[Companion Apps] WP7 & Android – Let’s Browse and Record TV

A few weeks ago I showed off the re-imagining of the home screen on our WP7 application. While I covered some information, there is still obviously a lot of depth to the companion apps so this week I wanted to dig deeper into how you will search to find television shows and what the experience is like on WP7. To start off we have our Television pivot. Inside this pivot is everything crucial to your television experience on your “Q”. Today I will be going over two key ways to search which is either via the guide or through a channel listing. Let’s first jump into the channel list.

Home

When I select “Channels” from the Television pivot I am presented with a full list of all my channels available to me sorted by channel number. I can quickly see the Call Sign and also tell if the channel is HD or not. Selecting a group header will bring up a nice jump list so I can quickly get to a channel group. Swiping to the next pivot will sort all of our channels by their call sign, and if I select the group header in this case I will be presented with letter groups correlating to the first letter of the channels call sign. One more swipe to the third pivot will bring us to our favorites list. The Companion applications allow you to favorite channels in the app and get to them quickly through the application. As you can see I only really watch 1 channel in my house… HGTV. If you saw my CES demo I enjoy a lot of House Hunters and Property Brothers, which now seems to be an on going joke here at Ceton.

Channels By NumberNumber Jump ListChannels By Call SignCall Sign Jump ListChannel Favorites

Alright so now let’s dig deeper into one of these channels. Selecting a channel will take you to the channel details page. This is where you can view days worth of guide data specific to that channel. Here are two examples of channels. On the left you have HGTV and on the right you have FX HD. I want to point out all that you are seeing here. Starting at the very top you are getting the channel Caption, in the case of HGTV it is Home & Garden Television. Right after that you see that this channel is in fact HD by the red HD symbol. You also get the channel number and call sign. If we take a look at the actual shows you also get a lot of rich meta data with them as well. The blocks on the left hand side correlate to the shows category, purple being a movie, and blue and normal show. These colors will be a similar theme throughout all of the apps as the correlate directly the the “Q’s” guide.  Besides the category you also get the start time, show name, episode name, if it is being recorded (take a look at “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan”), and if it is in HD or not.  On top of all that is there you can also quickly jump to a specific date by selecting one of the day headers and bringing up a nice Date selection jump list which you see in the last image.

FXHDHGTVChannel Jump List

Before we go into a show let’s talk a bit about that bottom menu bar. Throughout the companion apps we tried to take advantage of the menu bar as much as possible as to not clutter the UI. So down in the bottom you have some very common actions such as marking the channel as a favorite, tuning the channel in on you “Q”, and going to the next or previous channel.

Channel Menu

Let’s dig down one more layer and actually select a show. I have gone ahead and selected an episode of How I Met Your Mother (one of my personal favorite shows on television).  Right away I am instantly presented with a lot of information including the episode title, if it is new or a repeat episode, run time, episode description and even information on the channel that it is on.  Did you also notice that blue block to the left of the show name? It carries over to display the category Smile. Additionally what we can see down in the bottom menu is that I actually have How I Met Your Mother as a series recording (notice the slash through the series icon), however since it is not a new episode it is not actually scheduled to record. At this point I can actually cancel my series recording or select to record this episode, which I will do. So now in the second image you can see that I have gone ahead and marked it to record and in the program details that it will be recorded and I have it as a series recording.

How I MetRecording HIMYM

But what about the traditional Television Grid Guide some may ask? Today I will give you a little sneak peak at our grid guide for WP7 and for Android. In the upcoming weeks I will go extremely in depth on the Grid Guide and show you all the neat features we are putting in them. For today however you just get a quick sneak peak at the look.

WP7 Grid Guide PortraitAndroid Grid Guide Portrait

WP7 Grid Guide Landsape

Android Grid Guide Landscape

Besides all that I have shown you today, there is still a lot more even within these two sections of the companion applications. Until next time.

-James Montemagno
--Software Developer, Ceton Corp.

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*WP7 and Android apps are still in development. All content is subject to change before final release.