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The new genre field

Posted: Fri Feb 06, 2009 6:55 pm
by iBoy
I just want so say I love the new genre field in DVDpedia 4.4.2. I've been thinking about suggesting this before, but now there is no need for that. Instead of having hundreds of categories in all combinations like "Action/Thriller", another for "Action/Comedy" etc, I have now only the main categories "Action", "Comedy", "Thriller" etc., and they can be used in all kinds of combinations. This is much more tidy. Thank you so much for adding this!

Re: The new genre field

Posted: Sat Feb 07, 2009 3:59 am
by Nora
Thanks for the feedback! :)

Re: The new genre field

Posted: Mon Feb 09, 2009 12:29 pm
by kbarnes70
iBoy wrote:I just want so say I love the new genre field in DVDpedia 4.4.2. I've been thinking about suggesting this before, but now there is no need for that. Instead of having hundreds of categories in all combinations like "Action/Thriller", another for "Action/Comedy" etc, I have now only the main categories "Action", "Comedy", "Thriller" etc., and they can be used in all kinds of combinations. This is much more tidy. Thank you so much for adding this!
Could you elaborate please? I have genre smart collections for Action, Comedy, Thriller etc too - each one shows all the movies that have, for example, 'action' in the genre field (as defined by IMDb). What am I missing here? Thanks. Keith

Re: The new genre field

Posted: Mon Feb 09, 2009 12:50 pm
by iBoy
Most movies are a combination of several genres. If you in a previous version of DVDpedia wrote more than one category in the Genre field, the application would handle all you wrote as one category, and every time you wrote a new combination of genres, it would handled it as a new category. For example would "Thriller, Horror" be handled as one category, and "Thriller, Comedy" as another. If you have a large collection of movies, chances are big that you ended up with a very large collection of genre-combinations.

In DVDpedia 4.4.2 the main genres are handled separately; they are not merged together as before. You can enter and combine all the main genres, but they will still be handled as separate keywords (like the tags in previous versions). If you try, you'll probably understand better than if I explain.

Re: The new genre field

Posted: Mon Feb 09, 2009 1:03 pm
by kbarnes70
iBoy wrote:Most movies are a combination of several genres. If you in a previous version of DVDpedia wrote more than one category in the Genre field, the application would handle all you wrote as one category, and every time you wrote a new combination of genres, it would handled it as a new category. For example would "Thriller, Horror" be handled as one category, and "Thriller, Comedy" as another. If you have a large collection of movies, chances are big that you ended up with a very large collection of genre-combinations.

In DVDpedia 4.4.2 you can make one genre for each main genre: one for Action, one for Thriller etc. If a movie contains both Action and Thriller, you just enter these two keywords in the genre field, but now they are handled separately; they are not merged together as before. If you try, you'll probably understand better than if I explain.
Hi - thanks for the amazingly quick reply. Yes, I understand it now from your description and a quick look. I only started to make proper use of the genre field *after* the introduction of this latest feature, which is probably why I didn't quite understand your previous comment. You're right - it's a great feature - I also like the 'Show in Collection' feature too which will of course show every genre smart collection the selected DVD is in. This program just gets better and better in every way. I have never known such a responsive software house as Bruji, not to mention the great help and ideas in the forums too. Thanks again for your input here. Best wishes from a cold, wet Nottingham, England. Keith.

Re: The new genre field

Posted: Tue Feb 10, 2009 4:33 am
by Conor
Thank you for the warm words about Bruji. Thrilled that the new features are already being enjoyed and being put to use. There are a tons of features we like to implement. It's the way of software that it is never complete. We are concentrating on the details for now so that the Pedias can shine. You could have a new program built in a month, the details can take years – and make the difference.

The new genre, apart from the enclosing blue bubble, involves subtle changes. One of the things to do is rebuild the autofill index for genre in the program's preferences. This will reset the possible values of the autofill to eliminate all the combined genres. The edit multiple is a quick way to list all the genres a selection have in common even if you don't plan to edit them. Each genre category will count for the statistics instead of the combined fields. Because of these and other subtle interaction of the genre field across the entire program it's a change that had to be a while in coming in order to make sure it worked properly, but it also what makes it have such an impact. Keith has been using the beta for a while, he has been having fun with the new genre field for longer than most.

As you mentioned it's thanks to the involvement and thoughtfulness of our users that we are able to improve the program. Even unseen the program is always improving, due to all the work we had done previously in changing the program to an SQL database, the 'show in collection' feature only took a day to incorporate. It was TheMatador who suggested the show in collection. Now we are only missing an update of the icons and the program would be perfect – maybe software can be complete after all. :wink: