Leonard Maltin Movie Guide 1.1 Update: Nice But Needs Faster Searching

What a difference a decade makes. You can see my old but well-preserved copy of the 1999 Leonard Maltin’s Movie and Video Guide next to the latest digital version on my iPhone…

Leonard Maltin Movie Guide 1.1

This is not one of those book-in-an-app iPhone apps that I’ve come to dislike to much over the past year. It takes the movie guide book’s movie review content and placed it in a searchable database.

It starts up with a list of reviews of recent movies (Current Picks). This is fast and handy to use and read. The problem comes when searching for other movies. The version 1.1 update description notes that this update has faster searching than the 1.0 release. However, it still takes far too long. Using a stopwatch, I found that searches typically took between 25 and 30 seconds before the first result appeared on an iPhone 3G. This process should take no more than 5 to 10 seconds. I was also disappointed to find that movies could not be grouped by, for example, genre and date (all science fiction movies between 1970 and 1980, for example). It would also be nice to have some kind of random movie discovery feature for those times when you want to watch something but just can’t figure out what might be interesting.

The movie reviews themselves are well-written and interesting. As you might guess from the size of the 10 year old book and the 24,000+ count of reviews in this app, this is a team effort with 10 editors listed in the app’s information section.

Disclosure note: The Leonard Maltin Movie Guide 1.1 for iPhone was provided free of charge by mobileAge for evaluation.

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