@Daojoan I posted a couple of days ago about an Obsidian-based solution which was really easy to set up (about 30 minutes tops) that works really well. But unless you have Obsidian syncing, it probably won’t work for the sharing part 😞

As far as this one goes (the macOS app) will ping you at the end of the week if you’re interested to test. I still need a few things working for me to be happy about the solution even without the external service integration and you probably don’t want to test a half-baked solution anyway 😛

A few days ago I discovered "TVMaster" (https://noben.org/tvmaster) by way of @keyle

It's a great looking app and it helps you manage the TV shows you watch via this very nice interface.

But I wanted more 😛 I wanted to monitor both TV shows and movies I wanted to watch. I also wanted to be able to interact with external sites (since I use several) to monitor the progress on shows and movies.

I’d already created the movie watchlist solution several times in different ways, but this would give me one app which would handle everything and that seemed a rather attractive proposition.

So got to work, and after about a day of work, I have a new app … and the project for this weekend 🙂

Basic functionality — done!

The next part is a bit more complicated since I need to allow the user to connect various sites with the app. But I’m hoping that if it’s not a single-week project, then it’ll only be a week more.

I guess we’ll see?

#macOS #Swift #SwiftUI #Apple #Entertainment #ShowManagement

@keyle Yes, I had forgotten that the TVMaze API allows user-level access only to premium accounts. So scratch that 😛

Though I have this crazy idea of pulling together TVMaze, Trakt, and BetaSeries (since I use all three) and mark stuff as watched on the sites which do support free access …

Of course, all of this started with me seeing TvMaster, so I don’t know if I should blame you or not 😛

Yes, I was talking about a progress bar and possibly a count (total number of episodes aired vs. number of episodes watched) when I said progress report. We (my wife and I) watch a lot of stuff and seeing incomplete shows is probably useful … or maybe not …

I did notice the colouring but didn’t make the association. So yeah, that works 🙂

Happy to provide suggestions and if you are looking for additional hands on the project, I would certainly be interested since I think I’m going to try my hand at something similar this weekend anyway 😛

But I’d probably start with SwiftData for what I wanted to do and that might not be the direction you want to go in. So just offering in case you want an extra pair of hands 🙂

@keyle I installed it and have been playing around with it. Love the interface!

I use TVMaze (amongst a few other sites 😛) to keep track of TV shows and so one feature I think I’d love would be to be able to import in all of my shows that I’ve already added on there …

Other than that, works beautifully and I can already see features that I’d like to see added 🙂

For example:
1. A progress report for incomplete shows
2. A way to see the next upcoming episode and/or a way to see the next episodes this week or today …

Now you’ve got me itching to do something similar with movie support added in 😛

@keyle Thanks 🙂

Will definitely be trying it out since I love trying out software. Will let you know if I run into issues or have suggestions … provided you want suggestions, of course 🙂

@keyle “TvMaster” looks nice — is that your own app? I mean personal vs. publicly available?

A long time ago I did a TV/movie tracking app with everything but the kitchen sink approach based on the Trakt API, but it became too unwieldy 😛 Still use a lite version of the app (just weekly show monitoring and making sure that I watch them) but didn’t have anything for movies that was easy to use …

Which is why I finally opted for the Obsidian approach 🙂

@Rycaut I just saw this plugin while looking for something and remembered that you might like it since you were talking about importing your Goodreads history 🙂

https://github.com/MichaBrugger/booksidian_plugin

@techlifeweb Tweaking the gallery for me was the fun part 🙂

If you hover over a movie name, it shows you a popup with info from the card. But the template from the guide ends up showing an empty popover because the template only populated properties and did not add any text content to the movie notes/documents.

So I modified the template to add some extra values (like actors, plot etc.) to the note as text and that made things a lot more useful for me ….

I also did some work in the QuickAdd JavaScript code to add the release date for the movie and a few other items to get me exactly the info I needed. The release date was the most annoying because it was a text date and had to parsed to ISO format to give me an actual date property on the #Obsidian side … I think I still need to do some stuff with the date handling but it works for the time being — mostly 😛

If you do end up using the release date and doing some date parsing, one thing to look out for would be movies with no release date. OMDB then returns “N/A” and you have to parse that as a special case to return an ISO date value …

@techlifeweb At the risk of sending you down a rabbit hole when you really don’t want to, the basic set up takes less than a half hour 🙂

Only thing to look out for is that you should have the Minimal theme installed for the gallery to work like in my screenshots and the guide. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out where that went wrong since the guide is from the Minimal theme docs and it doesn’t explicitly tell you to install the Minimal theme 😛

After that, most of my time was spent in customising the retrieved data to suit my particular needs. But the basic set up was very straightforward …

@techlifeweb Totally my bad there — I was so excited to talk about it that I forgot to provide the important info. Sorry about that 🙂

@xavdid Thanks 🙂

Just to be clear, the instructions aren’t mine — they are by the developer of the Minimal theme, I believe. But they were very clear and I think the only place where I stumbled was coming to the instructions not realising that they were for the Minimal theme specifically, not installing the Minimal theme, and then not seeing the gallery as in the screenshots. But that was totally my bad 🙂

I was super impressed by how easily I could modify the original approach to add my own custom data and to tweak everything.

Looking forward to the weekend where I can tinker some more!

