Showlog
An iPhone app for keeping track of every show you watch, episode by episode.
Showlog is a complete show tracker on top of a public TV catalogue. TV Time had shut down, and what replaced it was more complicated than the job. The interesting part was keeping it quick and simple however big the catalogue or the show, and making every tap feel instant.
- Origin
- Personal project
- Platforms
- iPhone
- What people open
- iPhone app
- Role
- I designed it and I built it
- On this project
- Expo · Convex · TVmaze
Why it matters
Quick to use, and yours to keep.
A show tracker gets opened for a few seconds at a time, usually to tick off an episode. So the tick shows up the moment you tap it, without waiting on the internet, and the whole history can be exported, so what you have watched is never locked inside the app.
Where it started
The tracker shut down, and the replacements did too much.
TV Time was a simple log of where you are in a show and when the next episode is out. When it shut down, the options left, like Trakt, covered that and a long list of other jobs a person tracking shows doesn't need.
Showlog is that short list, built as a real app. You search a public catalogue, keep your watch history, and can export it, so the next shutdown doesn't wipe everything out.
What I built
What to watch next, and what's coming.
- 01
A Watching screen with one card per show, the next episode to watch, and how many more have already aired.
- 02
An Upcoming screen listing episodes that haven't aired yet, grouped by day, in the phone's own time.
- 03
Discover and search on top of TVmaze, a free public list of TV shows, so adding a show is a search and not a form.
- 04
A My shows grid of posters, with a bar showing how far through each show you are.
- 05
Support for shows that run for years. One Piece is more than a thousand episodes, and its seasons are listed as years.
- 06
An export of the whole history, so a shutdown can't take it away again.
In the build
The hard parts.
A thousand episodes still opens
A season opens by itself. The phone never loads every episode of a show just to show one year of it.
Some seasons are years
One Piece isn't season 23. The row reads Episode 1180, then 2026 · E25, which is how that show is actually counted.
Catch up in one tap
Watched up to here ticks that episode and every earlier one that has already aired. The tick appears straight away, before the app has even heard back from the internet.
The catalogue stays where it is
Show names, episodes, and pictures come from TVmaze. The app credits them, and the pictures are still hosted by them.
Next project
A fan app, an artist studio, and the system behind them, built so fans can pay artists directly.