Letterboxd Goes Mobile!

Under The Gun Review has a favorite website. That website is our own. We’re pretty narcissistic like that. We have a second favorite website, however. Oh, and when I say “we,” I mean over half of our staff uses it nearly as often as Facebook.

That website is Letterboxd and today, they are mobile.

Letterboxd is the cinephile’s digital mecca. If you’re not on it, you’re not watching movies correctly or hardly enough. The service, based in Auckland, New Zealand, is an online film diary. Log your views, write reviews, and discover films through lists, your friend’s diaries, and their extensive film database. Take all of that and place it in a beautiful GUI and navigation system and there you have it.

The one thing that has been missing from the service for some time now is the ability to easily log while you’re on the go. Imagine being a Letterboxd addict at the tail end of The Amazing Spiderman. You’ve got things on your mind and you want to get them logged while you’re waiting for the end of credit teaser scene to play. You can’t, at least not easily.

The site’s incredibly responsive and enthusiastic team didn’t shrug this request, nor any of the dozens of functionality requests they’ve fielded over the last year. We asked, and now we receive. 

In a press release, the site’s developers had the following to say:

Since launching our private beta almost a year ago, our most-requested feature (by quite some margin) has been a better mobile experience. Today we’re pleased to announce the first step: a mobile-optimized view of Letterboxd for visitors on handheld devices.

In today’s release, we’ve added optimized templates for most of the site’s key pages, with more to follow. Our approach was to provide as much of the content from the desktop site as made sense in a mobile context, and to streamline the experience by tucking away navigation elements, and by removing a few of the time-saving shortcuts and popups that add enormous value to the desktop site, but tend to slow down a focused mobile workflow.

While we would love to have built a 100% responsive site, this proved something of a challenge within our existing web application framework. Instead, we’ve built a responsive mobile site, which loads automatically on all devices 640 pixels wide or less (you can manually switch between desktop and mobile views in the footer). A key benefit of this approach is that it affords us more control over which elements we include on each page — instead of including a sidebar element and then hiding it in the mobile view, we can subtly alter the markup or omit the element entirely.

We’d like to underscore that this is a first cut. There are areas we plan to further improve as time allows, and a few of the site’s more complex pages, such as the list-editing screen, have not been optimized (but are still accessible as they were).

This release also addresses a few other nagging issues: your user menu now has a direct link to your Diary; rating a film immediately updates the status of the watched flag in the interface (this previously required a page refresh); lists that have notes on one or more films are now highlighted as such; and list editing is improved in Safari.

As always, we welcome feedback on these new additions through the regular channels, and will work to further improve Letterboxd based on your input. Happy viewing!

Check out Letterboxd on your desktop AND your mobile!

Jacob Tender
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