Current Projects
Tasty Bookshelf
Download - Requires Adobe Integrated Runtime(AIR) and Flash 9
My studies at RIT have led me to focus my energies and professional talents on the development of Rich Internet Applications (RIA’s). These are websites built using advanced web scripting and programming languages and typically resemble more conventional desktop applications in functionality and interface richness. At the moment the majority of these RIA’s are built using either Flash/Flex or AJAX/DHTML. Some examples are Gmail, Pownce, and Meebo.
RIT has recently begun to offer some courses specifically designed to offer students training in the development of RIA’s and I have been taking them. The most recent is called, quite appropriately, Rich Internet Application Development. This class takes students through the complete process of developing one of these applications, including application interface layout and architecture design, prototyping, business logic development, live data loading and saving, and styling. My main project for this class is a library management application with a great deal of influence from a favorite app of mine, Delicious Library. I highly recommend it to anyone with a need or urge to catalog their books, music, and movies who also owns a Macintosh.
BrickBasher
Play
All RIT multimedia IT students are required to make some sort of arcade game as a major project. When presented with this opportunity I chose to emulate some of my favorite figures in IT, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, by creating a more advanced version of the classic game Breakout. The story of the original game development is very interesting and can be read about on Wikipedia.
While the original game had few colors, one ball, and very low end graphics, it was highly addictive. I have tried to preserve this addictive spirit in my rendition, and continue to improve the game in my spare time. BrickBasher uses pre-rendered graphics and a semi-realistic physics model to make the game look a little more visually impressive than Breakout once was. The game has multiple levels, a scoring system, multiple balls and is written in Macromedia Director using Javascript.
CubeVis
View
What has started as a creative project for a class fondly referred to as “Aesthetics for Geeks” has become something intensely interesting to me. The basic idea behind this project is alternative data visualization techniques. In it’s current incarnation it references an XML data file to create a scene wherein various “flocks” of data cubes float around. These “flocks” each represent a data category such as calendar, quotes, or a blog.
Fortunately my professor has taken an interest in the project as well. I’ve been looking for a masters project for some time and it would appear that this is it. I will be taking my current work on this and expanding it to allow a variety of data inputs, a wide range of flocking behaviors, and multiple visualization metaphors.