The Movie Diary application offers the same grey backgrounds and grey and black icons found on most WebOS applications released to date. The program simply asks that users enter in the name of the movie they've watched, the date they saw the movie on, the number of times they've seen the movie and the rating out of four stars they give to the movie. It's pretty much that simple.
Let's take a look at a few of the programs main output screens...
I would have rated this application above the 3/5 point range, however ratings currently only include a star rating, users can leave their own thoughts within the application so they can remind themselves of what they thought at a later time. If the developer was to create a website that could upload user reviews it could become a much more interactive and useful application.
With that suggestion aside the screens are very simple. The main data entry screen features clickable selections where users can say where they say the movie "Theaters, DVD, VHS, etc." Yeah that's right I said VHS! which is oddly still an option. I then clicked on the day I saw the movie for the first time, how many times I saw it and then I added a rating.
As you'll notice the options are all well spaced so you can easily click on them, while the "edit" button at the bottom of the screen and the ability to movie between movies with large back and forth buttons are all available.
Once users can entered in each of their movies they can then move to the main movie list which shows movies in alphabetical order with their star ratings also shown. This screen allows for simple scrolling thanks to the excellent screen on my Palm Pre and I found that the founds used made reading titles with their big title sizes extremely simple.
Just click on the + option and you can once again add a new movie, making the program very accessible.
Finally users can also launch IMDB from within the application which will show various bits of information about the movies the user has saved. This is a great option if you want to pull a quick quote from the movie, find out who starred in or directed the movie and other various pieces of information. Overall a great added piece of software in an otherwise well put together WebOS application.
Obviously this application will probably only be of interest to true movie lovers who like to get a grasp on how many times they've seen their favorite movies and when they've seen them. However there are some features that could be added which would help make the application more useful such as an interactive website for users to share reviews, the ability to set "review" ratings for each time you watch a movie (some movies get better after several viewings) and the ability to add "Notes" to the program, after all it's a diary, not just an info tracker.
Overall considering the fact that it's free it may still be worth the download for true movie lovers. The program can be downloaded and installed via the PreCentral repository.
Overall a great first release and I hope to see it evolve all the way into the Palm App Catalog.