Real-time college and university lectures

Top Hat’s active learning app helps professors engage and motivate students in online, blended and face-to-face courses. I worked with their mobile team to maintain, enhance, and modernize their iOS app suite to incorporate new functionality and accommodate ongoing growth.

Interactive at scale

Delivering a real-time interactive exchange between a lecturer and hundreds of students, often in marginal network conditions, can be a challenge. Working with an existing codebase that incorporated several different architectural styles and approaches, I helped add quiz and survey questions inline as part of a professor's slide presentation. The work was completed under tight timeframes and against a back-end API that was changing at the same time.

The future of classroom instruction

Top Hat is helping to pioneer how education will be delivered in the future. Having it “just work” is only the beginning. Striving to build a combination of seamless, rock-solid performance and an interface that both learners and instructors will appreciate is a worthy goal.

Unique video-based social network

I worked directly with the founders of Selfie (later Speakup) and a remote team of iOS and back-end developers to help implement their vision for a truly personal social network based on real face-to-face communication.

Fully custom UI

Carefully considered interactions and animations were designed to lead the user through the experiences offered by the app. Extensive use of gesture recognizers and view and layer animation along with multi-threaded Core Data and AVFoundation added to the technical challenge and led to patentable innovations.

Amazing exchanges on difficult subjects

The app provided a safe and engaging place to share thoughts and feelings within a supportive community.

One page of notes

Indigo In was an iPhone/iPad and Mac app that let users capture ideas and notes into a single, running text document. Notes were seamlessly synced and merged to all the user's iCloud-connected devices.

A beast under the hood

The simplicity of Indigo In is deceptive. The core synchronization logic was rebuilt several times using iCloud Key-Value Store, Core Data synchronization and finally iCloud ubiquity store until it was just right.

Reviews

“This is a very clean, user-friendly app, great for jotting down an idea with minimum fuss – the digital equivalent to David Allen’s ubiquitous capture tool in the GTD methodology. The main attraction of Indigo In is its extreme simplicity and totally reliable syncing with the iPhone/iPad app of the same name. The one continuous note idea is very effective.”

— MR55

“Love the simplicity of this app. I use it to pass notes back and forth with the wife. Nice!”

— Lepagio

“It has all the benefits of the paper napkin solution, and then some. It lasts longer and it’s always in your pocket. That earns it 4 of the 5 stars I give it. What puts this over the top into 5 star territory is that it doesn’t have a slow loading skeumorphic design to just get in the way of your thoughts and that note.”

— 1jPg4SKj

Beautiful flashcards you make yourself

Why not create personalized flashcards for your toddler, using photos and sounds from your last trip to the zoo, or your big family reunion? Share your cards with friends and family with iPhones.

It’s the little things

Funcards automatically trims silence at the beginning and end of the audio clips you record, letting each card pop to life as soon as the child sees it.

Reviews

“Well designed, easy to use and very intutive.”

— canadianfamily.ca

“Our son loves Funcards! He loves swiping the cards, he loves poking the cards and hearing the voice tell him what letter or number is on the screen.”

— TSOKMom

“Funcards is perfect for toddlers and I highly recommend it. Bonus is having the edit function require two touches at the same time so that your kiddo doesn’t make changes all the time.”

— chris.law

“Funcards makes it really easy to make customized flash cards! I used it to make a little slideshow of my last vacation. Great app!”

— CLR5

Push e-mail notifications

Before Google offered push e-mail to your iPhone, I helped develop a push notification service that worked with almost any e-mail account. Despite a successful beta program the service did not fully launch because of Google’s move into the space.

Beta statistics

• About 1,000 beta users.
• Hundreds of thousands of messages pushed.
• A single Amazon EC2 instance.

Reviews

“Completely reliable and stable. It just works.”

“msgpush.com provides seamless integration of push notifications for GMail on the iPhone while still allowing me to manage my e-mail via IMAP.”

“msgpush.com works so well that when I happen to be on my computer I’m almost always notified of new e-mail first by my iPhone.”

“It’s a great service, fast, clean, easy to setup on your device.”

“Super fast. I get e-mails on my iPhone before they come through on my PC.”

More than a media server

The Redlight system is a fully custom media and home automation platform designed to provide a futuristic experience in the home. It is purpose-built and one-of-a-kind, serving as a technology testbed and a user-interface playground.

Functionality

• Lighting/home automation controller
• Music, TV, and movie library
• A/V remote control
• Game center

Is it on yet?

Redlight can automatically detect when the living room Xbox is turned on or off, so that the TV and receiver can switch to the correct input and the sound levels can be optimized.