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Actors for Netflix was created in a weekend at the iPadDevCamp in San Jose by Andrew Pouliot, Adrian Cockcroft and Kirsten Jones, with a big assist from Jim Dovey’s AQGridView. The team won the prize for best use of Web API’s, as described in How It Works.
Adrian did some subsequent polishing of the UI, debugging and finally posted the initial version here. There are some missing features and minor issues, described on the Work In Progress page and recorded on the Issues Page that we will work on for future releases.
When you start the app, it comes up with a large list of actors, sorted by surname. There is no “login” needed to browse through the app, until you try and play a movie. The initial list is hard wired into the app as a starting point, and you can flick-scroll through the list very fast. You can tap on any actor to see the movies by that actor.
The movies list starts with any movies directed by that person, then movies they acted in. Movies that have a blue dot in the corner are available to play instantly. Tap on any movie to select it, or you can go back, or visit the Netflix page for that actor by using the buttons in the bar at the top of the screen.
The movie details page shows a large image of the movie box-shot. For instant movies, a high resolution box-shot is available, for others, it will look fuzzy, as it is scaled up from a lower resolution image. In the top bar, you can go back, and if available, a play button will take you to the Netflix app and start playing this movie in a single click. Below that, a Delivered By Netflix button takes you to the Netflix site page for this movie, and buttons for the director and actors take you to their movie lists. This page is currently only available in landscape format, which is correctly oriented for playing movies.
Picking the director takes you to the screen shown below.
From the home screen, the top right menu button currently provides credits or links to this wiki page on github to provide help and documentation.
The Netflix site bio for an actor is shown below, the image shown is for a user who has not logged in or signed up. Once you have signed up the normal Netflix site page will be shown for that actor.
The free trial button takes you to this sign-up page. Please sign up for a free trial via this app, it costs you nothing, but provides the authors with an incentive to keep developing new versions and features. You should only have to sign in once, Actors for Netflix will remember your login cookie.
This app was submitted as a free iPad app on June 10th. The app links to the official Netflix web site (for additional functionality), and to the official Netflix iPad app (to play movies). The initial link to Netflix is done via a clickshare referral URL, and if the user signs up for a free trial, Netflix credits the clickshare account, and any funds are collected by Adrian and shared by the contributors.
Actors for Netflix is not an official Netflix app, however:
Adrian works for Netflix, and is author of the best selling Instant Queue Add for Netflix iPhone app as a “Hack Day” and spare time activity. He is not involved in the official Netflix iPad app development, but works on Netflix’ Cloud Architecture.
Kirsten also works for Netflix, and is a developer evangelist for the API team, including the OData API.
Andrew is a professional iPhone/iPad developer who has worked on the eBay iPad app, amongst others.
Jim (a.k.a. Alan Quatermain) is a professional iPhone/iPad developer working on the Kobo eBook Reader who has published AQGridView as open source.