Movies Now! sounds like an app for people who simply can’t wait to get showtime information – but I’d say the opposite holds true. I was browsing through Beautiful Pixels’ favourite iPhone user interfaces of the year when I stumbled upon their paragraph about Movies Now! (sorry for shouting). Beautiful Pixels’ description of the app was spot-on, since this really is one of the most non-iPhone UI’s I’ve seen in a while. Yes there are tabs and buttons, but they’re not laid out in the standard formation, and there are some interesting little touches (and I mean that literally – more on this later) that make the app stand out amongst the crowd of free showtime apps
I haven’t field-tested the app yet, but I did spend 20 minutes or so playing with the interface to get the hang of the whole thing. It’s absolutely gorgeous all the way through and it’s just a treat to take some time to appreciate it, although it does suffer from a few buttons that are about half the size of normal iPhone buttons. It’s like Windows Mobile all over again with those 😛
Now!
If you want to see a movie, well, now, then this tab features a very interesting approach. All of the local movie showtimes are displayed in a list, and you can decide what you’d like to see based on how much time you have until the showing starts, as well as how far you are from the movie theatre.
Movies
What I like about this tab is the same thing that Beautiful Pixels mentioned: the movie posters. It’s a great way to show off all of the different titles — as long as the posters load up correctly. I tapped on a picture of Avatar 3D and saw a poster for The Princess and the Frog. Most of the other films did display the correct information, although I noticed the loading time for showtimes was a bit longer than on Flixster.
Theaters
I really like the Theaters tab. It just makes a lot of sense to display all of the theatres as pins on Google maps so that you can see where you might want to spend 13.50 CAD (or 4.00 CAD if it’s Rainbow Cinemas on a Tuesday!) on a movie.
There are a few other sections to the app, like Facebook and MovieTickets.com integration, but I’m not interested in Facebook integration and I might leave the online ticket purchase for a real-world test. However, I think Movies Now! will be sticking around on my home screen. It offers enough of a different experience from Flixster that it might be handy to keep both around. Both apps are free, so the only thing I’m losing are spots on my home screen.
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TAGS: free iphone app
