Mobile App Craft: the birth of a new trade
Last January I set out to teach myself how to build an app for iOS (i.e. for the iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch). The notion had been swimming around in my head for more than a year, for example, I'd...
View ArticleThings in the cloud
A quick update on the project management front: CulturedCode just recently released to the public a beta version of the upcoming cloud-based version of their app Things, which you can read about on...
View ArticleSXSW 2012 Overview
I had an amazing time in Austin for SXSW this year. I headed down on Thursday March 8, and was there for the entire duration of the festival, closing it out with the annual SXSW Softball Tournament on...
View ArticleSXSW Interactive Recap
I found the SXSW Interactive sessions I attended to be, in nearly every case, thought provoking and of a fairly high quality, and I typically found myself jotting down many notes and things to...
View ArticleQuantified Self Chicago Meetup
Last month I drove up to 1871 Chicago to attend my first Quantified Self meetup. The Chicago meetup group hadn't met in a while and was having a 'year-in-review' meeting to usher in the new year. The...
View ArticleSXSWi 2013 Recap
Back in March (3/7 - 3/13) I had a great time attending SXSW Interactive for the second year in a row (last year I wrote a short blog post as well). A couple of weeks ago I gave a 'lunch & learn'...
View ArticleMy first hackathon
Last month (6/1 & 6/2) I participated in a two day hackathon at the T-Rex tech incubator in downtown St. Louis. It was part of the nation-wide National Day of Civic Hacking, and in collaboration...
View ArticleThe Story of an App
Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to speak at the 2013 Mobile Development Day conference at the University of Illinois Research Park. I gave a presentation about the development process we...
View ArticleOpen Data STL
Last month a new meetup group called Open Data STL was launched with the goal of bringing developers and local civic groups together to facilitate providing citizens access to local civic/government...
View ArticleMove to the Mound City
View of St. Louis from the Cahokia Mounds. Back in February of this year I moved to Saint Louis, MO from Champaign, IL where I had been living for about six years. Over the course of my adult life I...
View ArticleUnlocking the power of D3.js
A couple of months ago, I attended a workshop on D3.js at the St. Louis Machine Learning & Data Science meetup, which got me really excited to start playing around with it. It's a Javascript...
View ArticleTracking my heart health
In August I purchased a Withings blood pressure monitor. It's an inflatable arm band that connects with an iPhone and pairs with the Withings Health Mate app. It can take a reading of your systolic...
View ArticleInteractive maps with Leaflet
One of my current side projects involves visualizing crime activity in St. Louis and other cities. A key component to the project is being able to represent the density of crime incidents on a map,...
View ArticleStrange Loop Recap
Avi Bryant presenting at Strange Loop on using group theory to help streamline data aggregation (photo: J. Williams). Back in September I attended the fifth annual Strange Loop conference here in St....
View ArticleMap Sandbox Project
A choropleth map showing crime incident levels in Pittsburgh census blocks. Original 2008 Pittsburgh incident data from GIS Tutorial for Crime Analysis; Census blocks from City of Pittsburgh. Earlier...
View ArticleThe Quantified Car
The Automatic device plugs into the diagnostics port of your car to track your driving habits by monitoring your trips, and gives you visual and audio feedback through the accompanying mobile app....
View ArticleWorldLine Project
A visualization of daily activity data taken with a prototype iPhone app I built called HabStats. For some time I've been fascinated with the notion of recording my daily activities. I recall in 2001...
View ArticleRF Proximity Spikes
StickNFind, Gimbal, and RedBearLab beacons use Bluetooth LE technology to detect the proximity of a mobile device. For more than a year I've been scoping out potential devices I could use for RF...
View ArticleCodegraphy Project
Examples of relational data visualizations: CodeFlower is a D3.js module for drawing a file dependency graph; CodeCity represents classes as buildings and packages as districts laid out in a grid,...
View ArticleThe Quantified Tube
My TV has its own twitter feed now, capturing my TV watching habits, backed by a Belkin smart switch and IFTTT. One of my (sadly neglected) side projects, code named Worldline, is to discover ways to...
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