One to Watch now available

One to Watch, my new iPhone application for noting down films you want to watch at lightening speed, is now available on the app store. Get it now for free, before I work out that it’d be good to make some money on this thing.

One to Watch submitted to App Store

It’s been quiet here for the last couple of months. Something’s been brewing, as the more astute of you may have noticed. That something is another iPhone app, One to Watch.

Another app designed to scratch a particular itch I have. Recently I closed my Lovefilm account, which I used to use as a holding pen for films I wanted to see. I needed something to replace it, and a search of the app store came up lackluster.

All I wanted was a simple, intelligent application to store a list of films. All I got was somewhat ugly applications with a million features. I don’t need an application to show me:

• What’s on at a cinema near me.
• New releases.
• Reviews from some site I’ve never heard of.
• Repeated “sign up to our service before you can use this” dialog boxes.
• A splash screen while it sits around doing goodness knows what when I open the app.
• Errors due to needing constant internet access.

So One to Watch is simple: a list and a search. I’ve put a lot of work into making the app load quickly, help you record a film quickly, and then get on with your life:

• You can start a search in less than two seconds on an iPhone 4.
• Searches retrieve as little data as possible. Useful when you’re in an area with spotty signal.
• As long as the initial search works, the app will cope if you lose signal. No failures due to inessential data.
• Non-essential data — like thumbnails and Wikipedia URLs — are downloaded in the background.
• Scrolling is smooth as butter — no matter how many films you save.
• The app tries to help: it gets a synopsis and links to sites like Metacritic and IMDb for you, to make it easy to decide what to watch when you’re back home.
• The search is backed by Freebase, meaning that virtually every film you could want is available (I’ll add support for adding items not in Freebase very soon).

All this, and it’s still great looking.

The app will be free for at least version 1.0, so get it now! (Or when it’s released, anyway).

Helping to provide great service

Business Insider speaks to Keith Rabois from Square, who provide a neat little dongle you can plug into your iPhone and use to process credit cards. The interview’s not that interesting if you’ve been following any kind of Silicon Valley/Square stuff, but a feature of Square’s payment app jumped out at me:

KR: [With the Pay With Square app], when you have favorited a merchant, there is a geographic trigger — there are actually two. Within a certain proximity it alerts them on the register that so and so has walked into your store. Then when you’re within 10 meters, you’re ready to check out, so you authenticate the face, name, click, checkout. If you want more information about that person, it will show you their last visit and their visit frequency, as well as in the future what the most likely orders are.

This is the kind of help people need in order to gain loyal customers and build sustainable businesses, and a perfect example of the kind of thing technology companies can build to level the playing field between large and small outfits. Note the control the customer is offered: they must proactively favourite the merchant before the tracking kicks in.

Everyone gets something from features like this — the customer, the business owner and Square — unlike with scumbags like GroupOn who are out to screw everyone but themselves. Well done Square.