Hi all, I've released the latest iteration of APPLEBOX. This means you can now sign up with the service and create and keep as many collections of movies as you want!

APPLEBOX is tied to a physical, retail business which will be opening doors for renting DVDs in about 2 weeks. Once the basics of the operation are bedded down, there's a helluva lot more I want to do with the software - sharing collections, writing reviews & watching previews are a few that spring to mind! If you can think of anymore, lemme know!

I'm still a little light on data in some areas (namely tv), but that will be coming up to speed very quickly.
 
Cheers,
Simon (APPLEBOX)

Where will the DVD rental come into effect Simon?

Oops.... just saw the info on the home page.... Fairfield, Melbourne

Love the slick zoom function in the Storefront! It's cool, and works really well!

Also, I really like the look and layout of it. Easy to pick things, features up, and the colours are pleasant

It is very slick... clicking on a search result takes me to the details page seamlessly.

One point: I suggest making the forward and back buttons a bit bigger. Looks like you have enough free space on the bottom, so maybe things can be pushed down a bit. It's good that there isn't much on the page, but the placement (top left) feels a bit odd. I find myself 'searching' for it.

Are the search results showing only the titles available that night/day? It isn't clear

Also not sure what the ratings are based on.

It'd be cool if the ratings took into account your users ratings....

Another thing I'd like to see is 'Related titles', or related collections, once you have that. So when I look at a movie in detail, there can be a section where similar titles are displayed.

Thanks for checking it out!

• search results are for titles stocked in the store. They might be out or in - if all copies are out (ie already rented), a bit vertical 'OUT' image appears. I'll rig some to be out so that action is visible.
• ratings are pulled from a number of different sites across the web - so they are a generalised 'consensus' if thats at all possible. This will normalise things out a bit though. This is a starting point as I aim to let members/users rate and have that feed that into the system .. so yep, a future release will have member;s rating.
• related titles and collections is a great idea - but I suspect its hard to do well as most movies can be related to another in some fashion. It's definitely something I want to look into. In the meantime, I want to let members expose their collections to friends and other members - so I can discover related movies by virtue of someone else placing them beside another in one of their own collections.

• search buttons bigger - yep - I think the bar those buttons sit in can be stretched taller and the buttons made bigger ..

Ah... thanks for the detailed response Simon

your 3rd point is an excellent one.... imagine if you had a network of people in Applebox, and you watched a movie, and with the click of one button, recommend that movie to your friends. (Maybe even add a reason/review). and then, when your friends see your recommendation, they can add it on to their rent list with a click!

Absolutely!

How soon are you going to add support for Safari and IE? I know it's difficult to develop for lots of browsers (although you could probably allow Safari people to access the site and it would look fine) but you're obviously going to have customers who simply don't want to do this.

Hi bjtitus - I support both IE 6 and 7, but not 5.5 or earlier. Did you encounter a problem?

Re Safari - I use XPATH for querying the SOAP XML documents I get back from my ajax calls. Safari has only added support for XPATH in its webkit nightlies - which I think will only make its way into public use in Safari v3 (coming with Leopard?). Whilst there are javascript XPATH implementations out there - they are slow. I'd rather drop XPATH and either read the XML DOM structure directly, or auto translate all reponses into JSON at the browser, or rejig and return JSON from the server. BUT if Safari in Leopard (hopefully v3) has XPATH in place, then I may be able to stick with it.

I have also found a number of CSS deficiencies in Safari - I'm hopeful I should be able to work around them. Unfortunately, Safari as a development platform has just been behind the game. With Firefox I have the DOM Inspector, Debugger, Firebug - its outstanding. With IE I have the dev toolbar which whilst nowhere near Firefox's capability, it still has a DOM viewer and debugger. With Safari there had been nothing for way too long. For a long time JavaScript errors were written to the OS console which is just ridiculous. It's finally got its own javascript console now, and Drosera and the Webkit nightlies look promising. It really has been a while since I've properly looked at Safari again - so I do look forward to revisiting it once I get the time ....

I develop on the Mac, and with Safari now available on windows machines - I definitely want to support it.