Back from OFFF in Barcelona. Full with excitement and motivation I forced myself to finally tackle my dead site, fix open issues, and add some content.

So I spent two sunny days with messing around with Rails, MySQL and RVM, I finally managed to get my local MacOS development setup working again. Amazing how complex this whole webspace stuff is, once you want to do it on your own. Being a control freak hurts. But now it's too late to go for wordpress — all the projects are already sorted in and once Capistrano IS running, developing with Ruby on Rails can actually quite fun.

Anyways, you can now follow my RSS feed at http://www.pixtur.org/content/rss

And I promise to provide updates on my random musings and our demoscene projects with reasonable frequency.

Since autumn 2008 I am working with the team of moviepilot to improve the user experience of their web-site. This has been a great and intense trip so far. It involves all stages of UI-design: brainstorming, concept, prototyping, usability testing and implementation. And it provides the wonderful opportunity to catch up with the latest developments in RubyOnRails world like Haml and Sass.

I have to admit that redesigning moviepilot is by far the most complex UI-job I have been involved in. Not only because the site's tremendous complexity, but also because of their perfectionism. I never had a design that went through so many design stages. But the results look very promising and will go online March 2009. I can't wait, because they turned me into a big fan and I am now using the site almost every day.

What moviepilot.de is about

Although it is still a long way to match all my own expectations regarding ui-design (well, to critic is my job there...) the site is really cool:

Moviepilot calculates your taste regarding movies. After you registered and rated something like 50 movies, it will forecast how you would rate most other movies running in cinema, on DVD or even TV. It has cool lists of the movies current running in theaters sorted by your taste.

Working with them has actually increases my film consumption tremendously! Give it a try and register: www.moviepilot.de

After six months, I finally got some free time to transfer most of the content from my old website to the new ruby on rails version at www.pixtur.org.

Startet in 2006 by Benjamin Krause, omdb.org is to become an ajax driven alternative database for movie fans. Since I joined the project fairly at the beginning, I was responsible for most of the interface design and the general usability. I could also contribute to certain aspects of the database design.

Because omdb was full of the newest technologies (ruby on rails driven ajax, tableless css2, etc.), it was a perfect chance for becoming acquainted with the latest developments in web technology.

The overall look is the result of a fantastic team work with Benjamin Krause, Sheila Seyfert, Diana Karsten and many more.