Nothing to see here

Anyone over the age of 30 can remember a time when watching television wasn’t the delightful experience it is today; rather, it was a frustrating, tedious task involving dials and antennas. We’d forgotten just how awful the whole ordeal was until  we spent time with TiviFlow, an app about as worthwhile as a pair of foil-wrapped rabbit ears. TiviFlow hails itself as a sort of souped-up iTunes library for TV shows that isn’t limited to QuickTime and MPEG-4 files. Unfortunately, the app never came close to working well enough to actually consider it as an iTunes replacement.

Between crashes and error boxes, TiviFlow hardly has any flow at all.

Before I could even import my first TV series (Breaking Bad, ripped from a DVD set), TiviFlow crashed. Hard. Fallen-and-I-can’t-get-up hard. After an unsuccessful reinstall, preference dump, and an obligatory this-won’t-help-but-I’ll-try-it-anyway restart, I sent an email to customer support explaining my issue. They responded very quickly but couldn’t help me (though they did promise to investigate the cause of the “unexpected” crash). So I dug further until I found the culprit: the com.guilleservera.TiviFlow directory in the Containers folder. I informed them of my solution--which has since been added to the top of the Mac App Store Preview page--but it was only a temporary fix; needless to say, TiviFlow users will want to become acquainted with Lion’s hidden Library folder.

Once I got it running for more than 12 seconds, I quickly ran into more trouble (and a few error dialogs). My Breaking Bad seasons weren’t immediately recognized, but another email cleared it up. Imported shows (which actually increase the size of the app) need to follow a precise naming convention (i.e., 1x01.avi), but even legitimate iTunes shows, which loaded rather painlessly with the “renaming” tool, were wonky; Pan Am, for instance, erroneously listed two seasons, and the sole episode of CSI in my library got lost amid a listing of hundreds of possible episodes. And once I found a show I actually had, playing the file was hit or miss.

But even if I could look past the crippling crashes and importing snafus, TiviFlow had one more trick up its sleeve. Granted, I wasn’t using the newest machine on the market, but according to the developer (and my own intuition), a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo iMac with 4GB of RAM should be plenty of computing power to run such a simple app. Not only did I get more beach balls than an Olympic volleyball team, TiviFlow consistently spiked my CPU usage to more than 100 percent and slowed my system to a crawl--even when seemingly idle. It got so bad I began to think I had downloaded some kind of spyware that was rifling through my files for credit card numbers and passwords. A software update fixed much of the background processes problem, but hardly cleared up any of my other issues.

The bottom line. If TiviFlow hopes to steal ratings from iTunes, it needs to fix its writing and acting problems first.