ASU Peer Review Tool & Boilerplate

Architecture, coding, and UI / UX.

I built version 1 of this application was for Smart Sparrow's client, ASU. With proper consent, after Smart Sparrow was acquired, I initially contracted with ASU to build a second version of the tool that could connect and exchange data with an LMS (Learning Management System). Early on, I learned of ASU’s desire to create several such apps. I thus proposed building out a boilerplate application instead of all 3 of the planned off-shoot apps.

This strategy would allow ASU to leverage my work… using the boilerplate as a template from which ASU could build as many apps as they wanted with relative ease. A large part of the heavy lifting was designing how to organize the data and front-end functionality between such apps and an LMS. Designing the 2nd version of the Peer Review Tool to act as a template required a lot more thought and preparation that simply building it as a stand-alone application.

The result: after completing the initial boilerplate, the other planned applications were able to be produced at a fraction of the time and cost of building them from scratch.

Smart Sparrow Projects

Collaborative Coding

The chemistry wet-lab simulators (nearly 3-dozen) were just a fraction of all the projects I wrote code for at Smart Sparrow. These simulations were filled with some very fun and diverse challenges. Aside from overcoming all the obstacles we faced to create a truly intuitive UI that provided the desired 2.5-D experience, every individual lab had its own unique puzzles to solve.

(Burning substances, liquid color changes based on the various chemical substances mixed together, animating the flow of a liquid with precise accuracy from a single drip to a stream of fluid, etc.)

Other projects included a blood-typing lab simulation, electronic breadboard simulator, and labs for iodine clocks, calorimetry, freezing-point-depression, electroplating, and many more.

Ivory Tower Defenders

All Coding, front-to-back

Coded from start-to-finish a mobile “tower defense” style action/ strategy game called Ivory Tower Defenders, which was recently launched on both the iTunes Apple Store and various Android markets such as the Google Play Store.

Though simple in appearance, the path-finding issues in this game were very complex. Students (runners) would each follow different paths according to the type of student they were. This was altered by which empty seat each student was nearest to. Finally, if a student was defeated or sat down, all other runners on the screen must immediately respond by recalculating seat distances, competing student choices, and a variety of route options.

The problem is that this must be done very quickly and on every frame that the display was refreshed. Which would have been tolerable if there weren’t timing issues due to processor/display engine limitations. If the timing wasn’t perfect, identical choices by a player could result in different outcomes in the game, which would be unacceptable as it defeats the point of the game mechanics.

Environmental Volunteers Mobile App

All coding, front-to-back. Design, UI, Voice Over & Audio.

This mobile app was designed to give visitors to the Palo Alto Baylands Nature Preserve an interactive, self-guided walking tour of the wetlands. In addition to handling all programming for the app, I covered various design and audio tasks, and provided the narrative voice-overs for the app’s feature locations. It is available for both iOS and Android devices.

(Also, 2 years later I built a second version of the app in Español.)

CWA Presidential Election Quiz

All programming, UX/UI, Graphic Design, Animation, Audio

CWA wanted an interactive Flash-based quiz-format game to inform participants about Barack Obama’s and John McCain’s respective healthcare platforms during the 2008 presidential election. All they had were a simple set of questions and answers, and they wanted a way turn this into a quiz of some kind that would be fun and engaging.

The result of this 6-week project is what you see here. This was a truly ‘built from scratch’ effort as I handled every last thing from the sound effects and graphic design to the animation and coding.

The app uses an XML back-end with a simple question/answer editor. As a bonus to leverage CWA’s efforts, the app was designed to be easily updated to run other quiz-games with different token graphics.

RLNS Vitamin & Calcium Recommendation Widgets

All programming, front-to-back

Rainbow Light Nutritional Systems offers a numerous selection of multivitamin and calcium supplements, each suited to the needs of specific customers. RLNS needed a way to help customers find the products that were tailored to their needs.

Given an excel spreadsheet of their products and features, I created a pair of web apps that would walk a potential customer through a set of questions about their wants and needs. The app then suggests up to 3 products to meet the user's criteria for a multi-vitamin or calcium product. If interested, the user can choose to purchase the product, connecting to the store directly from the app.

These apps make use of a MySQL database to gather anonymous user data to further provide RLNS with valuable feedback about their customers. I also set up and connected an email marketing campaign/service for the company, and added an opt-in feature to the apps so interested customers can subscribe to receive company email offers.

Embedded Panasonic Camera Utility App

All Programming, UI, Graphic Design

Developed UI and software for a consumer class Panasonic security camera, allowing consumers to control the camera remotely through a standard web browser. The software and UI was embedded into the camera so it could be used out-of-the-box. This is the oldest project on my portfolio, but I’m listing it because it was done when this sort of remote access technology was still rather new stuff.

Interactive Product Tours

Coding, animation, project & team management, VO, Graphic Design

Here are two average examples of the literally dozens of product tours done for various high-profile clients such as Sony, Canon, Epson, Netgear, Pentax, Fuji, Avaya, Lexar, SanDisk, SlingBox, and many others.

These interactive demos were all created in Flash, which was a tricky feat to pull off… the Flash Player had big timing issues when it came to playing audio. Voice over synchronization would slip because the Flash player would drop frames to keep up visual playback speed, but it did this without dropping audio frames. That meant 30 seconds into the tour, the VO would be talking out of sync like a bad kung-fu movie.

Finding a solution to this problem meant our studio was the only one at the time that could produce these interactive product tours with voice overs tracks that remained in-sync during playback. In addition, some clever pre-loading kept performance smooth regardless of presentation length or user bandwidth.