Code and Life
Los Cracks – Fútbol Virtual it’s a cool game for soccer lovers, built by EPCON CCS; it allows you to choose your favorite soccer players from the Liga MX and earn points every week based on your team performance.
Challenge yourself and compete against everyone in the general group or play with your friends in private groups.
This game works exclusively with real data from Liga MX.
Available for iOS and Android.
I love to develop mobile apps as a hobby, the first app I published was a very simple RSS client I built in college, It was for Windows Phone 7 and I uploaded it to the Windows Phone Marketplace.
I know… My first app ever was destined to die 💀, and not only the first one, because the moment I saw in my dev dashboard that someone besides my mom had downloaded my app I went crazy and eventually I create another 4 apps for Windows Phone before I even get started with Android.
I don’t regret it at all to have put my time and effort into creating these apps. I learned huge when building them and also it took me to the very answer of why I think every developer should create a mobile app:
In one of this apps I got my first user review:
Yes, that is my first review ever, and as much as first it made me sad because donna didn’t understand the purpose of my movie suggestions app, I’ve come to realize user reviews are the reason I create mobile apps and here are a few reasons why I find them so valuable.
User reviews give you a lot of useful information about your app and your users. It is the first indicator that your app is making an impact, either positive or negative in your user’s lives, they’re taking the time to write a review and express their experience while using your app. It feels much better when it’s a good one.
With user reviews, you’re able to come close to your users and interact with them. You can offer support, ask follow-up questions or simply say thanks. With this interaction, you build a sense of community around your app.
User reviews are about developing better software for your users, paying attention to your user’s needs can impact your app bottom line and enables you to create a better product.
Receiving user reviews feels great, it’s amazing to know that there are people all around the world using your app and that it is making an impact on their lives. Take the improvement opportunity from the bad reviews and the joy and satisfaction of the good ones.
I don’t know if I fit in the definition of cinephile, but I really enjoy watching movies and so does my wife, we’ve been going to the movies on a weekly basis for around 4 years and we watch a couple more at home in our free time.
Because of this, the question: “What movie should we watch?” has become a too recurrent question for us so I did what any other software developer would do: I start coding.
I found this really cool api right away: https://api.themoviedb.org
A public api to explore the movie db with plenty of cool features and tons of information about millions of movies. Awesome!
I used the /discover endpoint, you can use it to discover movies sorted and filtered by many parameters like rating, votes, genres, etc. You can look at the specs here.
After a few hours exploring the api and a few days of coding on my free time I had One Movie, a very simple app that gives you random movies for exactly that moment when are finding a hard time deciding which movie to watch and you need an app that decide for you.
So, this is what you get.
The app takes you directly to the main screen where you automatically get a random movie, you can see some basic information about it as well as hit refresh to get the next movie if you’re not happy with the current one.
Then there is the filter screen where you can narrow your search and it has the following options:
Popularity is a very important metric in IMDB, it takes many parameters in consideration, such as, the number of votes and views for the day, the number of users who favorited the movie and added it to their watchlists, the release date, the number of votes, among others. One Movie order the movies by popularity and take the top ones.
Very simple. It filters movies with a release date less than 1 month old and with theatre release.
It filters movies with a release year equal or greater than the specified year.
It filters movies by the selected language.
It filters movies limiting the search to movies that are within the selected genre. Feel like watching comedy? Horror? Romantic?
It filters movies with a vote average equal or greater than the specified value.
And, of course, One Movie has a simple about screen. That’s it.
Take a look at it 🙂 Leave a comment on how can I improve it and a rating on Play Store would be awesome.
Check the repo and feel free to contribute.