This is a review of one of my absolute favourite iThing apps – the tvguide.co.uk TV Guide. It’s free, it’s customizable, it has bells and whistles aplenty, and it has saved me a fortune in weekend newspapers that I only bought for the TV listings. There’s a website too, for those without iThings, which looks fine in IE and Chrome, but is a bit messed up in Firefox.
There are different versions for iPhone and iPad and both make the most of the screen space available.
The iPhone version shows the times and titles for the current and next 2 programs on each channel. Click a channel to get full program summaries.
The iPad version has a more magazine-y feel to it with scrollable listings at the bottom of the screen, and a picture and program summary at the top of the screen for whichever program you’ve selected in the listings.
Both versions allow you to customize your channel list to show only the channels you have (or only the ones you’re interested in), and they include Irish channels plus regional and HD variations for the UK channels. Since we’re on a free-to-air setup and don’t get a number of the standard UPC/Sky/Whoever channels, this is great for us – no skipping through reams of irrelevant info.
Once you’ve selected which channels you want listings for, you can then order them to suit – I’ve put our favourite channels at the top so they appear on app launch.
If you are a Sky subscriber, you can set up login credentials, which I believe will allow you to remotely set up recording.
Some of the bells and whistles:
- When you select a program in the future, you can ask for an alert to remind you before it starts (how many minutes before the program starts the alert pops up is customizable in the settings), or if you have a Sky account set up, you can set it to be recorded.
- You can add programs to your iThing calendar, post about a program to Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn, or email info about a program to someone.
- You can check when else the same program is on again – brilliant if you’ve missed the start of a show or have just discovered a new series you want to OD on for a bit.
- You can also rate programs (the app shows an average viewer rating for each listing), and add them to your favourites (in which case listings for those particular programs appear at the top of the main listings page ahead of all else).
- You can search the current day’s listings, or listings for the coming 7 days, for any program title – great for when things get rescheduled due to sports and the like, or you’ve missed if the 2-parter you’re watching is over 2 nights or 2 weeks.
In short – it’s wonderful, it’s free, go get it!
Couldn’t agree more! Have stopped buying paper tv guides altogether since discovered this app a while ago, it’s brill!