The new Tomatometer Dashboard Widget is now available. At first glance, it isn’t enormously different. But as it turns out, a lot of effort was involved in getting the dang thing working again.

First up, Rotten Tomatoes changed their website layout. Completely. So I picked my first battle: the new Google powered search.

With the previous version of Rotten Tomatoes, it was possible to specify that your search terms should only be used to look for a movie. However, due to the new Google powered search, this is no longer possible. Or at least, how it might be achieved isn’t immediately obvious. Fortunately, Google’s more advanced search features are publicly available and I was able to leverage them to bring the new search page back into line. One major hurdle in doing so was that the previous Rotten Tomatoes search results page would actually include the “Freshness” of the movie. As it turns out, freshness is all that the Tomatometer Dashboard Widget needs to know. Therefore, it didn’t have anymore work to do; all the information it needed was presented as part of the search results. Unfortunately, this nugget of information is missing from the new search results page. Instead, I need to scrape the actual movie page. So my problem is, what do I display while the movie page is being fetched? Sure, I could display a loading spinner or something to that affect – but that would be boring. In the end, I decided that if the user is going to have to wait for the result, they should at least have something pretty to look at while they do so. So I decided to go all out and make the freshness bar turn into a fancy pants barbershop pole. And yes, it animates.

Something else I’m disappointed to have lost is the alt text on the Fresh and Rotten images beside each review. This alt text used to include the review’s raw rating, e.g. A+ or 9/10. With this gone, I’m no longer able to display a star rating on the Tomatometer Web App. Instead, it now displays a simple ‘Fresh’ or ‘Rotten’ label instead. It’s unfortunate, but I’m quietly confident that they may decide to bring back the alt text. Getting these updates out the door has been a little hectic and it’s great to have Tomatometer stable again. Thank you everyone who emailed me to let me know that there was a problem in the first place!