Callsheet: Find Cast & Crew

This app retains the speed and simplicity of the phone version, and is also a good fit for this platform. The app looks very nice with the new glassy semi-transparent material look, and the movie poster thumbnails are high enough quality that they look fine when presented as quite large. The “touch” targets and buttons are big enough that it’s relatively easy to activate them without making mistakes. The main search bar now adorns the bottom of the window. There’s a search history panel that makes it easier to access past searches through large buttons instead of trying to type. I couldn’t correctly clear out the search history in that panel, but I expect that it may be a feature that’s coming soon. The features here don’t require augmented or virtual reality, but it’s great to have the app here because many people are using their devices to watch movies and television. Generally, if you’re happy with this app on other platforms, you’ll probably also be happy with it here because the quality is similarly very high and it follows native platform conventions.

I’ll be honest. I downloaded the app because I genuinely wanted to support Casey (he’s a good guy), and figured I’d subscribe even though Callsheet is ‘just’ a front end to a website. Oh, was I wrong! The app is fast, responsive and, more importantly, a delight to use. Every screen has the information I care about, but no more. I went to the source website to see if I’d been missing out on the best movie site ever. Nope. There’s so much clutter there that Callsheet has swept away leaving me in a figurative zen garden of movie information. I think I’ve spent the last hour or so just browsing, and searching, and browsing some more. Learning about a bunch of actors I just couldn’t be bother to go spelunking on Wikipedia (or worse… the other ‘mdb’) because they are right there, with their age, and their photo. Seriously Casey, if you’re reading this, I’ll double down on my offer: come back to Austin and I’ll buy you as many beverages as you want. Thank you for this amazing app, and thank you for caring about good UX.

Decent app with potential but marketed as better than IMDb, which may be true in some ways but it misses the point. Apps like Reelgood are free and much more feature packed. There are dozens of others and even IMDb has user-generated content (reviews, trivia, goofs, etc) that this app can't compete with. I realize this app links to IMDb but it's a disjointed experience and especially odd, considering this app is touted as better than IMDb but then uses IMDb as a crutch. I would turn on a dime if this app offered radically better UI than competition or features that none of the others had. Give me advanced power-user filters that let me filter by runtime and other metadata. Give me a way to tell which movies an actor stars in, not just movies they appear in. Spoiler hiding is cute but not enough. There's a lot that could be done that wouldn't require more data (see Reelgood's Cue, Reels, Roulette, Search Party, etc) but ultimately I worry that TMDB isn't a good enough data source and will limit this app in the long term. In the short term, I hope to see significant UI enhancements and/or clever features that no other apps have. Currently, this app does no single thing better than other apps, nor does it compete with other apps as a whole. Pretty much the only things it does have going for it right now are privacy, ad-free, and no account creation. That's not nothing but don't give this app a pass just because the dev is known in the iOS community. If you compare it against more than just IMDb, it's clearly lacking.