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Show HN: TheReelBox, find tonight's movie
- dzlobin 15y agoUnfortunately, it doesn't load past the spinning popcorn for me, and I see some failed GET requests in the network log.
- jkkramer 15y agoNice. Slow to load, but worked. I wish I could specify preferred theaters. In my area, there are many theaters nearby, and the closest isn't the best.
- switz 15y agoLet me put in my zip code. There's no reason why I should _have_ to share my location through the browser.
- ax 15y agoIE9/IE10 will have a goldbar at the bottom of the screen so the green arrow is a bit misleading...
- jamest 15y agoThis solves a problem that I have all the time. Existing movie aggregators are a pain to navigate the filled with ads. I like the Rotten Tomatoes integration. Nice work.
- thehodge 15y agoguessing this is US only?
- aamar 15y agoLots of neat stuff here. "Event listings"--movies, music, etc.-- can still improve a lot in terms of ease of use, so I'm very happy to see people work in this area. A few thoughts: - I'd want more movie options & theaters (need a much bigger radius). - When a single movie has showtimes at multiple theaters, the action on the map confused me at first. - I personally know where my local movie theaters are. I do care very much about which theaters are available for a movie, because they vary in quality and convenience, but I have to hover over showtimes to see the theater options for a particular movie. So there may be a different UI which helps me optimize my decision (e.g. with less emphasis on the map) - Title says "pick tonight's movie", but I can't actually figure out how to see the showtimes for later tonight--movies with a lot of showtimes are only showing the midday options. - Can ads be removed from the video trailer? Seems unpleasant to see an ad during an ad. Also, normal video controls would be handy.
- pkrein 15y agoall great ideas, thanks. the ads in the trailers are youtube's ads... so probably can't get rid of those. i'll figure out a way to show movie times further into the future, midday bit is frustrating yeah.
- Arelius 15y agoCan you hook into another movie trailer service? Perhaps Apple trailers? I imagine that since trailers are Ads, there might be a service that provides some sort of affiliate commission, or at least shows them without ads and without fees.
- jlgosse 15y ago"We couldn't find any movies nearby." Now, I am sad.
- tnorthcutt 15y agoSame here. There are two theaters within 5 miles but it found nothing.
- Sephr 15y agoPlease don't try to guess where the location permission chrome will be. Also, your site is completely useless if I don't want to give you permanent permission to access my location. You should let users enter a location or zip code if they don't want to give you live access to their exact location.
- pkrein 15y agogood idea, will add it soon. thanks!
- Arelius 15y agoAgreed, the Arrow was pointing somewhere completely unrelated on my system. Best to redesign that rather than try to guess it.
- pkrein 15y agogood point, removed the arrow for now.
- krelian 15y agoAlso, it says "dl.dropbox.com" wants to track your physical location, this doesn't match the site's domain name.
- sskates 15y agoI'm curious, but why are so many people against sharing their location through the browser? You already give up your OS, browser version, and IP address (which can give a rough location) just by visiting the website. I understand if someone personally has something against sharing their precise physical location, but I don't understand why it's an issue for so many people.
- ctdonath 15y agoUm...because most people don't want to share their precise physical location just to get local movie times? Zip code is close enough for good enough results.
- mshafrir 15y agoOn Mac OS X + Chrome 19.0.1068.1 dev, I'm getting "Uncaught Error: QUOTA_EXCEEDED_ERR: DOM Exception 22" on showtimes.js:677 localStorage.setItem('zipcode', String(view.position.zipcode));
- pkrein 15y agohm, can't reproduce that here with the same setup... the address, latitude, longitude and zipcode returned from google's geocoding api must have been insanely long to exceed the 5MB quota. sorry that happened :(
- catch23 15y agoQuota is based on domain, and in your case you're serving up everything from dl.dropbox.com. Maybe these users already have stuff in their localStorage from other sites that happen to use that domain? Seems like the fix for that would be to serve up the html on your own domain so that other sites, eg dropbox, won't mess with your quotas. Also, that would fix the location permission dialog that says "dl.dropbox.com wants to track your location".
- serdary 15y agosame here.
