NowShowing.ph iPhone App Review

Posted on Jan 15, 2012 in Interweb, iPhone, Philippines | 0 comments

You don’t have to think hard about what this app does as you can tell by its name but to be extra clear, this is an app that you use to check out what movies are (surprise!) now showing.

NowShowing is a Days of Thunder project by ProudCloud, a Manila Ruby on Rails shop. (I once asked what a dev shop is so if you’re asking the same question, that basically means they do dev work, in this case RoR, for clients.) Days of Thunder happen every Thursday and Friday at Proudcloud when engineers get to work on what I call “side projects” that are not for their clients. This one is from their website:

Thursdays and Fridays are Days of Thunder at Proudcloud dedicated to internal projects, dangerous experiments, and building stuff we can contribute back to the community.

Giving back to the community is a cool idea that somehow reminds me of Taxikick and TrafficDito. (Disclaimer: I work with the team behind TrafficDito so you can consider this as my mini-product placement for the 2 readers of this blog.)

NowShowing the iPhone app isn’t the first movie guide app in the Philippines. I, together with a couple of iPhone-using friends, have been using ClickTheCity to check movie schedules. So when this came out, my first question was, “How is this different from CTC’s app and why will I add more apps to my phone when I already have one that does the same thing?”

Ask no more! Here’s a quick list of things I found more interesting about this app:

  1. Movie reviews come from Rotten Tomatoes. I like this because I trust the Tomatometer and that’s how I decide whether I should see a particular movie or not. I know that CTC also has their own “Critics Rating” by Philbert Ortiz Dy but yeahh… Not a lot of people know him. Plus points for integrating Rotten Tomatoes with the app. But wait, what is this I see?

    How can there be zero ratings for those 2 really popular movies in the US? A quick look at RottenTomatoes and I see Alvin and the Chipmunks got a terrible 13%. Not sure what went wrong here but there goes their first advantage.

  2. You can watch movie trailers within the app.This is something CTC doesn’t have and something that’s really useful. This is actually how I saw the trailer for A Mother’s Story and thanks to this app, I have decided I will not watch it.Except for that minor issue with the message that tells me I have to watch it on YouTube (I thought it will launch the YT app), everything was okay.

  3. You can access the map for mall addresses right from the app. CTC doesn’t have this either. Some people might not find this too useful though since it’s likely that you already know where all the malls are but for the noobs out there, it’s a pretty cool feature.

I downloaded this app a couple of weeks ago and so far I have been using it mainly because CTC’s app is annoyingly slow (they show you their mobile ordering ad first before allowing you to access the app). Only then do I remember I have a faster loading app but then I see the faulty RottenTomatoes review rating so I end up going to RottenTomatoes.com to check. Aside from that issue, it does what it’s supposed to do. It’s a good app for movie buffs. :)

If you’re interested in the nascent “tech scene” we have here in Manila, I found out about NowShowing from an article on StartupPhilippines.com. You can also check out StartupDigestPH headed by John Arce.