Have Your Own Pocket-Sized TV Show Guru With TeeVee 2

TeeVee 2 - Your TV Shows Guru ($0.99) by CrazyApps is a sleek app for helping you keep track of all of your favorite television shows. It’s a new entry in the growing market of television show tracker apps, including iTV Shows 2 and TV Forecast. If you are looking for a simple little app for the task, then TeeVee 2 may be what you’re looking for.

I have to admit — I love television. It may be hard to find the time during the week to catch up on all of my shows (including the ones I have in my Netflix Instant Queue), but I can’t get enough. The stories every week just keep pulling me in. I’ve accumulated quite a collection of shows to watch as well, so it is definitely quite daunting to keep track of when the new episodes are back on the air. If you’re in my exact shoes, then you will love TeeVee 2, as it makes easy work out of keeping track of everything in an organized fashion.

Even though I’ve been a user of iTV Shows 2 for quite some time now, I love seeing what else there is in the market. With TeeVee 2, I am drawn to the incredibly simplistic, yet elegant flat design. Once iOS 7 is available to the public, I have a feeling that this will fit right in with the overall scheme of the OS. The thin text, visual emphasis (including blurred backgrounds), and ease-of-use make this incredibly appealing to the mass market, at least I think so.

The first thing you will be asked to do on the first launch is to begin adding in your favorite television shows. TeeVee 2 will search as you type, although it doesn’t seem to deliver actual results until you have finished typing. When you find the show you want, just tap on it to add it to your queue. You can continue adding shows without interruption, and you can return to the main view of the app by tapping on the “X” in the corner. There are over 30,000 shows in the database for TeeVee 2, so it’s likely that you’ll find most, if not all, of your shows.

The main view of TeeVee 2 will be a list of your shows, although there is no text. Instead, each show is represented by a banner image, and you are able to see how long until the next new episode, along with the season and episode number. You can quickly delete a show by swiping right until the “x” appears, at which point it will be gone upon release. Users can also swipe left on a show to reveal the next episode’s title, as well as the date and time it will air. Incredibly useful if you are like me and prefer to watch your shows live (and avoid Internet spoilers).

If you tap on a show, you will be taken to a section with further details on the show, which will be split up into four tabs: Upcoming, Info, Cast, and Episodes.

Upcoming provides a brief summary of the episode, and will have a link to a video clip if it’s available (beware of spoilers)! You can even share the episode info with your friends on Twitter and Facebook, and a full countdown to the episode will be shown at the bottom.

Info will provide a detailed synopsis of the series, and you can view when it airs, overall rating, how long each episode is, what channel it is on, and what genre it falls under. The Cast view will display avatars of all of the characters in the show and display their names and who plays them. I love this, because sometimes it’s incredibly hard to keep track of the names of every character (I’m looking at you, Game of Thrones).

You are able to get a list of every episode there is with the Episodes view. This also allows the viewing of previous episode summaries and you can also mark episodes as seen by tapping on the numbered circle. However, there is no way (that I know of) in the app to mark every episode as seen, unless you go through them all manually. This is tedious though, and I hope that the developer implements a “Mark All As Seen” button of some sort. Or at least ask users if they have seen every previous episode to the one that they are marking, as it does in iTV Shows 2.

That’s all there is to TeeVee 2. It’s beautiful, sleek, and gives you the essentials that you need to know. I personally love the Cast feature, as I like to look up actors in shows who look familiar — I can’t be the only one who does this. I just wish that it came with some kind of data backup or sync, as there is currently none, so all your shows will be stored locally. Hopefully the developer can add a backup method in a future update. It would also be nice if you could set up alerts to be reminded of a show before it’s on, as I have that set up with iTV Shows 2 and it’s been incredibly useful.

If you’re looking for a slick little app to help you keep track of your favorite shows, then this is worth a try. I think I’ll be keeping it around myself mostly for the Cast feature, but it can definitely be a great option once it has sync and notifications.

TeeVee 2 – Your TV Shows Guru can be found in the iPhone App Store for $0.99.