What's new in LaterRex: challenges, rewatches and more careful imports
LaterRex 1.3.3 is out, and it brings the first challenge to the app. Until now, Discover Sets were lists to browse and work through at your own pace. Now some of them come with a countdown and an avatar you can only earn while the clock is running. The first one is all ballgowns and slow-burn courtship.
This update also lets you add something you've already finished to your Queue, so you can plan a rewatch, and it brings another round of import fixes after the rebuild in 1.3.2.
The Regency Challenge
The challenge is built on a set of 19 Regency titles in Discover. There are films like the 2005 Pride & Prejudice, Bright Star and Mr Malcolm's List, series like Bridgerton, Queen Charlotte and Sanditon, and books by Jane Austen, Georgette Heyer and Julia Quinn, including The Duke and I, the novel Bridgerton started from.
To complete it, add 10 of the titles to your library, finish 5 and rate 5 before the challenge ends on 31 December. Anything you'd already finished or rated before it started still counts, so if you've seen the 2005 Pride & Prejudice more times than you'd like to admit, you're already on your way. The set's page has a checklist that shows where you're at on each step, and a countdown in the corner so you know how long you've got.
The prize is Regency Rex, a Legendary avatar in a top hat with a rose in his hand. His description in the app reads "The season's most eligible reptile. And he knows it." He can only be earned while the challenge is running.
You'll find the challenge in Discover, or you can open the set from here. On 1.3.3 that link opens the set straight in the app, and on a computer it opens in the web app.
I've got a few more challenges planned for the months ahead. If there's a set you'd love to see turned into one, let me know.
Plan a rewatch from your Queue
The Queue is where you line up what you're getting to next. Until now it only held things you hadn't finished, so there was no way to plan a rewatch, a re-read or another run through a game. Now you can queue something you've already finished, and it shows up as a rewatch, re-read or replay. When you get to it, log it from the item's journal like any other rewatch (logging rewatches is part of Pro, as before).
One fix while I was in there: if something in your Queue was in progress, it didn't show up in Continue on your Library home. It does now.
Imports, one more round
1.3.2 rebuilt imports, and 1.3.3 is the round of fixes that followed. Most of them are about picking the right title, which is harder than it sounds when all you have is a line from someone else's export.
A Goodreads import could bring in Machiavelli's Art of War when you'd read Sun Tzu's, land on the wrong book in a series, or miss a book whose title was spelled a little differently. Letterboxd could turn Loki into a film called Lokillo, and TV Time could put The Office (US) on a different show. Matching is a lot more careful now, and the app matches titles the same way the web app does, so one export gives you the same library on both.
My favourite of the lot: an import could skip The Matrix Revolutions, saying it was already in your library, because Sabrina, the Teenage Witch was. The two happen to share an ID number, one on the film side and one on the TV side, and the import wasn't checking which side it was on. It made me laugh out loud, and it's fixed.
Importing again is safer too. It only fills in what's missing, so a date, rating or note you've changed in LaterRex stays how you left it. A Steam re-import keeps your updated hours played instead of changing them straight back, and a long TV Time or Apple Music import that gets interrupted keeps what it had already brought in.
If you're thinking of moving over, I've written up how LaterRex compares with Goodreads, Letterboxd and Trakt, and what to do with your history now that TV Time has shut down.
A few smaller things
News and events now show as cards at the top of Notifications, and you can dismiss each one once you've read it. Anything you delete in the web app now goes from your phone as well, where before it could hang around or even come back. A rare crash when deleting something from its own page is gone. A book you add from its page shows its page count straight away, and switching a book to audiobook shows its length without reopening the app. And some text that went white on white in light mode is readable again.
That's 1.3.3. If you already have LaterRex, update and go find Regency Rex in Discover. If you don't, it's free on the App Store, and there's a web app in beta at app.laterrex.com if you'd rather start on a computer. And if anything gives you trouble, Contact Support in Settings comes straight to me.