Last night after I saw Lars von Trier’s Antichrist I was too afraid to go to bed so I stayed up all night improving tiffr.  You can now link your tiffr account to Twitter and we’ll tweet a few minutes before you head into each film.  Pretty simple, pretty awesome.

There are a bunch of other changes throughout the site.  I spent some time streamlining the Sign Up and Log In workflows so that new users can more easily get down to business.  I also added an auto-refresh to the Shortlist so that if you’re adding films and keeping that page open, it will periodically update with your new selections.  And, finally, I added a countdown-to-close to the bookmarklet window along with a button to get back to your shortlist, rather than just closing the window unceremoniously after adding a film.

Hope the new updates help save you some time and make using tiffr even easier!

We’re really excited to announce a great new partnership with The Auteurs (theauteurs.com).  If you’ve never heard of them, The Auteurs is a social web app that gives you the ability to watch a curated set of amazing films online (in incredibly high quality), discover films you may never have known about, and discuss film with other like-minded people.  They have partnerships with the The Criterion Collection, Celluloid Dreams, Costa Films, and Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Foundation to digitize and disseminate important world cinema on the Internet.

As part of our collaboration, we’ve ditched our Browse Films page (for which we got more than a couple of suggestions for improvement), and replaced it with the more comprehensive film listing at The Auteurs.  Additionally, while browsing The Auteurs you can now shortlist films directly on tiffr by using the Add to Schedule button underneath each film playing at TIFF09, or by using the bookmarklet, just as you would on the official TIFF site.

We’re really excited about the possibilities that this partnership brings and hope you love The Auteurs as much as we do!

Check out our accounts at The Auteurs and create your own!

Mina: http://www.theauteurs.com/users/57148
Ryan: http://www.theauteurs.com/users/78520

More new features!

We’re still listening to your feature requests and suggestions and we’ve recently added a few small features that we know you’ll love.  Check it out.

1. A lot of people were asking for the film title on the Planner to bring you to the film details page so you could refresh your memory on the film, which is now how it works.
2. There were a few requests to be able to compare your schedule to someone else’s.  We’ve made it so that when you’re logged in and looking at someone else’s schedule, any screenings you have in common are clearly indicated with an “Attending” badge.
3. To make it easier to discover new users, we’ve replaced the boring Highest Ranked list on the homepage with a Recently Updated list that shows users who’ve made fresh changes to their shortlists and schedules.
4. We’ve connected our homepage to the tiffr Flickr group and are asking filmmakers to submit stills from their films to be featured on our homepage.  It’s not limited to filmmakers of course, anyone with great TIFF shots from this year or previous years should post them to our group to add them to the rotation of images on the homepage.  We’ve got a great start, but we’re always looking for more!

We’re not stopping here, there are still a bunch of great features we’ve got planned to help save you time and keep you organized for TIFF.

Stick around.

We’ve been hard at work creating more time-saving features for tiffr, with a big announcement and deployment planned for this week, but I’ve been meaning to write this post for over a week now so I figured now is a great time to thank two people who were tremendous help in the first week tiffr was online with feedback and some incredible coding skills.

John Perieteanu and Dan McCormmick were instrumental in getting the site up to speed during that crucial last week of August and we can’t thank them enough.  John used his massive Perl skills to quickly write us a script to get the live data into the database to begin with, which would have taken Ryan and I at least twice as long to do.  Dan, a programmer and film lover himself, spent a couple of nights putting tiffr through its paces and offering constructive and specific feedback about everything from design to functionality.  He even contributed some Python code to keep the database up to date with changes happening on the TIFF site that has proved super useful.

These guys are computer wizards to the nth degree and we can’t thank them enough for their amazing contributions!

Ryan and I were so swamped implementing updates and new features to tiffr.com that we almost ran out of time to select our own films.  We both stayed up pretty late last night going through all the films and whittling it all down to a handful of screenings.  We just found out that Box 48 was drawn and since we were in Boxes 52 and 53, respectively, we’re pretty much guaranteed to get our picks, which is awesome.  Bonus points for procrastination!

You can check out our schedules here:

http://tiffr.com/schedules/ryan

http://tiffr.com/schedules/mina

Let us know what you think!

We love film and the people who make them and we want to give you an opportunity to showcase your film on our homepage.  If you or someone you know has a film playing at TIFF09, get in touch with us and we can work together to add a nice, big still from your film to our rotating homepage with a small blurb describing your film and a link back to the TIFF page for your film or your official site.

Sound good?

After working like mad this week to respond to user feedback for tiffr, Ryan and I have finally found some time to sit down and focus on putting together our own schedules ahead of the Ticket Ordering Deadline, tomorrow at 1pm.

We’ll share our schedules once we get them done later tonight.  We finally get to use tiffr ourselves, in the wild with real data, and we’re excited that it has all come full circle!

We’re also planning on showcasing some user schedules here in coming days, as well as announcing some new, useful features as the festival gets started.  We’re innovating with tiffr to improve the festival for TIFF-goers (or tiffrs!), and that doesn’t end with scheduling.  Single ticket buyers will soon find there are other reasons, beside the amazing scheduling features, to visit tiffr.com.

Now back to scheduling my festival!

We rolled out another set of changes today based on user feedback.  Incorporated the film details into the Planner so you can more easily remember why you shortlisted a film without having to go anywhere.

We also added a link so that you can easily tweet the link to your schedule and share your TIFF with others!  Along those lines, we’re going to start highlighting some of our user’s schedules on the blog so that you can see how some people are planning their festival!

We’re really happy to see that people are enjoying the tiffr experience and we’re committed to improving it as much as we can.  We’re planning to move to a dedicated server soon to avoid those annoying drop outs that some of  you may have seen, and we’ve got some other incredible time saving features coming next week, most notably a super useful Rush Ticket Status page that will allow us all to collaboratively find out which films are sold out!

Stay tuned and if you like what we’re doing and/or have suggestions for improvements, drop us a line and let us know!

Added some desperately needed new features to the site last night.  First and most importantly is the addition of running times to the Festival Planner and to your final schedule.  Now you can see when each film ends, which is super useful when making your schedule, and we also provide the running time of each film on the final, printable view for your convenience.

We also updated our film details page to show the images for each image, rather than just a black bar, or previously, that one slightly creepy image from Pontypool.  Check out the some film pages, http://tiffr.com/films, they look pretty awesome.  While you’re there, enter your schedule and share it with everyone.

Stay tuned for more additions to the site over the next couple of days, including some short screencasts on how to use site features.  First up, the magic of the tiffr.com bookmarklet.