These days it's a little more complicated than “personal site” and
“professional site.” What you'll find below is a hopefully healthy balance of
the two, including links to bits of writing, recordings, and work that I have
created over the years in various states from sketches to finished products.
If you're a family member, head to the Connect section for links to the
family photos you're probably seeking. If you're looking to collaborate with
me, head to the Work section. If you're already a client,
you'll find the links you're probably looking for in the Clients
section. And if you're my wife or my stalker, you can hear some of my recordings
or watch some videos of The Rogue River String Band in the
Listen section.
AS3,Flex SDK,AIR,Ant,Unix Server Administration,SQLLite
The ramp-up time for building a completely new product can be pretty terrifying, especially when you have to wait until pretty late in the game before you get hardware and software that works well enough to do any high-fidelity usability testing on your designs. Add to that the push-pull of designers wanting to experiment and developers finding themselves under the gun and it can make for a pretty tense workplace. To solve both these problems, Polycom brought me onboard to rapidly prototype new designed "in-house" so that we could vet our designs on our own timeline, and iterate on them without tying up production resources.
The prototype featured in this video, for instance, was to be an Android tablet device that acted as a replacement for the remote control that usually ships with a videoconferencing installation. We wouldn't have working hardware or software for some time, as this was our first time building anything with a touch screen or Android. It was half-way through this project that the iPad was announced, so times were a little different than today. This prototype was a high-fidelity simulation (done using a Dell Latitude XT2 touch-screen laptop) of the tablet's interface with two views: the tablet interface and the ten-foot experience: stills of the callee(s) overlaid with UI feedback (indications for call connection, device muting, etc.). You can manually dial a call, browse and dial from a directory, manage and dial from a list of favorites, browse and dial from a list of recent calls, browse and dial from a calendar, display video input (simulated) from a VGA cable or PC, change the layout of the content (call participants and any content being shown), change cameras and much, much more.
I have built additional prototypes that are still under NDA that simulate more and more of the end-to-end videoconferencing experience: motorized pan-tilt-zoom cameras, infrared remote controls and more. I got to wire up some Arduino-based project boards, work with some socket connections and try out Flex 4.5s iOS and Android support. Look for more videos in a few months.
To facilitate the distribution of these prototypes and gathering of feedback I also set up an intranet site for the User Experience department. There's a project wiki (for the developers, primarily), a YouTube like site for viewing of concept videos and usability study recordings (built on Mediacore and a build server (built on Hudson that automatically publishes prototypes as AIR applications to an internal "app store" of sorts.
Harvard ManageMentor
HTML,CSS,JS,AS3,XSLT,Ant
Harvard Business School Publishing(HBSP) came to Enspire Learning with a well-established brand in ManageMentor, and the desired to publish an interactive version that felt as leather-bound and letter-pressed as their customers would expect. I lead the technology team on this year-and-a-half-long project that saw a close integration with the HBSP, including plenty of face-to-face collaboration with the HBSP team. I grew quite a collection of Harvard and Red Sox memorabilia. I oversaw a small team that did the lion's share of AS3 development and HTML/CSS/JS development while I developed a Microsoft Word plugin (in VBA, which output clean XML to an Ant task and several XSL transforms) that allowed the HBSP team to publish from Word with a key press. For the last quarter of the project I took over the HTML/CSS/JS development as well, to free up the original developer for another project.
Marketing SDK for Dell
AS3,Flex SDK,CSS,Ant
Marketing interactive is a fast-paced environment, and spinning up an application that is localizable, user-editable and performant in short order can be pretty tough. Why not make a framework that gets that stuff out of the way? Extending an existing project from within Dell's walls, I developed a marketing SDK that I and my co-workers at Possible Worldwide (then called Schematic) used to jump start projects. It was adopted by Dell's development team as well, and was reported to have been distributed to other third-party development houses. I fully documented the SDK in the JavaDocs format, and included Ant tasks for automating such things as re-publishing those documents. The framework included run-time selection and loading of font libraries (based on font-families declared in CSS and character sets required by the runtime environment).
Fluent in Finance
HTML,CSS,JS,AS3,Java
Fluent in Finance was an eLearning course developed at Enspire Learning and designed to be something of an MBA for the rest of us. As such, we designed the application to scale from a meager beginning of a few dozen users, to a potential user base of tens of thousands. I lead a small team of developers who worked on most of the HTML/CSS/JS content, which was the majority, handled most of the AS3 development myself, and worked with our solutions architect as he handed off a stubbed-out RIFE (a web-app framework in Java) instance.
This was a "spare time" project I got to do with a couple designers at Possible Worldwide (then called Schematic) that served as the Austin office's holiday card, sent to employees and clients alike. If you're not from Austin, you might not have heard of the Zilker Holiday Tree. We decided we would recreate it digitally, and each designer had a different idea how we'd do so. I ended up going with both! They're both rendered using Papervision3D, with the second being constructed from photos uploaded by recipients of the card (you're prompted right off the bat to upload a photo that has Holiday meaning for you). We also included a Google Maps-powered ride-share application that allowed you to drop a pin indicating where you live and either that you'd like a ride or that you don't mind driving and you have [n] seats still available.
Whole Foods Market University
AS3
Whole Foods Market has an internal training division (Whole Foods Market University or WFMU) that offers courses to employees on topics from organic fish-farming to inventory theory. They had a staff of talented designers that dabbled in enough AS3 to build their own bespoke courseware pretty successfully. After a few of these projects, though, they found that a core see of features was consistent across all the applications, and that the one-off approach was making it difficult to maintain their code. I was hired to build an eLearning platform for WFMU. I worked closely with the team to create a platform that the writers could easily author for and the designers could easily implement, maintain and extend when new features were needed.
Jug Band Hero
AS3,Flex SDK,Flixel
Jug Band Hero was a concept pitched to a client looking to take advantage of their sponsorship of the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo with a super "sticky" advertising campaign. Lots of ideas were pitched, including this one that I concerted and prototyped myself, and in the end this was not the winner. It did win the popular vote, though. ; )
The idea was a lo-fi parody of Rock Band. Jug band instruments are typically simpler than most instruments. The washtub bass, for example, often has one string. The jug itself has just one "interface." Likewise, Jug Band only required the user to hit the space bar at the proper time. Actual jug band recordings from Archive.org enriched the experience.
What I found most interesting was that the actual game code was quite simple. The incredibly hard part was authoring the levels. To that end I developed this level editor, for automating and assisting in creating the record of when the space bar should be hit to properly emulate playing the song.
Interactive Marketing
AS3,Flex SDK
I've done plenty of it. This first video is a web app that lets the user upload a photo and play paper-doll dress-up with it. It got to be a real exercise in communication as I tried to help the designers visualize the complex layering that took place ("sometimes boots go behind the pants, like jeans, but sometimes boots go on top, like skirts, you know, since the boots are in the legs pictures" is not a sentence one should ever have to speak). I ended up creating 3D diagrams that we could use to communicate when changes needed to be made.
The second is a pretty typical marketing piece done for the Psion Teklogix WORKABOUT PRO 3 handheld device, which makes use of some pretty nice 3D animations that I did not create. This project represents a lot of the freelance work I have done pretty well.
Please begin by logging in at projects.thomasqbrady.com. From there you'll find links to staging sites, source control and anything else you might need.
the two, including links to bits of writing, recordings, and work that I have
created over the years in various states from sketches to finished products.
If you're a family member, head to the 
