SeriesGuide on Twitter

So the last weeks I felt more unhappy about how long a process it was to get to the description of the next to-watch episode. Sure, you can quickly access those for upcoming episodes in Upcoming, but what if you re-watch a show and are in an early season (assuming ‘Only future episodes’ is disabled in settings). As re-watching is a major use-case of SeriesGuide there had something to be done. A comment got me thinking so after some time I came up (after some iterations) with the new Overview.

Overview

With Overview you can now see the details of the next episode by just clicking on a show. It also helps to leverage ‘Show Info’ which was previously hidden in the context menu of a show. Together with the ability to mark this episode watched (and show the following one afterwards in-screen) and the Share button Overview did get really neat ;).

New App icon

Additionally I finally had the time to change the app icon from the Oxygen icon to something more custom. And I have to say I really like the result with the green checkmark making the icon easy to spot.

One thing I might add as a note to myself: do longer testing! I rolled out three updates a day (not all just bugfixes). To a user I think it would made more sense to have these released as one. Sometimes it’s really hard to decide between pushing features fast and not bothering users with updates…

As I know there are some SeriesGuide users on 3.0 right now (hello you lucky fools!) I did some basic optimizations recommended by Google, so the next point release would look a little nicer. See for yourself below. Two things have changed for Honeycomb users: the action bar is used and SeriesGuide is styled with the native Holo theme.

And here’s a sketch further exploring it based on the concept of files and folders. But as you see in the video above everything (mainly display functionality for pictures, video, text files, documents) could be transformed into those 3D layers.

Future me, if you read this: did you learn to use DirectX and did create this?

Important: do NOT move SeriesGuide to the SD card when using the widget.

By default (‘Show only future episodes’ is checked in settings) it shows the two soonest upcoming episodes. If you disabled ‘Show only future episodes’ it will show the two oldest episodes you have yet to watch.

Each show info now has an IMDB button which takes you – you guessed it – to the related IMDB page in your browser.

The button is more of a side-effect of a potential later ability to check-in shows/episodes with GetGlue, but there is nothing decided here yet.

Besides some small performance and interface improvements that’s about the most important stuff. However below are some additional screenshots to give hints to further changes.

Showing status if there are currently no unseen episodes.

If the season list says you watched all episodes of a season, now you really did.

Look at Android market, the new version will appear there soon.

If you haven’t already noticed, SeriesGuide 1.5 is in market since… ahem, minutes :D. New things are (from the Change Log):

• Basic search functionality. Use your devices search key or the menu in SeriesGuide.

• Interface updates (e.g. new checkbox image, progress bar when updating all).

• Using Android Backup Service to backup settings (useful for reinstallation, change of device). This works on Android 2.2. and higher and only if it is/can be enabled on your device.
• Database Version 12 (created a fts table for efficient searching) (Backups from this version can not be imported in earlier versions)
• Fixed upgrade from database version 10 to 11 (Rating and image path got mixed)

As usual mail me through Android Market if there are any problems (I tested this version really long and hopefully caught all bugs).

• a new preference to control hiding of SeriesGuide images from your photo gallery. If you change this a reboot is necessary on most devices for the images to show up again in your gallery.

This was introduced because some users actually do like having the SeriesGuide images in their gallery.

• different determination of season and episode numbers, fixing some stupid mixups (e.g. ‘One Piece’). Just update affected shows. If you update other shows you might see some episode numbers changing, too. Mail me about any side-effects!
• Database Version 11 (Backups can not be imported in a SeriesGuide version with a lower database version), this happened to support the new season and episode numbers as well as shrinking the seasons table a bit to save storage space. I hope to optimize other data in the future, too.
• Auto-Backup of the database before a database upgrade (only!). There will for example be a new backup file named seriesguidedatabase_b4upgr after you upgraded to 1.4.10 (which has database version 11) in the seriesguidebackup folder on your SD card. This happens also if you import a backup which has a lower database version.

I hope to get 1.4.10 tested and to market soon. I’m a little busy with my studies, so sorry for the wait…

The new version of SeriesGuide 1.3 is getting released today with a ton of new features. But the most notable thing you will notice when opening SeriesGuide after the update is the richer show list and overall some design improvements.

That’s right, finally some nice pictures! However after an update you will likely just see some generic icons. Do an ‘Update All’ to resolve that. Sadly it might happen that not all images get downloaded from theTVDB.com. To counter that, there is a new ‘Fetch Missing Art’ button in the menu which allows you to download just missing art at a later time. After trying, it will tell you if images are still missing, because it is possible that some shows just don’t have art.

Regarding updating: updating a show, updating all shows and fetching art will now happen in the background. You will be able to continue using SeriesGuide during background operation, though you will not be able to check/uncheck episodes. Obviously you can’t do multiple background operations at once, you will have to wait for one to finish. E.g. if you update a single show you will have to wait for it to complete before updating another.

To justify this posts title the show poster will also be shown in ‘Show Info’. And if you did an ‘Update All’ after updating SeriesGuide as I said, in the episode descriptions an episode image will be downloaded. All these images get cached in memory and on your SD card, so they only have to download once. You can clear these caches in Settings if you need to. Uninstalling SeriesGuide will do so, too.

More Sorting

Besides the ‘art attack’ there are some further improvements. You can now change the sorting of seasons and episodes directly through the menu. Episodes are additionally sortable by alphabet.

To clean up the menu on the mainscreen, the Backup/Restore function has been moved into settings and is now called ‘Backup/Delete’.

New Database Version

To support the new image capabilities the database version has changed to 8. This means you will not be able to import database backups from SeriesGuide 1.3 and upwards into older releases (1.2.7 and below).

As usual it is still possible to import older database versions (down to version 4).

Awesomeness at TheTVDB.com

To conclude I want to point you to the service which makes this whole app even possible. The people over at TheTVDB.com do a tremendous job maintaining and expanding such a huge, freely accessible database of TV shows. If you like this app check out their web service and consider helping and/or donating.

That’s it! SeriesGuide 1.3 should appear in Android Market very soon. But nevertheless you can download the latest version here:

Obviously you shouldn’t do this, it won’t work out… Believe me. Ok, ok, try it yourself. You’ve been warned.

A huge artificial lake which once powered the now out-of order Tyssedal hydro-electric plant. Instead there are now pipes going from below the water to a new state-of-the-art plant placed within the mountain beneath.