tl;dr: SeriesGuide 1.3 released with show art, episode images and many improvements.
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:
