Quick story
In the end of march, the lockdown begins in france. I gives me the opportunity to learn new things during this free time. So I asked myself :
What could I learn that would also keep me busy for few weeks ?
I always wanted to create an app. So I read my ideas from my notes on my phone, thought a little bit. I love watching movies and sometimes I forgot movie titles my friends tell me about. So the concept is making an app like a to do list for movies but with some features added and a better design than just a list. I had the idea of the name Spelfilm because it's easy to remember, to write, short, and it means motion picture.
Mixing up skills
I'm really into filmography, youtube, and I have a camera... So I made videos about the process of making the app. The first one was about the design, then the second one was about the development :
Screens
Lets review each screen of the app. Disclaimer : Most of the designs here changed over the time for many reasons (technical most of the time).
Login
You can sign in and up with an email and a password.
Films
Here are all the films you added
Film
The screen for a film. There is some information about it, the trailer, you can remember where you left the movie at, when you planned to watch it, share it when you watched it...
Add
One of the most important one, it's where you add films to you selection.
Random
One of my favorite feature so far, I often don't know what film to choose, so the app picks a random movie from the movies I added.
Calendar
You remember the date picker one the film screen ? All the movies you set a date on are here.
Technologies used
Films database
Some friends of mine asked me if I wrote all this data by hand, of course not ! I simply used the api of TMDB.
To store the users's data, log them, do analytics...
I use the auth service of Firebase to sign in and sign up users, their database Firestore, their Analytics. As said in the second video, publishing apps on the App Store costs $100 a year so I decided to put some ads on the android version until it helps me to publish it for the iPhones.
Framework
I learn basics of Java at university but not enough to code a whole mobile app, and it would allowed me to make it only for android... It wasn't my goal, and as you probably know with my other post, I love Javascript, so : React Native. It's a framework that turns mobile development "easy" when you're from the web and know React.
I recently made a Twitter account to communicate about Spelfilm. I will post what are new in the updates and more about the project. I don't have content to post everyday so, I thought it would be nice to have a "virtual community manager" so I coded a bot again.
The bot
Everyday it tweets a trending movie. Each week it tweets upcoming movies. When you watched a movie, there are social media sharing buttons, and of course there is one for Twitter. When you share it from the app, the Twitter account will automatically like your tweet. (It is able to know that because the tweet will contain 🎬 and will be tagging @spelfilm). To make it more fun and interactive, why not make it able to answer some questions from Twitter users... Simple questions are supported like
une idée de film pour ce soir ? @spelfilm
or
quel est ton film préféré ? @spelfilm
they're written in french because the app target is french people like me and my friends.
Conclusion
I learned a lot making this app and it's useful to me ! Some of my friends were really interested about this project and it made me really happy because I thought I'd be the only one needing it. They helped me to improve it by finding some bugs and telling me what wasn't clear about it.
If you have an android phone, you can download it here. And if you have an iPhone, I hope I'll be able to make it available one day.