Pocketpedia UI enhancement requests

[Jarrod]

First I'd like to thank and congratulate you for creating some nice software. I was able to install & register DVDPedia, scan in my 260 DVD collection, and sync it to my iPhone in the time it took the Titans to lose to Houston yesterday. Bravo.

Here are some initial suggestions I have for what I think would be some significant improvements to the UI in pocketpedia.

1. In the library browser, move the search widget to the top bar, next to the library name and "back" button. It is confusing and inconvenient to be required to scroll back to the top of the library each time I want to search. If space is an issue, the search box could start small, then expand to fill the top bar while you type (similar to how the search widget works in iPhone/iTouch Safari for example). I don't know if such an expanded mode would still allow search-as-you-type or not.

2. In the individual title details/reviews browser, it would be great to have next/prev navigation buttons (similar to Apple's email app, or maybe more stealthy like the photos app, for example) that would allow you to move to the next/previous title in detail view, without requiring the user to go back up to the list to make another selection. Perhaps this could also be accomplished with left/right swipe gesture? It would be important for these next/prev buttons to traverse the list that was created with the last search. This would allow one to quickly browse the details of a list of titles that was returned from a search and in my way of thinking make the application much more convenient.

3. After starting pocketpedia each time on my 3G, scrolling the main library list is painfully slow. Once I've traversed the entire list once (which takes several minutes even though I just have 260 titles), scrolling is then very smooth. I am assuming the images are causing this slowdown and that once they are cached in RAM, scrolling becomes smooth? If so, it would be nice to be able to, perhaps as an option, turn off the images in the library list view. I'd rather have fast scrolling in list view rather than images. Perhaps in the long run you could implement a coverflow view for those who wish to browse the list by artwork?

4. The ability to "goto imdb" instead of just "goto amazon.com" if you are browsing a movie library.

5. Split-screen scrolling in title detail view so that the cover art, title, and rating stays fixed at the top while you scroll through details (like it already works for reviews after selecting a mode at the top right.

6. This is minor. I would gray out the "results" button at the home screen unless there are actually results to browse.

That is all for now Thanks again and keep up the great work!

[Conor]

Hi Jarod,

Thank you for taking the time to give us such detailed feedback, that is some very thoughtful ideas. Some of them are things we wanted to include but never did quite finish. For example the swipe for next in the details view was something we had working, but the transition animation was not correct so we are still working on it. We had not considered the split scrolling, but that could feel natural. You are correct about the images, we load them on a needed basis, and that can slow down the initial scrolling. But it shouldn't be as slow as you describe. We will take a look at it and consider a text only setting; in the meantime try a restart of your iPhone to be sure there no other program that is using all your iPhone memory and making it slower than it should be.

6. It's the smallest details that matter the most.