This app is perhaps the quickest way to find out if a movie is worth watching. Enter the movie’s title and hit ‘go’. You’ll get a wall of movie posters returned to you – select the one you’re wondering about and you’ll get a quickview of the movie’s ratings, reviews, and general audience reaction.

Popcorn Lite is perfect for those times when you’re at the video rental store (or even at home looking through a listing of Netflix shows) trying to figure out what to watch. Just pull up Popcorn Lite and search for the movie. All the bells and whistles of the bigger apps have been dispensed with so that you can quickly get to the movie. Simplicity is best.

Resources Used

To pull this app together I used the Telerik Windows Phone controls to quickly implement the wall of movie posters that you see after searching and the basic window overlay for the app info screen.

All movie review, rating, and images are supplied by Flixster / Rotten Tomatoes. I do intend on updating the info with feeds from other providers in the future depending on the value that they can bring. Using the API was made much easier thanks to a wonderful API wrapper for .NET called Cherry Tomato. The wrapper isn’t entirely bug free – mainly due to the RT API itself as it is horribly inconsistent at times – so occasionally you’ll see Popcorn Lite display screens with errors. Still, fiddling with Cherry Tomato was far faster than writing out the code myself… Once I figure out Git I’ll submit some patches to the code – sorry, I still live in the world of SVN & Team System at the moment.