Old News for Movies List

NEW as of 05-19-2004:

More movies added to the list. I've added another diary entry's worth, as well as a few extras--A Decade Under the Influence, which I got from Netflix recently, and The Exorcist: The Version You've Never Seen, which I've now seen! I bought the latter on DVD a while ago but only just now got around to watching it. Still an absolutely fantastic movie. Totally frightening and filmed with such skill and power. I didn't really notice many differences between this version and the original version of the movie (besides the infamous spider-crawl scene), but maybe that's because I haven't seen the original in a while.

NEW as of 05-11-2004:

Since I just posted a new entry in my film festival diary, all the movies for that day have now been added to the list, as well as another movie I just finished watching--the original Dawn of the Dead. What an excellent film! I'm thinking now that maybe I should give Night of the Living Dead another try. I didn't like it the first time, but now I think that may be because I wasn't prepared for how depressing it was going to be...

NEW as of 05-03-2004:

There are plenty more movies on the list; I'm trying to add the films I saw at the Philadelphia film festival as I finish reviews of them.

I changed the way the applet links to the reviews to make it easier for me to add more; this won't affect anything on the front end of things that you see, but it will definitely make things faster for me on the back end.

I also finally added a feature I've been trying to get to work for a long time--when you initiate a search, a label on the applet will update to read "Searching..." so you know that something is going on.

NEW as of 11-12-2003:

I added some new movies to my list. I have now finally seen all the Matrix films.

NEW as of 08-02-2003:

To my great joy, it is now possible to continue to filter the list (theoretically) infinitely! This means that after filtering the list by one criteria (say, all movies from the year 1986), you can then further filter it again by a different criteria (by, for instance, typing "3-4" into the rating field and pressing Enter--this example would give you all the films from 1986 that got a 3, 3.5, or 4 rating from me).

You can also now search by review only, by simply checking or unchecking the "Only search for movies with reviews" checkbox and then pressing enter.

The search feature also now searches by word! To force it to search for an entire phrase, just put quotes around the phrase. (Unfortunately, this means to search for only movies by Alfred Hitchcock, you have to now put quotes around his name, or you will also get all movies by anyone named Alfred and anyone named Hitchcock. But with this small increase in difficulty comes a large increase in flexibility and control.)

In other news, I fixed a small bug, and also added more movies to the list!

NEW as of 07-31-2003:

Having learned myself a bit more about Java, I've fiddled with the Applet and added some new stuff.

First of all, the layout is slightly better and more compact. Theoretically, if you're viewing it in 1024x768 resolution (which is the resolution I recommend, at all times, for everything, but especially for my Applets), the whole thing should fit on the screen.

I've also added a bunch of key mnemonics, or keyboard shortcuts, for navigating through the Applet and activating the components. And you can now Tab around the thing!

Last but not least, I've now added a ranged searching feature to the Year and Rating fields. It's described above, but basically it works like you'd think. Use commas and dashes to separate the items you're searching for. You should be able to search for pretty much any crazy combination of things you can imagine.

As always, let me know if there's anything that doesn't work or that you don't like. Of course, also let me know about things that do work and that you do like! Just let me know!

NEW as of 06-18-2003:

A slight applet enhancement. If your keyboard focus is in the list of titles, you can press a key and the next item in the list that begins with that letter will become selected. This is not the enhancement; this has always been a feature. The new bit is that when you do this, the list will automatically scroll so that the newly selected item is visible! This is something I've always wanted the applet to do, but I only just discovered the line of code to make it work while rummaging about in the API. So, hit those keys, and marvel at the automagic scrolling!

NEW as of 06-07-2003:

I've added a checkbox to the review label that allows you to search for films that have reviews. You still have to perform some kind of search to use this, so if you want the list to display all the films that I've posted a review for, just check this box, then put the keyboard focus in the title field, erase all the text in the field, and press Enter.

NEW as of 06-05-2003:

Searches in the rating field are now exact and exclusive, meaning that searching for "3" will display only the films with a "3" rating, and none of the films with a "3.5" rating. Let me know if you think this is a good idea, or if you think it should go back to the way it was (any field that included even part of your text was displayed). (I plan to make ranged searches possible in this field eventually, so this is really a stop-gap measure.)

NEW as of 06-03-2003:

I fixed a bug with the new search feature that was causing the applet to crash if you searched for a key phrase that was not in the list.

NEW as of 06-02-2003:

The list of films is now searchable. To search the list, simply click in one of the fields, type the key phrase you want to search for, and press enter. The list will display all films that have that key phrase in the particular field you typed in. WARNING: currently the search and reset list functions are rather slow! It takes about ten seconds to reset the list on my machine, and I have a cable modem! Luckily, you don't have to reset between searches. But if you do want to reset for whatever reason, it might actually be faster to just reload the page...