As with Dramatis, The Queue is a Claude-developed web app. Its purpose is to help me track the TV shows and movies that I want to watch, am watching, or have watched. So as with Dramatis, the same disclaimer applies: While I managed the project, all of the code involved was written by Claude. There's no use of passwords, nor does it store or collect personal data (other than free API keys, which are store locally in your keychain). But still, use at your own risk.
Unlike Dramatis, though The Queue is completely free to use—no Anthropic API key is required. It uses the free TVmaze API to retrieve information about TV shows, and two free API keys (which you have to create) from TMDB and OMDB for movie information.
Here's how it looks on my Mac:
And here's a download link:
Download The Queue web app (591KB)
It works like Dramatis does, by running a mini web server on your local Mac.
You start the server with a simple AppleScript applet, and it can be stopped that way, too, or by using the red button on the web page. There are custom icons for the two AppleScript applets, though they haven't been applied—just paste each into the Get Info window if you want to use them.
The retrieved data is stored in a local SQLite3 database (in your user's Library folder), so it only calls the API once to get the initial data—though you can update it with a re-lookup button.
The web app has a help screen to get you going, and a Utilities menu with some backup and export options, including a plain text or Markdown-formatted text report. It has light and dark themes (or matches the OS theme), and a search feature lets you quickly find shows in your database.
There are even instructions on how to share the database across machines on your network, and those machines can be Macs, PCs, or iOS devices, because it's all web-based.
It works extremely well, and I'm quite happy with the result of a fairly long interaction with Claude on this system. With all that said, I actually don't use this myself any more, because…
…but more on that in a future post.