MovieFX

With the abundance of multimedia products flourishing in a wide array of genres, enthusiasts might want to keep track of prefered ones in organized collections. Developers came up with specialized applications so you can create movie collections or quickly look up titles in existing, popular databases online, which is the case with MovieFX.

The application comes in a pretty lightweight package and you don't even have to install it on your system. This means that you can store in on a USB Flash drive and use on the go, while requiring Java Runtime Environment to run increases flexibility.

One closer look at the application though, quickly makes you change your mind, because you'd expect a little bit more. Sure, accommodation isn't a problem thanks to the simple design, which only splits your workspace into a search panel, browser and preview section.

As a result, you get thorough info, if available, for any movie you write down in the search field. The application looks up your title online, but the target website is not displayed and nor can you change it. The design isn't that polished either, with not enough space to display several details even if not abundant.

You can go ahead and hit the “Watch trailer” to pop up your default web browser with the corresponding short presentation. If you're not exactly sure if a movie is the one you're looking for there's an option to quickly grab similar movies.

But what's most disappointing is the complete absence of any form of export options. So by the time you close the application, you won't be able to go through history of search criteria, not to mention saving reports based on ratings, date, or genre, for instance.

Last but not least, functionality suffers from poor implementation as well. This has a direct impact on the overall loading speed which either seems to last forever or fail to grab several movie related details.

All things considered, we come to the conclusion that MovieFX started off on the right foot, but managed to lose balance somewhere along the way. The application quickly returns title search, and a decent amount of details are displayed, but the online database it uses for results is somewhat shallow. It would have also been nice to be able to generate custom lists or bookmark titles. Overall, the app is on the right track, but could use a little more work.