Micro app 19: That Guy

I was at the theater this week seeing Minions and Monsters, and I had this feeling over and over, which was I would hear a voice and not quite be able to place the actor. It was on the tip of my tongue, but I couldn't quite figure it out. If I was watching this at home, I'd pick up my phone, pull up the movie, and figure it out in a few seconds. But I will never take out my phone in a movie theater, so I was stuck.

Of course, 2026 is the year of the micro app, and I decided that I would take this opportunity to try and solve this problem for myself. A couple days later and I have a new app on my Apple Watch called That Guy, which does exactly what I wanted.

The use case

When you sit down in your seat, you open That Guy on your watch, type in the movie you're watching, and it downloads the cast in a simple to navigate, minimal UI on the watch itself. For the rest of the movie, if you ever have a moment where you're wondering, "hey, who's that guy?" you can glance down at your watch, scroll through the cast with the digital crown, and satisfy your curiosity so you can get back to enjoying the movie.

I've also added the ability to tap into an actor to see their most notable credits if you need assistance figuring out where you may know them from.

And to make this easy to pull up in the theater, I've of course included a complication you can put on your watch face for easy access.

Release?

This is the 19th micro app I've talked about in this series, and obviously not all of them have gotten released publicly, and honestly, that's kind of the point. I'm exploring the concept of identifying problems and solving them with software for yourself. it's cool when one of them can be turned into something useful for more people, but it's not the expectation.

Also, this feels like the sort of feature that should be in an app like Callsheet, Letterboxd, or IMDB, so I'm not sure if I should release this, or just hope that Casey Liss notices this post and agrees this would be a nice thing to have in his app.

That said, if there's enough interest from this post, I'll of course consider it.