I decided after dinner on Friday that I’d had enough of not having a nice, simple and quick movie times app on my phone, and that I’d build one myself.

Come Sunday afternoon, I’m done:

It’s called (rather imaginatively) “Movie Times” and you can see it at http://andrew.harrison.org/movies http://movietimesapp.com.

You can search for cinemas based on your location, or you can type in a suburb if you’d like. Movie Times will show you a list of cinemas and the movies they’re showing, or you can look at a list of movies and the cinemas at which they’re playing. Hit the little marker pin to see where that particular cinema is located.

It’s designed for iOS, but in theory it should work reasonably well in any Webkit browser. It works best as a stand-alone app – hit the + button in Safari Mobile, and then “Add to Homescreen”.

Enjoy.

Update: Movie Times is featured and a staff pick on the Apple Web Apps site! (screenshot, for posterity) Also, there’s now a Movie Times Twitter account.

Technical Stuff: It was built in about 20 hours (on Saturday morning and Sunday) using HTML5, CSS3, JQuery and some PHP magic. Data from Google Movies, title’s set in Bebas by Flat-it, icons from Glyphish and the heavy lifting is based on
Google Showtime Grabber
by Bas van Dorst.

We did a very quick beta session on Twitter on Saturday afternoon (thanks @Justin_Liu, @hillank, @thebookfreak58, @bobearth, @tcn33 and @bed42), and with the handful of suggestions and bugs reported, I fixed it all up, slapped on a proper UI, and it was launched about 5:30 Sunday Afternoon.

Bug reports and feature requests (I have a few of my own) should be sent via the contact form or on Twitter.