When I mentioned Obsidian (https://obsidian.md/) and my new movie to-watch list solution, what I totally forgot to mention was how easy it was 🙂

Given the lack of details, I didn’t realize at that point, that someone might think that you had to maybe copy and paste every value from IMDB or something. But really, it's much simpler ...

Once set up, all you do is search for a movie by name, select the right one from the results, and you're done!

I also forgot to point people to instructions that let you set it up yourself. Sorry about that!

Instructions here: https://minimal.guide/guides/movie-database

#Obsidian #MovieLists #SimpleSolutions #FreeSoftware

@henrik Here you go: https://minimal.guide/guides/movie-database

I just now (literally) realized why Minimal was not mentioned in the guide at all — it’s part of the Minimal documentation 😛

I came to that page from a post on the Obsidian forums and didn’t realize that it was for the Minimal theme. I simply followed the instructions, didn’t get the gallery like in the screenshots and so went elsewhere trying to find a solution …

@henrik See, I knew I missed a few things 😛

Yes, the listing is simply using Dataview and a query. The card view in the gallery comes from using the Minimal theme and specifying the “card” style for the page. Otherwise, you just get a table like you normally do with Dataview — I was following somebody’s instructions to do all this (I can send you the link if you want it …) and I still missed that part (switching to the Minimal theme) and was scratching my head for a bit ...

The main notes use a template so that all notes have the same structure and the original tutorial just had properties being added to the doc and nothing else via QuickAdd.

That resulted in a lot of blank pages if you had property display turned off 😛 Plus, you can hover over the item title in the gallery view and actually get a preview of the card if there is content in the card instead of just properties ...

So I modified the template to also populate the text portion with some info like actors, and plot. So now I can simply use the gallery view most of the time instead of having to visit the individual cards at all …

@henrik Sorry, should have included the process in my original post to indicate how easy it all is 🙂

No manual work required at all except for a search.

Basically, I have the QuickAdd plugin set up in Obsidian (not sure if you know Obsidian and plugins and so might be providing more detail than you want 😛) to show a search prompt when I press a particular shortcut key combination.

I type the movie name into the search box and it will use the OMDB API to fetch movies/TV shows matching that name and show me a list of 10 items. If the show I want is in that list, I simply select the item and a new card is created populating the particular metadata I wanted from the original listing.

The gallery view is auto-populated with Obsidian documents/notes which have a particular tag (in my case #movies) And that’s all there is to it …

If the show I wanted is not in the search results, or it isn’t found at all, then I have to do an IMDB search, get the IMDB ID and paste that into the search box in Obsidian. That will always add the show I wanted …

@Rycaut I believe you should be able to do exactly that 🙂 I saw some plugins which would fetch info for books, comics etc. as well.

Even if the plugin isn’t there, as long as an API exists, my impression is that you can use the QuickAdd plugin to fetch the data via the API, massage it to your liking and add it to a new file/document the same way the movie stuff works.

Again, if you run into any issues, would be glad to help out in any way since this kind of thing is what I live for 😛

@Rycaut Yep, having things to experiment with is always a great motivator 🙂

I was using Obsidian for simple note-taking but while I knew it had plugins, I had not looked at the plugins or considered how it might enhance the functionality till I looked into storing my movies on Obsidian …

There are several posts online about storing a list of movies on Obsidian and so you should have no trouble setting it up, but the basic idea is to use a couple of plugins — QuickAdd and Dataview — to get things going.

In my case, with QuickAdd I can simply use a keyboard shortcut to bring up a search dialog where I type the name of a movie, have it show me a list of matches, pick the movie I want from the list and have it added as a new note in Obsidian automatically *and* have the gallery populated with a card for the new entry.

So I find it really, really helpful/easy 😀

@Rycaut I think I told you a long time ago that I would let you know if I found a solution that worked for me for maintaining my to-watch movie list ... (Not sure if it was really a long time ago or not, but it seems like it ...)

So just letting you know that I found one with Obsidian 😛 I know you already saw that post but in case you want details on how set things up or any help with setting things up yourself, lemme know ...

I recall you mentioning that you had a collection of Apple Notes and if it helps, Obsidian seems to import Apple Notes fairly easily. It imported in all of my Apple Notes with very little effort and the only thing I miss from Apple Notes is the ability to collaborate/share certain notes with my wife.

But even that might be solvable since I see some solutions out there which might work ... Or, there is the paid option from Obsidian itself — but I'm cheap/paranoid and would prefer a self-hosted option 🙂

I've been looking at various solutions for managing my to-watch movie list. I looked at software, writing my own solution etc. I didn't like any of those solutions for one reason or another — mostly because adding a new movie to the list included a bit too much work 🙂

But apparently, I missed the one solution which I already had/used — Obsidian (https://obsidian.md/) 🙂

With just a bit of tweaking (and some coding to customize the output) I was able to get exactly what I wanted!

And I love it!

The best thing is, now that I’ve discovered this particular facet of Obsidian, I can rework it and use it for so many other things too!

Obsidian is free, keeps all the data on your own machine in a format that you can read even without Obsidian, and it has so much customisability that I wonder why I didn’t use it more previously!

(The answer to the last question is probably that I didn’t take the time to learn all that Obsidian is capable of … but isn’t that always the case? 😛)

#MovieList #Obsidian #Workflows #FreeSoftware

@JenColbert Yep, letting it simmer is always the way when you’re pantsing 🙂 Go do something else instead of thinking about the story and suddenly, you’ll see the way forward.

It’s a great feeling when it happens too 😀