I’ve had a lot of side projects in the past and most of them started as stuff leaning around in the back of my head for a few weeks before I actually gave it a go. That was before I started pitching ideas to an awesome ex-colleague of mine: Adrien Heury. Rewatch is an idea I got when I ran into one of those GIFs that you have to pause at the right time to know the answer to a question (I think it was something about a Friends episode). I’m thrilled to announce today that the 1.0 just landed in the App Store.

What is Rewatch?

Rewatch connects to your BetaSeries account to fetch the episodes you’ve already watched. It will then suggest you an episode you could watch again. It’s something I’ve always done for as far as I can remember, it’s probably due to hating the silence and needing a background noise to concentrate on something. To be honest, it’s even better when it’s David Tennant quoting “The Lion King”.

Shipping Beta Versions

I started working on this application using Apple’s TestFlight to send nightly builds to the awesome designer who sent me a design less than 24 hours after I pitched him the idea. I automated the whole process using Fastlane but the huge processing time turned out to be really frustrating. That’s why I quickly moved to BuddyBuild for that purpose.

Buddybuild is this awesome continuous integration tool built by cool people from Vancouver. I had the chance to meet one of the founders, Christopher, in Montreal a few months ago and the demo he gave during Cocoaheads Montreal was mind blowing. Now I only have to push something into my master branch to have a build sent to a few internal testers (including my awesome girlfriend who sent me my very first bug report).

Since the processing time matters a little less when it comes to public betas, I’ve been using TestFlight to send the very first decent Rewatch build to the few people who registered on the website. That gave me the opportunity to keep playing with Fastlane for this website using boarding, as well as “gym”, “snapshot”, “match” and “deliver” to ship screenshots, metadata and binary to iTunesConnect.

I would recommend both those tools in a heartbeat to anyone who is serious about mobile development.

What’s next

I have a few features in the work right now as well as a few bug to fix. My main goal in the next few days will be to make the app more stable and flexible to add support for another TV Shows tracking app: Trakt.tv. Betaseries is great and we both use it at home, but I know some people really struggled with the fact that the content suggested is only in french.

You can also (probably) expect more articles about the technical side of Rewatch. I’ve been using ReactiveCocoa and CoreData and I’d love to share what I learned.

The app is open-source!

As a way to give back to the community, the whole app is open-source and available on Github. The code is a little rough on the edges right now, but I’m working on that.

If you have questions or suggestions about the app, don’t hesitate to ping us on Twitter at @rewatch_app!