48-Hour Days

I know you thought you’d never hear from me about this again, but I have finally Named My App. Thanks again to all for the great suggestions. They were so much better than I could have come up with.

And the winner is…

Moviesaurus Rex from Brendan Cullen.

I really liked every suggestion, but as soon as I saw this one I pictured a fat purple dinosaur with big googly eyes tossing DVDs down his gullet with abandon.

Thanks, Brendan! You have won…absolutely nothing! Well, not true. Your idea of a name will go on, your name will forever appear in the credits for the application, and you will have my eternal gratitude. Sorry I can’t afford a real prize.

Now, don’t anyone expect this thing to show up anytime soon. My husband (for some reason) insists that I get paid work done before I work on my personal project. Hmph. Need I lament again about how hard it is to fit my job (well, the one I actually get dough for doing) done?

BUT, that doesn’t mean that this will sit around forever. And I really doubt anyone else will have much interest in it anyway. I’d actually be surprised if there is anyone even reading this far. If you are, here are the features I plan to include.

• Track movie collection (DVDs, VHS, digital downloads for when I get an iPod that will handle video)
• Print filtered/unfiltered shopping list
• Print filtered/unfiltered wish lists
• Track movies I want to see
• Track movie release dates (iCal/Google Calendar integration?)
• UPC/ISBN entry of inventory (lookup through Amazon?)
• AIR app
• E-mail reminders (movie release dates)
• Track movies loaned to people (Address Book/Gmail contact integration?)
• Track purchase price and provide total investment reports
• Provide net worth based on median price on Half.com and Amazon Marketplace
• Updates on wish list items available at Amazon, eBay, and/or Half.com
• Wish list import from Amazon and Half.com
• Multiple users
• Pretty pie charts by genre, price, format (useless eye candy)
• Search by title, format, keyword, actor
• Personal ratings and reviews/comments
• Critic information from Rotten Tomato
• Ratings from Amazon
• Images (hosted on Flickr or picasa)
• Suggest movies to friends or warn them of duds
• Look up title at library and place a hold
• Share wish lists with others to provide gift suggestions
• Series movies linked together somehow
• Similar movie suggestions

This is not a definite list by any means; just the result of brainstorming and a lot of “Gee, I wish there was an app that would do that” and “Wow! I could use the API to do this” kind of things. As you can see, this is quickly growing bigger than simply tracking what DVDs I have. I’m hoping to track a lot of things. For me it will be really helpful to be able to take a list of movies that I want to see with me to the video store, or a list of movies I have on VHS and I want to get on DVD to Half Price Books. I think there are lots of opportunities here to integrate with other applications and services out there, too. I can’t wait to get started.

I ran into a rather annoying problem with my virtual PCs tonight. I am trying to test a web application running on my staging box in the office. I’m connected to the corporate network via VPN and using the dev box’s private URL. This all works great, until I tried to get there from PC in Parallels.

When I was running my own DNS server, I didn’t have this problem, because I just copied the corporate domain into mine and served as a secondary provider. However, I got tired of updating it manually and started using OpenDNS (which is great, BTW). Now when I fire up the craptastic IE 6 and type in the dev box’s URL, it goes right to OpenDNS’s “not loading” error page. Damn.

I had nightmarish visions of messing with registry entries to wrangle the DNS server order into something that would work. Or rebooting my MacBook Pro repeatedly until the PC’s NIC got a connection (anyone familiar with that fun little bug?). However, the fix turned out to be exceedingly simple: edit the hosts file on the PC. I added an entry for the dev box and voila! I can now run tests in the favorite of all favorite browsers (known in our office as Stupid IE).