John August

Less IMDb

Less IMDb needs a new home

Apps, Less IMDb

iconLess IMDb, our browser extension for making IMDb less cluttered and more useful, was the very first app we made.1

Here’s what I wrote back in 2010:

They’ve made it more difficult to do the one thing I come to IMDb to do: look at credits. New sections for photos, videos and trivia (star signs!) push credit lists below the fold, forcing you to scroll.

Rather than complain about it, Ryan and I decided to fix it.

And it worked!

In the early days of browser extensions, Less IMDb became very popular because it did exactly one thing well: rearrange layouts to get rid of the cruft, letting you focus on the stuff you’re more likely to actually want.

Six years later, the little yellow tab remains in the upper-right corner of my IMDb windows, silently re-jiggering things. Remarkably, despite all the changes of technology, the extension still works.

Mostly.

Except on Firefox and Chrome.

And even on Safari, layouts will occasionally break spectacularly. IMDb pages aren’t static; you never quite know what you’re going to get. When IMDb reskins entire sections to promote a big summer movie, our little extension gets confused.

Getting Less IMDb back into fighting shape across multiple browsers will take a savvy web person 10 to 30 hours, and it’s just not a priority for us. We’ll be launching Highland 2 soon enough, and that occupies every brain cell of design and coding talent.

But reworking Less IMDb might be a great project for someone else, which is why today we’re releasing all of the source code for it with an MIT license. You can download it here:

Less IMDb source code

Everyone is welcome to use this code to make their own version of the extension. And if one of those versions is great, we’ll even give you the name if you’d like it. (You can find us on Twitter: @qapps.)

I’m really happy we made Less IMDb. It set a great tone and mission for our company: making useful things we wished existed.

I hope someone takes up the charge and can give Less IMDb the love and attention it needs to go another six years.

  1. Is a browser extension an app? Debatable. There’s code and logic, and it has to be installed in an app-like way. But compared to Highland or Weekend Read, it’s not nearly as sophisticated. It falls into the murky area between web and app design, which is part of why it was a great first project for us. ↩

Less IMDb gets unbroken

Apps, Less IMDb

We love IMDb, but man, there’s a lot of clutter on those pages. That’s why one of our very first coding projects was Less IMDb, a browser extension that rearranges IMDb pages to emphasize credits and minimize everything else.

screen shot

For the past four years, Less IMDb sat in the righthand margin, quietly doing its job. Occasionally it would encounter an odd IMDb page that didn’t play nicely — often a themed page with oversized ads — but for the most part it worked as intended.

Then last month Less IMDb broke altogether. So Ryan Nelson dusted off the code and got it working again.

The Safari version of Less IMDb has been updated to 1.3.1 and is available here. He’s working on the Chrome version now.

Unfortunately the auto-updaters for both Safari and Chrome won’t work properly, so you have to download and install it yourself.

For best results, uninstall your existing version of Less IMDb first. (After all, you don’t want More Less IMDb.) You can find it in Preferences > Extensions.

Then download the new one and follow the instructions. (There is also a video walkthrough.)

What’s New:

  • The sidebar is back when Less IMDb is turned on.
  • Fixed formatting of release date, genre, and runtime information.
  • Added retina display support to Less IMDb controller icon.
  • Fixed bug that hid ratings even when Less IMDb was set to off.
  • Changed extension permissions to allow Less IMDb to run on any subdomain for better international support.
  • Fixed bug that prevented video from playing.
  • Fixed bug that prevented ratings from working.
  • Future versions will automatically update once 1.3.1 is installed.

Known issues and notes:

  • Older versions of the extension will not automatically update to the latest version, and should be deleted before using the updated extension.
  • Pages with heavily-branded content may look funky, particularly those using dark backgrounds.
  • Photos and video thumbnails don’t always load when Less IMDb is turned on.
  • Apple’s Safari Extension gallery doesn’t yet link properly.
  • The Less IMDb page is old and FAQ is out of date (update coming).

Once Ryan get the Chrome version finished, we’ll be open-sourcing the whole project. We’d love for coders to springboard off what we’ve done to build a Firefox version, for example, or incorporate it into some of new WebKit goodness announced for Yosemite.

Less IMDb continues to be a useful little utility, something you don’t notice until it’s gone. If you haven’t tried it, give it a shot.

Phil Coulson and the failure of IMDb

Less IMDb, Rant

If you click over to my IMDb profile, you’ll see two new projects: “Phil Coulson: Agent of Shield” and “Coulson’s Day Off.” I’m listed under the writer section, having contributed characters.

Only I didn’t. At all.

I’d never heard of these shorts until I saw them on my profile page. Yes, I worked on the original Iron Man, but I’m not a credited writer and didn’t have any input whatsoever on the character played by Clark Gregg in the franchise.

I’m fairly certain the director simply attached my name — along with Joss Whedon, Fergus & Otsby, Marcum & Holloway — to attract attention to his Marvel fan film. And now that I’m blogging about it, he probably will get some attention.

He’ll also probably get a scary letter from Marvel legal.

Maybe I should feel bad about that — but I really don’t. Fuck him. He’s drafting off my name (and Whedon’s much bigger name) by misrepresenting my involvement in his short film.

If he wanted me to see his movie, he could have sent me a link. Lord knows I’m accessible. I often plug stuff I like. But he didn’t give me that chance. So, as I said, fuck ‘im.

Now, it’s possible that the director himself didn’t link my name to this.1 IMDb credits can be edited by just about anyone, so someone else could have done it.

Which is why I’m saving the bulk of my opprobrium for IMDb.

C’mon, IMDb. Why do you have to suck so much?

My team can make a browser plug-in that makes your layout less terrible, but we can’t fix your data. That’s on you. You have to do better.

Here’s a simple way you can start: I’m a registered user, so why doesn’t your system kick out an email to confirm a change like this? I know I didn’t work on this. It should never have showed up on the page.

I have a movie coming out, and I’m starting to do publicity. All is takes is one lazy journalist looking at IMDb to assume I’ve been reduced to doing crappy superhero knock-offs.

True, one idiotic fan film isn’t going to hurt my reputation much, but what happens when I’m listed for acting in a porn film, or producing a inflammatory religious documentary? To me, that’s a lot worse than revealing an actress’s age.

Because there’s no real competition, we’ve come to rely on IMDb. That’s a mistake, but there is not yet a viable replacement.2

For now, I could use some reader help — and if you have a few minutes, it’s a useful exercise for seeing how the current IMDb system can be gamed so easily.

  1. If you have an IMDb login, head over to my page and click the Edit Page button. (Less IMDb has to be turned off to access it.)
  2. In the Filmography > Writing Credits section, choose Correct/Delete.
  3. Click Continue.
  4. On the next screen, choose Delete for the two Phil Coulson credits.
  5. Click “Check these updates.”
  6. You’ll get an error message asking you to state why these credits should be deleted. I leave this to your creativity.
  7. Click “Recheck these updates.”
  8. Click “Submit these updates.”

And you’re done! Maybe! There’s nothing to indicate whether a change is really in the works. Some updates show up quickly, but the auto-generated email lists 7-10 days as normal.

Which says a lot about how seriously IMDb is taking its mission.

Update:

Eight hours after posting this — and three days after first filing the credit notice — IMDb has excised the two Phil Coulson shorts from my profile. Thanks to everyone who submitted on my behalf.

I suspect some higher-up at IMDb paid attention, because the other writers who had been listed (including Whedon) are also now unlinked. But the same director is still drafting on credits for other filmmakers. IMDb has corrected one mistake, but not their system.

  1. Click through his other credits and you’ll see the same pattern. ↩
  2. On The Talk Show, we speculated that Apple might come out with their own Siri-integrated solution for film credits. ↩

Less IMDb: Faster and cleaner than ever

Apps, Less IMDb

Ryan spent much of this last week updating Less IMDb, our browser plug-in that makes IMDb approximately one billion times better.

Version 1.2 sniffs out some of the new cruft that IMDb has packed into its title and people pages, hiding it away so you can see the credits. Ryan has also streamlined how it works, so you’ll find pages loading faster than ever.

Here’s a little screencast I did that shows what it does and how to install it:

For Chrome, you can install it from our site, or with one click from the Chrome Web Store. Well done, Google!

For Safari, it’s three clicks from our site. It’s also available on Apple’s Safari extensions gallery, but without an easy link. Bad Apple.

If you have an earlier version of Less IMDb for Safari, it’s a good idea to uninstall it first to prevent possible wonkiness. Instructions are in the video.

Less IMDb was the first thing we made as a company, and it still gets the most traffic to the site. We don’t make any money off of it, but goodwill is its own currency:

Their Less IMDB Safari extension is a godsend. It gets rid of nearly all of the garbage and delivers the streamlined UI that’s as close to how it used to be as possible.

And that’s why we made it.