Devlog: May 29, 2023
So far in ScreenCred, you can only compare movies and shows. I wanted to add a missing category—people.
Search Updates
I was already using TMDb’s multi search endpoint, but was filtering out the people. So it was pretty simple to add people back in. One convenience I wanted to add was search scopes. This adds a picker below the search input that lets to quickly filter results.
Power searching
Comparison Updates
My comparisons were also pretty flexible in that compare two Media which can be a movie, show, or person. But, the app had no idea how to compare a person to a movie or show. I essentially have two comparisons now. One comparison is for when the types are “like” each other—two movies or shows, or two people. The other comparison is for when the types are different—one person and one movie or show. The main difference is that if they are different, I basically just check if the person is in the credits of the movie or show. Not too bad.
When it’s two people, it works almost exactly as it did before, except showing all the movies and shows the two people worked on together. I made the choice to throw out most “Self” TV show credits. In my opinion, this added a lot of noise from interview shows and whatnot. Someone could maybe talk me into adding them back.
Here’s a demo:
Search demo
You can see from the demo that the images in the comparison are rectangles when you are comparing two people. This is ironic because I put in a bit of work to make profile images for people squares. But squares look bad for movie posters. So now there is some special logic to determine if the image should be square or rectangle.
I also needed to update my URL scheme to allow for people. That was a simple change to my regex that parses the incoming URL to allow of IDs with p, for person. With that change and another recent change to allow a single ID to be passed in the URL scheme, ScreenCred can pretty much handle anything1.
Web Updates
I have a small web server that handles generating the images that are used for the og:image meta tag. Similarly to the app, I pretty much needed update the regex that parsed the urls to also handle p. Now you can get beautiful image of Danny DeVito and Daniel Radcliffe.
Your friends will love this
What’s Left
Need to do something with people who do not have profile pictures. I think I want to give them a placeholder, as well as sort them lower than those who have a picture.
I think I also need to rethink how I handle sorting results. Not sure if the current sorts of number of credits and by name are the most useful when comparing two people. Maybe I should also add sorting by release year? Not sure.
Not literally anything.↩︎