Setting the tomatometer to above 0% and the years to 1915-2012 with the filter set to just Gay & Lesbian movies only returns 21 movies. Netflix has 256 Gay & Lesbian movies available for instant streaming, many of which (among the ones I quickly checked) are reviewed on Rotton Tomatoes.
Is there a technical reason for this or is this a bug?
Technical. A Better Queue's database currently takes in only the first genre listed for a movie from the Netflix API. So those other 235 Gay and Lesbian movies are present in A Better Queue, but in other genres. The choice to only take in the first genre listed from the Netflix API was that, beyond trying to keep it simple, the first genre seemed like the most accurate one. The choice was in no way intended to be exclusionary.
I would be able to take in multiple genres during a database load so that each movie could show up for all of its genres. So I will. Right now I'm waiting to hear back from Rotten Tomatoes' API team so I can get a second API key for development. (Using my production key to test new functionality would put me over my API call limit.)
This is because Rotten Tomatoes uses a more thorough criteria for "Action and Adventure", whereas A Better Queue uses the first Netflix genre criteria that's listed on the result from its api. So yeah, Rotten Tomatoes is more thorough in this regard. Most of the movies listed by Rotten Tomatoes with this criteria are under different genres in A Better Queue.
Other than one major feature request, I haven't got too much to contribute. The request would be sorting by Tomatoes score would be an excellent way to (optionally?) display films.
Aside from that, I don't have any critiques - clearly there's more that can be done, but already this is an excellent product! I will certainly be using it to help me decide what to watch :)
Hey everybody. I made this thing. Thanks for posting, xbryanx! It's so cool that my first web app is on the front page of HN.
ADDENDUM::
I'm somewhat new to all of this. Right now I'm learning BDD principles. So, I'm going to use A Better Queue as a learning tool and blog about BDDing new features, like an 'add to instant queue' button. I'll probably blog here: http://abetterqueue.blogspot.com/
After that, I'll re-write ABQ using BDD principles and then I'll open-source the thing.
Looks great, but doesn't work in Canada (they have different movies). I'm not sure if APIs exist for different countries or if a flag needs to be set somewhere, but it would be great if you could detect the country and set it accordingly.
Yeah, using this just reminds me of how much I hate copyright law and geographic restrictions. Netflix is great, but the Netflix movie selection in Canada is... paltry, in comparison.
Has the Rotten Tomatoes API improved recently? A few years ago I tried to work with their site to extract some data and automate some of my personal movie recommendations and it turned out to be a huge mess. At a point their web interface even inserted place holders inside the query strings. If they made some improvements I would be happy to work with the site again.
Suggestion: supplement or replace the Rotten Tomatoes percentage text with a graphic. It would be easier to skim the movies and compare them by glancing at a representative graphic than by trying to parse the numbers - graphics are less abstract. There are few enough possible values that we will usually not need the precision of a number. Perhaps the exact number could be available on hover, or in a tooltip.
I'm not sure what kind of graphic would be best. A meter like the Tomatometer would be the most accurate, but it might be too big or too long and narrow to fit well within the space you have for each movie. Other possibilities are a square that fills from the bottom up, a circle that fills in radially, and a circle that fills in with a smaller circle. (If you go with something 2D instead of 1D, like a circle filling with a circle, make sure to avoid a classic mistake by scaling the area of the sub-shape, not the width or radius.)
Love this, added to Favorites, I am ex-pat living in France so I am limited to Instant Queue. Netflix's ability to find good movies in their current Instant interface is lacking.
I would add a "select all" button next to the "clear" button.
I would also put the number of results returned underneath the "filter" button, something like, "15 movies found". This would help one narrow a large data set without having to scroll to the bottom of the page to determine if too many movies are returned.
I would also have a "new releases" checkbox in genres and make that the default.
I would also change the caption on the "filter" button to "find". "Filter" is confusing because it assumes there is a full set already returned. Most users, I believe, think they start with zero results, then "find" titles based on their search criteria.
Cool site. Can I suggest adding Twitter/Facebook links to make sharing easier?
From a UI perspective - I'd reverse the slider so that it goes from highest rating to lowest and most recent to oldest. Most people will likely want the highest, most recent films.
I would like to see a slider for minimum number of reviews counted in the tomato rating. A movie that has a 100% rating but only 3 reviews is something I'd like to be able to filter out.
While we're making feature requests: I'd like it to work better on narrower screens. I'm using the computer plugged into my TV (the one I use for Netflix) and I only have 1024 pixels across.
Now, start working on the real estate site that will allow me to find homes based on price, location, school ratings, jobs, days of sunshine and crime rating.
This site should allow a national search and also allow the user to assign weights to the various criteria. Presenting the result of a search as a heat map would also be helpful.
Rotten Tomatoes focuses exclusively on English language reviews from "approved critics"(http://www.rottentomatoes.com/help_desk/critics.php ), so it's not that much of a surprise that there aren't that many Japanese anime films rated there. Since the 90's, the only major theatrical releases in the US have been Studio Ghibli films, and that's because Disney handles the US distribution.
I would imagine that it's similar for the vast majority of foreign films as well.
As noted below, I'm teaming with a designer friend of mine for a redesign of ABQ. We'll probably get rid of those JQuery sliders as the don't work well on mobile devices. In any case we'll keep this in mind. Thank you.
I wish Netflix UK had an API. It looks like we are not getting one. There doesn't even seem to be a way to get a list of the current films available, and the new ones which appear.
Please add a favicon. I like to bookmark sites and delete the name so I can just recognize it by the favicon. Saves a ton of space. I assume I'm not alone in this habit.
Agreed. I think there's a way to add in a few features like this and still make it simple and user-friendly. One request when you do MPAA ratings is to not make it a slider bar, but just use checkboxes like you do for genres. Netflix tends to categorize lots of things as Unrated when you wouldn't normally expect it.
Nice site! One thing that I've been wanting for a while is to see all the Netflix streaming movies that are on the IMDB Top 250 list. That would be awesome.
very cool i really dig it. one suggestion, the slider makes it a bit difficult to find recent releases, once you slide past 2005 or so you can't really easily adjust it.
even still, this is a great way to view movies - nice work!
I don't necessarily agree with your taste (I like boring, pompous, overly-artsy movies) but the key problem for me is, like you, rotten tomato scores are a horrible indicator of my taste.
