Bad Movies On Now Picker
In 2011, while watching a terrible movie on TV, Adam Jansch came up with a great idea: why not create a system to inform people of such movies currently showing on television. Acting on that idea he came up with Bad Movies On Now, a Twitter feed displaying the name and channel of bad movies, tweeted at the time they were due to start.
To aid him in building this list of movies, Adam developed a web app to retrieve movies from online TV listings and allow them to be appraised and added to a tweet scheduling service. Bad Movies On Now ran through the majority of 2012, before technical issues and other commitments sidelined the project.
It wasn't until 2015 that Adam came back to the project with the hope of reviving it. With MetaBroadcast's Atlas API providing TV schedules, he turned to Apple's new Swift language to develop an app for iPad to replace the previous web app. Designed for his use only, this app presented movies in a table view, allowing each to be appraised, then accepted or rejected as 'bad'.
Once a list of accepted movies was constructed, the app generated tweets from pre-written templates, filling in the movies' titles and channels. That text was then sent to the Buffer API for scheduling to the Twitter feed.
Bad Movies On Now was finally shut down on May 18th 2016, with ever-greater restrictions on the Atlas API making the project untenable.
Updates [ 2 ]
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Bad Movies On Now shuts down
It is with sadness that today the Bad Movies On Now project has been shut down for good.
Since its resumption in 2015, the feed had been chugging along nicely; however, additional restrictions placed on the Atlas API that provides the feed's TV listings will make the project untenable going forward.
In commemoration, see Siskel & Ebert review the film that inspired the feed in the first place.
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Bad Movies On Now restarts, powered by new Jansch app
Earlier this week the Bad Movies On Now feed, conceived by Adam Jansch, restarted after a three-year hiatus. The feed aims to keep followers informed about bad movies currently airing on Freeview TV in the UK.
To power the feed Adam developed an all-new app, Bad Movies On Now Picker, which is built in Swift and leverages TV listings data and tweet scheduling APIs.