Turn Your iPad Into Your Own Personalized TV Guide With TV Forecast HD
TV Forecast HD ($2.99) by Big Bucket Software is the iPad version of the popular TV Forecast app, which we also reviewed back in February.
Keeping track of your favorite television shows can be hard to do nowadays, with all the great shows that are on. Whether it be watching it live or downloading for later, with TV Forecast HD, having your own personalized TV Guide is easier than ever.
On the first launch, you'll get a list view with a few popular shows already on. In case you aren't a fan of these shows, simply tap on "Edit" to delete them. Add shows with the "+" button at the top, and the app will search for shows in real-time. When you find your show, tap it to add it to your list.
TV Forecast HD will work in both portrait and landscape mode. The list view will have two views: Previous and Upcoming.
If you just want to use the app to know when new episodes are coming on, the Upcoming view should be enough for you. You'll see information like episode name, air date and time, and all your shows are organized by Tomorrow, Next Week, Upcoming, and To Be Announced.
Previously will show you the previous episode of a show and when it was aired.
If you select a show in either Upcoming or Previous, it will take you to a list of all seasons and episodes of a show. Selecting an episode will give you a brief synopsis, if it's available. Episodes can be bookmarked too.
TV Forecast HD also features a Calendar view. In this view, you get a month calendar view and any shows on your list will appear in the box for the specified date as a thumbnail. If multiple shows air on the same day, the image will change to rotate between all the shows. Time will show up in a small gray bar at the top of the date box.
A neat thing you can do is to tap on a date with your shows. This will split the calendar in two, kind of like how Folders are in iOS 4, to show a timeline. Your shows are represented with icons and you can scroll in the timeline by swiping left and right.
Any To Be Announced shows will simply appear at the bottom space of the Calendar view.
You can refresh the data anytime using the button at the top. Settings are accessed from the top bar as well.
Local notifications can be set to remind you of a show, and time zone correction can be set. Unfortunately, it seems that the Time Zone adjustment is applied to all shows, and can't be on a per-show basis. Maybe this can be possible in the future.
TV Forecast HD is a great little app that turns your iPad into your own TV Guide. It's sleek, well designed, and useful.
The only drawback is that there doesn't seem to be a way to sync between the iPhone version, and even the Mac Dashboard widget. I hope that Big Bucket has plans of some way to sync your shows between these three versions of the same app.
If you're a big TV show fan, the iPad is the perfect tool to have around the house to help you keep track of those great shows. This app is well worth the $2.99.
