I have a growing list of small app ideas – mainly for personal use – but not much time to make them. I’ve also been wanting to get better at using blocks and categories in my workflow, so wanting to get two birds with one stone, I set myself a challenge: create an app from scratch in one day and use blocks and categories extensively while doing so.
When I watch Netflix I use a VPN service to switch between Netflix regions, and I therefore like to be able to search for a film and see which Netflix region, if any, it is watchable in. Since Netflix is no longer accepting developers into its public API program, I’ve been using moreflicks.com. However, they do not have any public API either, so I thought I’d scrape the site to get the needed data into the app. Now, I know this is pretty bad form, but since I’m just going to use this app personally, I think it’ll be okay.
So I created a UITableView and UISearchBar for the results, and a NSScanner to parse the HTML code. Since I just wanted each result cell to show the movie or tv-show title and the available regions, I used iconfinder.com to find some good-looking flag icons and put them in there. I used some built-in block methods and created one myself for setting the flag status, and I used categories to add a HTML entity stripping method to NSString. All in all a learning experience. At the end of the day I ended up with the following interface:
It took approximately seven hours, not bad for an app I’m going to use almost daily!