June 2013

Glass Ceiling
Glass Ceiling is the ultimate female revenge fantasy. In Glass Ceiling, our hero Moxie fights her way up the corporate ladder—literally. By battling fresh men, backstabbing co-workers, asinine accountants, bad bosses and other office stereotypes.

Graphic and game design by Wendy Carmical, project management and game design by Maura Sparks.

It's written in C++ using OpenGL, and thus is completely portable between iOS, Android and OSX.

March 2012

SPARKvue Augmented Reality
Working with Sally Ride Science and PASCO I extended the desktop version of SPARKvue to support augmented reality views of the experimental setup.

In this enhanced version of SPARKvue sensors are tagged with fiduciary markers. The video from a camera pointed at the experimental setup is shown beneath normal UI elements, and measurements from sensors are drawn into the video as it runs.

December 2008

Zorap, Web-Based Video Chat
Zorap web pages are multi-party multimedia environments. Video from your webcam and audio from your microphone, photos, music and video from your own computer are shared to tens of your friends via a Zorap Server. Web content, including YouTube and other video sites are similarly shared, all in an exciting and customizable drag-and-drop interface.

Electric Magic implemented the Mac-specific portions of the Zorap web plugin, supporting Safari, Firefox and other modern web browsers.

December 1999

BeOS Audio Driver for Sony N505VE
Putting BeOS on a machine that had previously run only Windows was a revelation. Elegant, efficient, and the rarely needed reboots took only seconds. But Be had a small team and their hardware support was focused on the standard modes of common hardware. Laptop hardware tends to be anything but standard. The Sony N505VE was a very lightweight laptop with a good sized screen. Its sound hardware was powerful, but unique and at the time undocumented, and so was entirely unsupported by BeOS. I wrote and open sourced a BeOS audio driver that used the YMF-744B's legacy SoundBlaster emulation to provide 8 bit audio output.

April 1996

DigiPhone
The publishers of Digiphone, a VOIP application for Windows, took a shortcut to getting Mac compatibility - they (indirectly) bought NetPhone from Electric Magic, and had me add support for DigiPhone's communications protocol and audio codec.

August 1995

QuickTime Conferencing Components
QuickTime Conferencing was a short-lived project that tried to bring live communications technologies under the umbrella of QuickTime. To make it usable for most people's net connections, it needed codecs that were both low bandwidth and required limited CPU power. That combination was tricky, and so Apple asked me to help them by packaging NetPhone's CVSD and modified GSM codecs as audio components that could be used by QuickTime.

January 1995

NetPhone
In 1994 the Internet was just starting to be available in people's homes and offices. NetPhone was the first application to support what's now known as VOIP (Voice Over IP) without requiring a high-speed connection.

January 1994

Measurement in Motion
Measurement in Motion is a pioneering math and science analysis and investigation tool. It lets students take measurements from real-world video footage, then tabulate, graph and derive secondary measurements from their data. Conversely, students can generate data algorithmically and superimpose it over video to provide visceral confirmation of hypothesized behavior.

November 1992

Marrakech

Marrakech took the hypermedia concepts I explored in WorkSpace and applied them to the problem of managing workflow and assets for multimedia development.

June 1990

MediaMaker
MediaMaker was a ground-breaking application that provided a Finder-like interface to manage multimedia content, coupled with a timeline for assembling that content into a finished production. It controlled laserdisc players, VCRs and CD-ROM drives, managed video overlay cards, played AIFF files (no mp3s back then), MacroMind Director presentations and displayed PICT files (no JPEG either).

It was the commercialization of a project from the BBC's Interactive Television Unit called 'Future Worlds'. Future Worlds was investigating how to create video content that could be used in a traditional linear documentary and also in a hyper-linked computer-based environment. I worked at the BBC for all of three months before the ITU was spun off into an independent company, the MultiMedia Corporation. MediaMaker was published by MacroMind, and I went along with it to San Francisco.

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