RunPee During Your Weekend Movie
RunPee.com is a thoughtful Flex-based website that “helps your bladder enjoy going to the movies as much as you do”. It was developed by Dan Floro aka polyGeek who has a simple realistic premise: Every movie has a few scenes that aren’t crucial to the plot that you can miss and not be lost.
I initially shrugged it off, but with the monsoon and some not-so-great but must-watch movies around the corner I see how useful the site can be. Why do you think movies broadcast on TV have commercial breaks? I am going to use this website for this weekend’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine and next weekend’s Terminator Salvation.
From the website, users can find out all the approximate pee-times in a movie, identify them from the situation, and find out what happened during the pee-break.
The website logo has a funny animation where ‘n’ tries to hold its pee, scrolls off to the right of the screen, returns back from the other side, leans towards ‘u’ and asks, “What did I miss?” Like one of the users Bryan Turriff suggested, it would have been funnier had it been ‘P’ which ran.
The content comes from the users, what polyGeek calls a wiki-pee-dia. Read some of the hilarious suggestions users give to make the website better. I hope to see a feature to add movies itself, not just peetimes, so that Indian users could start using it. We need it more than anyone else.
The website has a few glitches, like with the various sorting keys of movies, and the real estate used by the website. But it still has the ‘beta’ tag.
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@Sravan, thanks so much for posting about RunPee. I’ll answer a few of your points:
*There will be international versions in the future. I’ll have to find individuals in each location to manage the database, inputting movies and such. And someone else will have to be responsible for adding PeeTimes. The wiki feature of the site is nice but is insufficient to get good accurate PeeTimes as soon as a movie is released. What I would like to do is set up the international sites and then share advertising revenue with the managers - or something like that.
*This was my first Flex application and also my first database driven application. So the beta is there for good reason. If you could see the source code you would be amazed that the site even works at all.
But since last Spring - when I started - I’ve learned a great deal. I’m looking forward to rebuilding the site from scratch using Flex4. I’ll also have a professional designer do the redesign.
-polyGeek
Oh, and about the logo animation: that is the only thing that I didn’t work on. My animation skills are worse than my design skills. So I paid a friend - Chad Wixom - to do the animation for me. We chose to have the ‘n’ the run offscreen because it’s in the center. That way the ‘n’ could ‘look’ down the isle in each direction before running off. Chad is going to revisit the animation soon and tweak it to be even better.
Thanks for dropping by, polyGeek. Great website, thank you.
Glad that you have plans about international version and hope to see them soon.
I have read on your blog about your animation skills. I won’t buy your ‘n’ being in the center though, ‘P’ is as much in the center.
Actually, the “n” was decided because it looked funny when it used the legs of the “n” to cross and look hurried. I might just find a way to do the P, I have some very clever ideas up my sleeve for the next build of runpee.com along with some other ways to get the word out. Stay tuned.