August 2011
1 post
TIFFr is ready for TIFF11
Yesterday we updated TIFFr for TIFF11 (after many hours of data wrangling and server configuration). We hope that it serves you all well this year.
We had many ambitious plans to upgrade TIFFr in many new and wonderful ways but life (and some laziness) got in the way and we only managed to upgrade our servers and overhaul the way we ingest the data. We’ll be working to eek out some small...
September 2010
2 posts
UPGRAYEDD!
(with two D’s for a double dose of TIFF scheduling awesomeness)
We’ve just pushed up a major release of tiffr.com, with many new features and bug fixes for all.
PRESS & INDUSTRY SCREENINGS
You can now schedule Press & Industry screenings for TIFF10. This means that all of our friends who are attending TIFF on an industry badge (or their assistants) no longer have to slave...
Torontoist Loves TIFFr →
Ryan and I were interviewed recently for a piece about TIFFr on torontoist.com. Hopefully the exposure will save a lot more TIFF-goers some time this year.
Stay tuned for more updates!
August 2010
2 posts
TIFFR is back for TIFF10
After a long and gruelling couple of days of disappointment and false starts with the TIFF website and schedule, I’m happy to announce that tiffr.com up and running and ready to save you time when making your schedule for TIFF10.
We had to revert to our old codebase, unfortunately, so there are no new features or bug fixes in the currently running version, but we’re working hard in...
September 2009
3 posts
Twitter Integration
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...
Partnerships and New Features!
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...
Shout Outs
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...
August 2009
13 posts
Schedules are in!
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...
Attention TIFF Filmmakers!
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.
...
One Day Left!
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...
Share on Twitter!
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...
Running Times and more!
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...
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Last Minute Theatrics
The TIFF09 schedule, which was supposed to be published today both as content on the official Toronto International Film Festival site and as an RSS feed, was slow to appear, but unfortunately the RSS feed never materialized.
That was a big blow for us at tiffr, we were banking on using that RSS feed to populate our database. It seems that things are not as organized as they once were over on...
Gearing up for the Full Schedule!
Tomorrow TIFF will release the full schedule for TIFF09 and we’re getting everything prepared for the real launch of tiffr.com. We had a soft launch about ten days ago to garner feedback from friends and interested users and we’ve taken all of that information, put it in the feature matrix, and churned out fixes and features that will make tiffr easier to use and more kick ass than...
Barcodes!
Ryan and I recently discovered that the barcodes on the advance ticket order form can be easily generated and are scrambling to quickly implement the functionality to add that to the final schedule view.
What does that mean for you? Potentially it means that you can skip the official booklet and just present your printed tiffr schedule to TIFF. You’d still have to do the green/yellow...
Our Schedules from TIFF08
While we’re waiting for the final schedule for TIFF09 to be published, tiffr is running with the data from last year’s festival so you can get a feel for how it all works before it gets down to the crunch.
Ryan and I have each re-created our TIFF08 schedules (from memory) on tiffr for you all to check out, and you can find those at the following links:
...
tiffr.com Goes Live!
After a few months of working evenings and weekends, learning all the intricate details of Ruby on Rails, we are proud to announce the official launch of tiffr.com, alpha release.
tiffr aims to be a simple solution to shortlisting and scheduling your films for the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). We’ve designed it to be a companion to the official TIFF website, allowing you to...
July 2008
3 posts
Project Nine Mile →
Completely unrelated to tiffr, but a project I have been involved with this year that I want everyone to know about. I went down to Jamaica and spent six weeks implementing a computer education program in Nine Mile, Jamaica, birthplace and childhood home of reggae legend Bob Marley. This is the site that tracked my progress during the trip and the progress of the trip in general. Read about the...
Affiliations
Since I’ve been asked a couple of times, I felt it was important to clarify that we are not officially affiliated with the Toronto International Film Festival. We see this project as a companion site to the official TIFF website, and the tool as a convenience for all of us avid tiffrs out there, who want to be able to select films at the festival without any frustration and, more so, make...
Prototypes
This will be the hub for all information related to the development of the tiffr application, which aims to help users easily select their films for the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF).
We’re currently in a rapid prototyping and development phase and are gathering as much usage information from past TIFF-goers as possible to make the tool as useable as possible. Anyone who has bought...