My wishlist for DVDpedia

Tell us about your wildest feature dreams. Or just harmless suggestions for improvement.
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billydo
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My wishlist for DVDpedia

Post by billydo »

I use DVDpedia almost every day and have a few WIBNIs:

1. Performance: I would like it to be faster and more responsive with large collections.

2. Custom lookups: I would like to create my own remote-database lookups to auto-fill comment fields. For example, if a review website has a certain syntax for retrieving movie reviews, I would like to be able to build that syntax into a button in DVDpedia and have the relevant field auto-filled from that remote database. (I would rather not have to visit that website to manually find, then copy and paste the reviews I want.)

3. Self-incrementing fields: I would like to be able to define a field as self-incrementing, specifying the step value and any required prefixes and suffixes (e.g. auto-generating "DVD2002")

4. I would like to be able to use variables in fields. Specifically, I always name a movie thus: Moviename [xxxx] where [xxxx] is the year taken from the Theatrical Release field. I would like this to be automatic rather than manual.

5. I would like to be able to set formatting rules for fields. E.g. All caps, initial caps, lower-case, etc.

6. I would like to have more icon flags. At the moment we have two, the star for Wishlist and the red X for Borrowed. I would like to have additional, user-definable icon fields to cover other states: for instance, Unseen, Damaged, etc. (In the process, I would like the minor bug, where the Borrowed flag is erroneously cancelled after editing a record, to be fixed.)

7. I would like to see a much more powerful Web export capability, one that is properly searchable (e.g. by Actor, Director, Year, Genre, etc). I would consider paying extra for this Web facility; AFAIK it's the only way of sharing my movie collection data with non-Mac users (yeah, apparently there are still a few of those about!). The current export+template mechanism is great but not ideal for larger collection sizes, IMHO.

8. I would like to see more Genre fields: E.g. Genre1=Comedy, Genre2=Noir, Genre3=War, Genre4=Classic Film. I appreciate I could probably achieve the same thing by having many more Genres defined, but I would personally prefer multiple genre fields per film.

9. I would like to see trapping of duplicate records (i.e. entering the same movie title twice).

10. The Info drawer would benefit from a fresh look at its layout and design.

11. I would like to have the ability to specify the minimum capture size of the movie artwork. (Currently, the captures are a little too small and I'd like to be able to say, e.g. "Capture 200px-wide artwork or greater where possible".)

12. I would love to have a Contextual Menu that would tell me instantly, when I click on a text selection anywhere in any app, whether the movie title exists in my collection. (I don't know if this is even remotely possible.)

Footnote: I've used DVDpedia for over a year now to manage a collection of 2,400 movies, and I can't imagine life without it :D

I also have to say that Conor and Nora could not support this application better. They react immediately to even the smallest comment and have helped me out with problems even when DVDpedia was not at fault (e.g. hard drive error corrupted my database). Truly exceptional — thanks!
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Conor
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Post by Conor »

Thank you for the excellent feedback. That is an interesting list, with some ideas that have been mentioned before and some brand new ones that we never imagined.
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