Naviflix. Coming to a small screen near you. 

We Flippers are big movie buffs. You'll often find us scrambling to catch the newest movies on the first week of release. The feeling of sinking into a plush seat in a cool theatre for a few hours of escape from our hectic lives is like nothing else. But we noticed that often the process of getting to that point can be quite tedious. Figuring out what movie is playing where and when can get quite frustrating. So we decided to undertake a little project to support one of our favorite pastimes.

Initially the idea was to make a very basic application so people could access movie listings and showtimes in the region on the go. But then we quickly decided to take it further and build it on a proper foundation and framework. Enter Navisite, our content management system! With this running in the background, we knew we could really expand on our core idea knowing fully well we had a solid foundation to work on.

Our resourceful team in Mumbai had all the cinemas and details entered and geotagged on our content framework. Next step was to start the design process. This being our second iPhone app development, we knew better than to jump into the code right away. In fact, we didn’t touch the xcode authoring environment until we knew the flow was spot on. Better to spend your time in the design phase than write a lot of unnecessary code later and waste more time going back and forth.

Kudos to our creative team for not just working on a flow, but creating a brand identity and design that rocks! (Seriously guys, thanks a ton, we love the logo!) Once we had the design in place we got to work on the codebase. Again thanks to Navisites’ flexible architecture we were able to get the data in a clean and optimised manner. Remember, this is mobile, so every KB matters! After a month of build, QA and more QA we were ready to submit the app to the Apple appstore.

But we weren’t finished yet. During the process of the build, some Flippers felt a little left out. They were still on their Nokia N Series, Black Berry Bolds and a few Android users as well. Our first reaction was, ‘Dude, get an iPhone!’ But common sense prevailed and we got working on creating a replica of the application for the mobile web. Complete with AJAX and HTML5 goodness, we ensured that the app was not a paired down version of the native app, but in some places gives the native application a run for its money. If you load the app and the mobile version of it on the iPhone you would not be able to tell the difference. Which is why we had to create a different apple touch icon to help us when we were testing :)
 
We’re really happy with the results and hope you like the application. We are already working on the next build of this with some nice little extra features!