Web applications I’ve made!
Craig and I mashed up of two of his creations – Sun Boxes and Moon Phases – for the eclipse on the 21st. If you let the app know your location, it will use local data to begin at dawn, climax during the eclipse’s maximum obscuration, and end at dusk. If you aren’t in the US (or if you want to know what the eclipse “sounds like” in a different location), you’ll also be able to choose a location instead.
Check it out here when the time comes:Â http://www.craigcolorusso.com/apps/sun-phases/
My husband is a musician. He recently decided to brush up on his sight-reading, but was having a hard time finding pieces he’d never seen to practice on. Â He off-handedly mentioned to me that it would be great if there were a website that would just keep feeding him new, random pieces to sight-read.
“If only there was a website that…” The words that launched 1,000 ships! Needless to say, DLE was on the job and only a few months later we launched New Piece, Please!
Attentive.ly was started by by a couple of Fission Strategy alums to help organizations broaden their focus from email campaigns to social media services like Twitter and Facebook.  They brought me on to revamp the interface for both the dashboard experience and the public facing marketing site.
Rather than begin with static wireframes, we went immediately into a rapid prototyping phase using the Foundation framework. For design, we leveraged a couple of Theme Forest themes, which got us quickly into front-end development.
At long last, I am very excited to announce the launch of the Sun Boxes Mobile App in both the iOS (iTunes) store and the Android store! Â Â You may recall from an earlier post that I built the Sun Boxes website last year. Â Sun Boxes is a sound installation by Craig Colorusso that uses solar power to play a series of guitar drone notes out of single speakers. Â Sounds mundane, perhaps, but it is one of the most humbly powerful pieces of art I’ve seen recently. Â I feel lucky to be a part of its momentum!
Our aim with the mobile app was not only to give users an easy way to interact with the piece by themselves, but also to encourage them to stage their own installation of the piece by turning their and their friend’s devices into individual Sun Boxes.
  
For this project, I was user experience designer, graphic designer, as well as front-end developer. Back-end development was handled expertly by my long-time collaborator and all around kind person, Mark Henderson. He created an API for the project, so you can expect more interfaces to join the fray soon.
Having never built an app myself (I’ve only designed them in the past), I have many, many resources to thank in making this possible. Â First and foremost, we leveraged the Phonegap platform in order to develop for both iOS and Android simultaneously, using the web technologies we already know and love. Â Steven Levithan‘s Date Format plug-in made handling times much easier than it would have otherwise been. Â Jason Job’s epic blog post about archiving and distributing iOS builds saved me from utter failure more than once.
And, as always, I would never get past “hello” without the amazing community that is Stack Overflow.
My pal Mark and I launched Some Demands on October 15, 2011, 28 days after the first gathering in Zucotti Park (and three days after having the idea for the site!). While public support of #occupy was rising, so were criticisms that the movement had no clear goals.
We started Some Actions on November 4, 2011, as Occupy Oakland called for and carried out a general strike. Growing numbers of people were asking what they could do to get involved beyond occupying public spaces.
Together, these two sites are known as Some Sites, and they aim to provide an open space for suggesting and voting on what needs to change and how to change it.
Over the spring and summer, I had the opportunity to work with Local Projects on the companion website to the 9/11 Memorial in New York City.  The memorial doesn’t open until 9/11/11, but you can already start exploring  the names on the memorial wall now at the website:
For this project, I created the interface and client-side interactions for the CMS used to maintain the memorial names database. Â This involved everything from concepting intuitive layouts and interactions within an existing design framework, to handing the data off to the server via JSON.
I also pitched in on the rest of the guide’s front-end development, in particular scripting the interactions for scrolling through the names on the wall.
It’s rare that a project gives me the chance to do new things (build a CMS from scratch) while contributing to a meaningful cause (remembering 9/11). Â It was great to have such an opportunity in this site.
In the winter of 2011, the likelihood that it was snowing outside was a pretty much 50-50 proposition. DLE decided to help users get the information they needed in order to leave the house prepared.
At long last, an update to our little Android app that could!
In this update:
– More and better sounds
– Adjustable Volume
– Ability to turn off notifications
– Fixed unlock screen alert
– Fixed done/cancel button functions
And most importantly, a fancy new icon!
See my original post for a more detailed explanation of what this application is all about.
If you’ve worked in a corporate office before, you’ve likely come across someone who continues to be employed there despite seeming to do no work at all.
One former coworker of mine seemed to have an endless supply of one-liners that masterfully deflected work while leaving his facade of competence untarnished. Â Over time, I began to associate him with the Melville short story Bartleby the Scrivener in my mind. Â I also started to keep a list of his work-defying quips.
After a while, I felt strongly that ALL workers EVERYWHERE should have access to this magical power, and thus the idea of the Bartleby the 8 Ball Android app was born: A device, much like the Magic 8 Ball, that produces a suitable retort whenever someone comes at you with unpleasant work to do.
My application-focused side-project, Dead Letter Enterprises, just launched our first Android app: the Gradual Alarm Clock.
Think of it as a snooze in reverse: GAC sounds once at 30 minutes before your alarm, twice at 15 minutes, and three times at 5 minutes. At the alarm’s set time, the alarm repeats until dismissed.
Theoretically, waking gradually will ensure that you’re really ready to get up by the time your alarm goes off.
I and my DLE colleague Mark Henderson concepted and wireframed this app, while the ever-patient Alexey Tchernykh handled the code.
The app is available now for a mere $1.99 in the Android Market:
market://details?id=com.deadletterenterprises.gradualalarmclock
Tweue is a Twitter-based web app that allows users to queue their tweets not by scheduling them at precise times, but by choosing the interval of time between them. Perhaps a user only signs into Twitter once a day, but doesn’t want to bombard their followers all at once. Tweue allows them to spread their tweets evenly over the course of the day.