XOMO Digital is a Vancouver company which produces mobile applications for festivals. Their new iPhone application for the Vancouver International Film Festival Fan Guide is a useful tool to help navigate and plan viewing of the over 370 films over 16 days. It's an evolutionary improvement on their Vancouver International Jazz Festival app which was a good first effort but lacked certain useful ways of navigating the schedule of events and marking favourite events.
The app first starts up on the What's On view which shows all films showing today in chronological order at all theatres and the calendar control easily lets you navigate by day. The calendar control is not nicely placed on the navigation bar and covers the top highlight and bottom shadow. Strangely, the Map button seems to just show your current location and not any theatre locations.
Films view lists all films in alphabetical order and can display by category. The Section button seems redundant on the Categories view. The Youtube link on the Film Details view for films which have previews is a nice touch as is the IMDB rating. The showing (Event Details) view contains a phone icon which calls the VIFF ticket hotline.
Theatres view lists all participating theatres in alphabetical order, shows distance to theatre, and has convenient Map button showing all theatre locations. Venue Details lists all films at that venue in chronological order. It is unclear why there is a Favourite button on the Venue Detail screen. Have a favourite theatre doesn't seem to be useful at all.
The Favourites feature is essential, but doesn't always work as expected. If you mark a particular showing (Event Details) as a favourite, the film doesn't show up in the Films/Favourites view. You have to mark the film in the Film Details view as a favourite for it to appear on the Films/Favourites view. I guess a favourite event is not the same as a favourite film. I think it would make more sense if you marked an event as a favourite that it's parent film be marked as well. The favourite star is difficult to see in the Films list view icons because of the small size and low contrast.
There is some confusion when in Films view when favourites mode is active. The upper right navigation button sometimes reads Favourites instead of Show All. When you press that Favourites button, it updates with a black background and all films are listed. Pressing the black Favourites button shows only the favourite films and the button turns into a blue Show All button.
The Stories view allows you to post and share messages and photos about VIFF. The default keyboard behaviour was strange without the usual capitalization shortcuts. Interesting feature but it would be awesome if it integrated somehow with Facebook or Twitter instead of being its own isolated island of social media. I personally post my quick film impressions on Facebook and the full film reviews on Blogger. It's not immediately obvious how to get to the Stories site from outside of the app from say a desktop browser or link to that information from Twitter, Facebook, Blogger, etc.
The Info view has information on the VIFF and links to the official VIFF website and ticket telephone hotline. The Map button shows a map with all the sponsoring restaurants pinned.
The app nicely remembers what view you last used when it starts up. It also seems to remember state of each view.
The app occasionally crashes when navigating between views. The app always crashes in the Stories view if you tap on the blue STORIES icon at the top of the list view.
Another quirk: you can create a ridiculously deep navigation stack going from the Event Details to Film Details to Event Details, etc. Pressing the back button will eventually unwind the stack and get you back to the top view. I didn't have the patience to see how deep you could go before crashing the app.
Overall a helpful and useful app to help wade your way through the huge number of movies at the VIFF. The social media feature is of more questionable usefulness. I give VIFF Fan Guide version 1.0 a respectable 4/5 stars on iTunes Store.
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