One afternoon in mid-August I sketched out a quick design for a simple app. A few hours later I had the first version of the app up and running! The purpose of the app was to help someone decide what episode of a particular TV show they should watch next. I chose Columbo, as I know all of the episodes, so it’s hard to pick one. This app takes care of that for you.
I ended up writing a series of 5 apps based off this first one. Each one showed slight improvements as both learned more about how to do what I was doing but also what I actually wanted to do became more clear.
This is the first app: One More Episode. No synopsis yet and there are more choices than in later apps.
The second app I wrote helps one choose which James Bond movie to watch. It covers all of the official releases. There is no synopsis displayed, but there is a link to that and more. This app is called Shaken, Not Stirred.
Venturing back into TV land, the 3rd app, Boldly Go, covers the original Star Trek series. Now we have an inline synopsis, as well as some nicer styling.
Sticking with outer space, Set a Course allows one to randomly choose an episode of Star Trek: Voyager. Pretty much the same design as the last app.
The final entry in this set of apps for randomly choosing what to watch is called Never Forget. It covers the Ghibli Studio animated movies. This version of the app is the most polished, as I applied what I learned from the previous apps to make this one better.
Credit where credit is due: I could not have written an iPhone/iOS app without help. That help came from ChatGPT – I designed the program, the layout, etc. and then asked for specific coding help to accomplish specific tasks within the program. The app is written using the SwiftUI variant of the Swift programming language and was created in Xcode, Apple’s primary software development tool. Some of the images are licensed from iStock photo and many of the posters are used with permission from the Poster Database site.