- artursapek 15y agoSomething to do with gamma.firebase.com and firebase.js isn't loading. I kept it going for two minutes and it kept buttering the popcorn. Maybe HN shot over your daily API quota?
- Pewpewarrows 15y agoJust FYI, your site is completely unusable for anyone working at a company blocking Dropbox.
- pkrein 15y agowhoa, i had no idea that companies did that? sorry!
- Pewpewarrows 15y agoIt's pretty uncommon, but it does happen. I'll happily check this out when I get home though :)
- nollidge 15y agoAlso: why does it browser warning say "dl.dropbox.com" when the website is thereelbox.com? Could seem very phishy to a user.
- smackfu 15y agoJust needs a way to mark a theater as terrible and that I would never go there.
- _sentient 15y agoThis is a pretty neat idea. One thing I'd consider changing is your use of the Rotten Tomatoes rating icons. You're using the Tomatometer Critics icons, but the % score you're displaying is actually the audience rating. This may not matter most of the time, but occasionally you have a movie like "A Thousand Words" that has a 0% tomatometer rating, and a 60% audience rating. (http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/a-thousand-words/ http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/a-thousand-words/). Mixing up the two ratings could be a little misleading. It may be better to just include both ratings on there, or stick with a single rating source.
- pkrein 15y agoGood point. The behavior is actually to use critics score unless the critics score isn't available (0 for A Thousand Words triggered that), in which case it falls back to use the audience score, if it's available. I'll think about this a bit more, thanks for pointing it out!
- itstriz 15y agoWhere are you pulling the movie times data from? I've been trying to make a local application but couldn't find an API anywhere, it came down to web scraping, which isn't very sustainable. EDIT: Is this coming from Yahoo?
- Timothee 15y agoI'm curious about that as well. I know of two companies that sell movie theater schedule datasets (through data dump or API): Tribune Media Services (http://www.tribunemediaservices.com/ http://www.tribunemediaservices.com/) and West World Media (http://www.westworldmedia.com/ http://www.westworldmedia.com/). I'm not sure that there are any other. It's my understanding that the main movie sites (Google, Yahoo!, RottenTomatoes, MovieTickets…) all get their info from one of these two companies. This is also probably why you won't find a free API with that data. Because the trailers are on YouTube, I suspected that the info was scraped from Google (I believe these two companies have their own trailer hosting); however, that would then make the connection between that info and RottenTomatoes a bit tricky… Peter, do you mind sharing?
- itstriz 15y agoFrom a quick glance over the code, it looks like the meat is in his showtimes javascript file(http://dl.dropbox.com/u/682022/showtimes/javascript/showtimes.js http://dl.dropbox.com/u/682022/showtimes/javascript/showtime...) I'm not very familiar with backbone.js so it's a little confusing to me, but looks like models are being built. Here's what I can muster, this could all be wrong * [Line 112] The trailer is using a YouTube API (https://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos?alt=json&format=5&orderby=relevance&max-results=1&q= https://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos?alt=json&form...) and then the movie title? * [Line 184] Ratings coming from RT API (http://api.rottentomatoes.com/api/public/v1.0/movies.json?apikey=znxvjxy3t76468rdqukfxpp4&page_limit=1&q=<title>&callback=? http://api.rottentomatoes.com/api/public/v1.0/movies.json?ap...) * [Line 341] Theatres & Times from Yahoo (http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q=use http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q=use "store://VZHvlyU81L6BFVGyE7CNhT" as pterodactyl.movietimes; select * from pterodactyl.movietimes where zipcode="<zipcode>" and date="<date>"&format=json) -- I have no idea what this is all about. Any insight would be helpful. * [Line 405] The links that Yahoo API thing returns are then rerouted to go through http://www.qksrv.net/click-5632409-10576771?url=<buyURL>&wssaffid=11836&wssac=123t http://www.qksrv.net/click-5632409-10576771?url=<buyURL&..., I'm guessing for OP to get some cash Then there's google maps for the maps, so that seems to be where the data pull is coming from. Not sure what the origin of that Yahoo URL is though. EDIT: I added line numbers from the showtimes.js file because HN reformats the links so you can't see them all the way.
