Netflix Freak

The one thing people love as much as their Macs is movies. Netflix Freak (NF) helps bring the two together through a clean, well-written Macintosh application.

Any review of NF (published by The Little App Factory) only makes sense in comparison to the actual Netflix website. Unfortunately for NF, the Netflix site continues to improve, which renders software apps like NF less appealing. Why would a user want to pay $15 for NF when everything can be done for free on Netflix's site?

The app does offer a few benefits over the Netflix site:
• Queue management - NF offers a variety of ways to manage your queue, any of which--but especially drag and drop--justify the $15 price tag. After a few days of swapping movies or dragging groups of movies around, I was hard pressed to return to Netflix's single reorder-by-number method.
• Rental history - the ability to see all the movies you've ever rented from Netflix is another excellent feature. But the process does require you to request the info from Netflix and then copy and paste it into the app.
• Custom category lists - another excellent feature for the hard-core Mac movie buff who wants to organize the movies they've seen using their own classification rather than Netflix's.
• No password entry - NF uses Safari to get your Netflix account password (assuming you've elected to store it on your Mac), so your info appears immediately when you first open NF.

Despite these genuinely useful features, the app suffers in comparison to the Netflix site when it comes to user interface. For example, when viewing a movie in NF, you see little other than the movie's title and your rating of it. Expanding the details section provides an image, synopsis, and tabs for general information, people, and detailed information. All of this information is further divided into lists, which hampers learning about a movie. Specifically, it takes six or eight clicks to see as much information about a movie (genre, length, release date, disc features, etc.) as Netflix provides on one page. Plus Netflix lets you watch a trailer (if available), click actors and directors names to see detailed information on them, and read critics and member reviews. Because of its sparse use of graphics, however, NF may appeal to those on dial-up connections who want to browse movies and manage their queues without too long a wait.

In short, NF is a great niche product, but falls short of the experience of browsing Netflix's site for the majority of its members. Further enhancements may bridge some of the gaps between itself and Netflix's site, but until then I'm going to pass on NF.