but why?
Facebook and Twitter integration is coming. This was meant to be a launch feature, but I scrapped it because it seemed like a bad idea to announce your every move to your Facebook and Twitter friends. So I had to go back to the drawing board and figure out an better way to go about it.
Oh.. there’s one more thing just one more thing… BADGES!!
That’s right! We’re bringing back badges, but this time, I’m actually going to launch the badge system. This is going to bring a whole new level of fun to collecting movies. Badges will work like you would expect them to. There are goals to earn each badge. The goals will be secret because I don’t want people cheating and I plan on adding a few new badges every once in a while to keep people on their toes.
Again, thanks for enjoying Super DVD Robot! and huge thanks if you’ve told your friend or Fan’d us on Facebook or followed us on Twitter. These little things go a long way with making the site bigger and better.
THANKS! ~Alex
PS: To the tech nerds.. I plan on moving to a cloud-based server and enhancing the database so everything will run much smoother. Right now, my goal is to get this bad boy to 1.0 and able to run well enough on lowest-common-denominator hardware.