- guynamedloren 15y agoNot working for me. After I click 'Allow', the page remains the same, with the prompt telling me to click 'Allow'. I'm on Chrome 17.0.963.79, OSX, Austin TX.
- simpsond 15y agoWell done! This fits the bill perfectly for me. The only problem I see is requiring location access. It miscalculated my location.
- nollidge 15y agoGIANT pet peeve: please do not auto-play the trailer when I click on the movie. Please. It is not expected behavior.
- PonyGumbo 15y agoDidn't work in Firefox even after allowing (the suggestion to "Allow" lined up in Chrome, though). Loaded the site in Chrome, and no movies were found in my area despite being within 10 miles of two movie theaters.
- invalidOrTaken 15y agoTook forever loading on Android---I'm surprised how much that matters to me; I just got a smartphone for Christmas and I'm already spoiled.
- tomjen3 15y agoThis is not the fifties. Movies shouldn't be watched on tv.
- stef25 15y agoYour green arrow is pointing at "learn more" and not "allow" so the link takes me here https://support.google.com/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=142065 https://support.google.com/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&an...
- breakall 15y agoThe UI is very cool! The Google Maps window loads very quickly when hovering over various show times. I immediately understood how this app could be useful. I also like the big high-res trailers. Using Firefox 10 on my Windows 7 desktop machine, I clicked allow on the location sharing prompt, but the location it pulled was way off from my actual location. I assume it's going off my ISP location. I couldn't find any way to manually edit my location? I totally get the motivation to make it "just work" without a bunch of input from the user, but it seems you need a way to allow for fixing the location by the user. Some of the locations it showed me movie times were quite far from me, which is OK -- the additional options were fine. But the next question that popped into my head when I saw the combination of a showtime and a location is "When do I have to leave?" A read-out of "You need to leave at X:XX to be on time for this movie" would be useful. The placement of the "Get Tickets" link under each movie made it tricky to move the mouse there from the showtime link I had settled on without tripping over another showtime link -- kind of like that game where you move the ball through the maze! Clicking the showtime link just took me to a blank white page -- I assume this is not intentional.
- alanfang 15y agoThis: http://www.maxmind.com/app/geolitecity http://www.maxmind.com/app/geolitecity is a much better way to find someones location so they don't have click the allow button.
- gee_totes 15y agoMy user story: I got excited that Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was still playing, but didn't want to see it tonight because I have other plans. I clicked on the link to buy tickets, hoping it would show me other showtimes, but it was just a normal checkout page. I would like to know when Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is playing tomorrow as well.
- vlucas 15y agoGood site idea, but my location is totally wrong and I don't see a way to manually enter it so it is more accurate.
- chrismanfrank 15y agoI love it. I go the movies all the time. I wish you had a way for me to put my email address in so I could get an email every Friday to remind me this site exists. Cool idea and implementation. Keep going!
- chadillac 15y agosorting: "closest" "rating" filtering: "start times" "location" (don't assume geo-log, let me enter zip) neat idea, needs a lot of polish.
- dlf 15y agoI like it, but it has my location wrong by about 50 miles. There absolutely needs to be a way to enter the local address.
- true_religion 15y agoWhat it thinks is my location is not my actual location. You should give me an option to enter an address.
- geuis 15y agoDefinitely think you're on to something here. Contrary to other commenters, I actually like that you're taking advantage of the geo location api. You should include an option for zip code and/or city, but personally what you have it fine. Your UI is a bit bare, but nice and simple. Don't add too much to that. Simple is good. Also love that the trailer auto-plays, which is contrary to how I want to experience video on most sites. However, since your site is about movies, auto-playing the trailer is a perfect implementation. Ping me on Twitter, @geuis. I'd like to be informed as you further develop the site. Good luck!
- tedmiston 15y agoIt's nice & simple. I think trailers would be a great addition. As an alternative -- I would be interested in a site just like this but that aggregated movies from all of the free (legal) sources on the Web where I can watch movies now. (I don't usually buy movie tickets in advance.)
- glodba 15y agoBecause people like my self don't need the gov knowing where and how I move to use this info against me due to my back problem and CUTTING ME OFF of suport so I can't take care of my two kids...