What is Butaca
Description
Butaca is an application providing movie information
Butaca is an application which allows the user to
access movie information -such as title, cast,
trailers, overview...-, check movie showtimes and
check whether a movie has extras after and during
the credits.
In order to achieve that, it queries the movie
information from The Movie Database, the movie showtimes from Google Movies
and the extras information from What's After the Credits
Goals
Butaca was born with the following goals:
- Provide different information about a movie, such as title, cast, trailers, overview, budget, rating or ranking, among others.
- Tell whether a movie has extras after or during the credits, so you'll know if it's worth waiting in the cinema
- Check movie showtimes: where and when a movie is being played.
- Share it with others: tell that you're going to watch this or that movie (or that you already did), share a trailer, etc.
- Keep a list of your favorite movies
Origin
Project Butaca originated in Fremantle, being available in extras-devel. While some of the previous goals are completed (it's possible to retrieve information, check the extras and movie showtimes, as well as using a list of favorite movies), others arent: it's not possible to watch trailers or share with others.
How does it work?
In Fremantle
The version available in Fremantle was built on top of two components:
In MeeGo / Harmattan
The D-Bus service is already ported to Harmattan available at Gitorius. However, after starting to use QML's XML List models, it's still unclear if the D-Bus service will be needed. It seems that everything can be done on the client side.
- A series of XmlListModels are defined to represent XML responses from The Movie Database
- Delegates are designed in order to display the content from those XmlListModels in a fashionable way
- Page navigation is done using PageStacks to allow searching and browsing the content.
- Movie showtimes are shown using a WebView pointing to Google Movies
Current status
Some basic navigation is already provided:
- The user can search for a term, browse through the results (which offer a simplified view) and open the desired one (getting a detailed view)
- The user can browse through some movies. Right now this is hardcoded, but this should allow navigation by genres, popularity and other criteria.
- If enabled, the user can open the showtimes view pointing to Google Movies.
Things to do
A lot
- Improve the delegates. Currently they aren't nice at all: the font is too small in the list view and the detailed view is not so detailed.
- Provide some means to actually navigate through genres in the browse view
- WebView is crashing on scratchbox (works on device, though) so it's disabled. Provide some way to enable on run time or figure out how to solve the crash
- Design a nicer welcome view
- Update the search view so that it searches people and showtimes, not only movies
- Fix the layouts so they work better when the device rotates