Working on a collection app

I started working on an app for mananaging a personal media collection, including movies, music, books and possibly other things. Idea is to have some fun with it and maybe produce something usable by others too.

I do realize that there are like a thousand apps like that already out there, but I want to play with some ideas to see if I can come up with a something fun to use that is minimal and simple.

My main idea is have simple user interface that is shared across all media types. Adding to the collection can be done by scanning the barcode or by adding via search, or manually. Then add some clever easy ways to browse and filter the collection, and have a “to watch/to read” list that would be easy to manage.

When I stated working on it I quickly realized that most APIs are not free and have restrictions. Minimum is that user will need to register for couple APIs to make the app really usable, but I am focusing on free APIs.

Also, I am thinking of including some kind of “streaming” list that would be a kind of list for movies and shows that user wants to watch or has watched, and wants to keep track of. Not sure yet how to play with that, but I think it might be useful. Something akin to flixable, but very minimal.

Lets keep brewing.