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The aptly named Binge is a new app for iPhones, iPads, and Macs that puts its focus on Letterboxd. Like that popular movie-focused social media platform, Binge gives you a way to track what you’ve watched and what you want to watch. But while Letterboxd is mostly limited to movies, Binge covers and adds both movies and TV shows “Jump scare warning,”<\/a> An innovative feature Letterbox can’t match (though testing it, I got mixed results).<\/p>\n Keeping track of my viewing is something I need a lot of help with, and while I’ve had a Letterboxd account for a while, I don’t log into it or update my viewing history that often. Because it offers a single location to track both movies and TV, I decided to give Binge a try \u2014 and despite the above issues with its standout features, I mostly liked what I found.<\/p>\n You don’t need to sign up for an account to use Binge, but if you do, you can sync your activity in the app across multiple Apple devices. As far as the interface is concerned, you get three tabs to view new and trending content-discover<\/strong>, Movies<\/strong>And shows<\/strong>. last tab is Library<\/strong>Where your view is logged.<\/p>\n Tracking is really simple: you can mark movies or TV shows as watched or ones you’d like to watch in the future; For shows, you can also log how many episodes you’ve watched. Then it’s all sorted into your timeline Library<\/strong> Page. (One non-Letterbox feature I like is the option to randomly select from your want-to-watch list \u2013 a good bet for those times when you can’t decide what to watch.)<\/p>\n \n Binge offers a clean and simple layout.<\/span> Overall, Binge is simpler than Letterboxd, which crams a lot of options \u2013 marking something as viewed, rating it, adding it to lists, and sharing it with others \u2013 into a single pop-up window; While that app offers a lot more to do, it also feels disorganized. Binge only offers the basics, which is a plus for a low-effort media tracker like me.<\/p>\n The same goes for the built-in search: it’s more comprehensive on Letterboxd, where you can really go deeper into search categories like genre, year of release, and cast and crew members. Binge offers a more simple keyword search for matching titles or those related to a title.<\/p>\n Still, Binge is impressive in terms of how much information it presents for each movie or TV show. As well as cast and crew lists, you’ll find trailers, ratings, awards and nominations from across the web, information on which streaming app you need to watch something on, and a parental guide that flags anything of a frightening, violent, or otherwise adult nature.<\/p>\n \n You get a wealth of information about each title.<\/span> The Library tab is well laid out, sorting everything in an easy-to-follow way, although you can create collections for movies and shows if you want to organize them more intentionally. i like the idea of \u200b\u200bit your next watch<\/strong> section, which recommends titles based on what you’ve already seen, and it turned out some interesting selections for me.<\/p>\n You can customize a lot of the interface inside Binge, so if there are features you’re not really interested in \u2013 like a review of a movie or a list of how many awards it’s received \u2013 you can disable them with a single tap. It is also possible to reduce some effects, such as parallax and shimmer, which are applied by default.<\/p>\n I’m not much of a fan of horror or violence\u2014I don’t really like being scared or pretending\u2014which can make movies difficult to watch. Some of the most critically acclaimed and popular films come with these elements, and so I find myself wanting to watch them while also worrying about being traumatized.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n What do you think so far? Binge provides a solution for this in the form of jump scare warnings: many title pages provide a timeline showing when the jumps are coming, and a description of what happens (so beware of spoilers). When you start watching you can start a timer that will send a jump scare alert to your phone as a “Live Activity” before the scary scene occurs. However, while the Timeline screen was straightforward enough, I couldn’t get Live Activity notifications to constantly pop up \u2014 the app seemed to be tracking what it was doing and when, and there’s no way to manually adjust the elapsed time once you’ve already started a movie or TV show. Still, the jump scare timeline is useful in its own right. The scares are sorted into minor and major categories, and if you don’t mind getting advance warnings about a plot point or two, these are useful if you want to know when to cover your eyes.<\/p>\n \n A jump scare timeline.<\/span> Unfortunately, jump scare charts are not available for every film. Browsing Movies I Liked invisible man<\/em> (2020) and Prometheus<\/em> (2012) Offer them, but they’re missing like old fare silence of the Lambs <\/em>(1991) and single white woman<\/em> (1992). I’m not sure where Binge is getting its data from (probably). whenjumpscare<\/a>), but this is not guaranteed for every movie.<\/p>\n The other downside: the fear of jumping into a binge is paid for extra. To get them you’ll need to sign up for a monthly ($1.99), yearly ($17.99), or lifetime ($49.99) package. Subscriptions also unlock several other features, like episode ratings graphs, the ability to set custom movie posters (also a paid feature on Letterboxd), and reminders for upcoming movies and shows.<\/p>\n \n The app also includes recommendations.<\/span> The app also scores highly for its data import and export tools. You can load existing information from your accounts on Tract, Letterboxd, and IMDb, and export everything you’ve logged to a JSON file to use elsewhere. You can also sync activity with tract<\/a>However this is another premium feature.<\/p>\n While hardcore movie lovers may still prefer Letterboxd \u2013 at least for the baked-in community and sharing features \u2013 Binge is a worthy alternative for the rest of us. You can be up and running in just minutes, everything is neatly laid out and easy to understand, and there are countless nice touches scattered throughout. This can ultimately help me keep track of my media consumption more honestly.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\nUse Binge to track both movies and TV shows<\/h2>\n
\n Credit: Lifehacker<\/span>\n <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n![\"binge](\"https:\/\/lifehacker.com\/imagery\/articles\/01KP8T1Z60JA1CV7NF6QFD9J5S\/images-2.fill.size_2000x1125.v1776264739.jpg\")
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\n Credit: Lifehacker<\/span>\n <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\nJump Scare Tracker is a great idea, but it didn’t work for me at all<\/h2>\n
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\n <\/span>\n <\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n![\"binge](\"https:\/\/lifehacker.com\/imagery\/articles\/01KP8T1Z60JA1CV7NF6QFD9J5S\/images-3.fill.size_2000x1125.v1776264739.jpg\")
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\n Credit: Lifehacker<\/span>\n <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n![\"binge](\"https:\/\/lifehacker.com\/imagery\/articles\/01KP8T1Z60JA1CV7NF6QFD9J5S\/images-4.fill.size_2000x1125.v1776264740.jpg\")
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\n Credit: Lifehacker<\/span>\n <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\nBinge is a worthy letterbox alternative<\/h2>\n