Designing Filmz

May 21, 2025

Filmz

Some time ago I built a little iOS App called Filmz: keep track of films and shows you want to see or you have seen. Keep personal additional information like “how did I like it?” (I.e. my personal rating), “For what audience would I recommend it?” (Adults, kids, family) “When and where did I see it” etc. And then comes sharing: passing on film recommendations to friends, either one film at a time or lists.

As I didn’t know any Swift back then, I built it in a vibe coding style, fully supported by AI (back then mainly Cursor.ai). This gave me a fast start, but I was lost once I wanted to add more complex features that required a well structured code base. And since I didn’t know much about Swift, I couldn’t do it either. Vibe debugging doesn’t work - yet…

So here I start again, and with a different approach: I first want to sketch the structure I would like to have, lay out my design principles, the SDKs I want to use (or the ones I don’t want to use) and then start coding. I also plan to use AI support (my Swift know how is still mediocre), but I hope that this way I can create a code base that is more structured, and that will be able to evolve while staying structured.

Main entities

These are the main entities I’m dealing with.

ImdbFilm

A film from IMDB - even though I don’t use the real IMDB (API usage is really expensive) but OMDB, the Open Movie DataBase that can be queried via a much cheaper API. I use ImdbFilm objects and references throughout my code base to reference a “Film”.

ImdbFilms are also what I get back from my search (as JSON). And example:

{
  "Title": "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone",
  "Year": "2001",
  "Rated": "PG",
  "Released": "16 Nov 2001",
  "Runtime": "152 min",
  "Genre": "Adventure, Family, Fantasy",
  "Director": "Chris Columbus",
  "Writer": "J.K. Rowling, Steve Kloves",
  "Actors": "Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson",
  "Plot": "An orphaned boy enrolls in a school of wizardry, where he learns the truth about himself, his family and the terrible evil that haunts the magical world.",
  "Language": "English, Latin",
  "Country": "United Kingdom, United States",
  "Awards": "Nominated for 3 Oscars. 20 wins & 74 nominations total",
  "Poster": "https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BNTU1MzgyMDMtMzBlZS00YzczLThmYWEtMjU3YmFlOWEyMjE1XkEyXkFqcGc@._V1_SX300.jpg",
  "Ratings": [
    { "Source": "Internet Movie Database", "Value": "7.7/10" },
    { "Source": "Rotten Tomatoes", "Value": "80%" },
    { "Source": "Metacritic", "Value": "65/100" }
  ],
  "Metascore": "65",
  "imdbRating": "7.7",
  "imdbVotes": "904,094",
  "imdbID": "tt0241527",
  "Type": "movie",
  "DVD": "N/A",
  "BoxOffice": "$318,886,962",
  "Production": "N/A",
  "Website": "N/A",
  "Response": "True"
}

Fields of ImdbFilm:

ID - my internal ID
Title
year
genre - an array of strings
plot
Actors - an array of strings
poster - the url of a poster image
imdbRating
rottenTomatoeRating

Some of the fields are optional, ID and Title are mandatory. At later stages we could think of keeping track of real actor objects and more, but for a start we are good.

MyFilm

A film that is on my list. Either one I have seen, or one I plan to see.

Fields of MyFilm:

ID
ImdbId - the film that we talk about
seen - Boolean
seenDate
myRating
myComments
recommendedAudience - kids, adults, family, bodyCountSavvy

Services

UI Objects

Principles

System boundaries

Use structs

Pass on IDs and services

Passing on IDs and services in my app. Every logic or UI component that needs the entire object gets it from the service
Take care of caching later

test.grtnr.com