In terms of IxD and UxD design, my focus in recent years has been web based but I am especially interested in designing interfaces and user experiences for mobile devices and tablet based platforms. Recently I developed a demo (see IndiGO) for a healthcare application which a doctor might use to impart cardiac and diabetic health risks to certain patients.

Like so many of us, I have a specific interest in sustainable design and technology. Toward those ends and as part of my Masters, I developed a Sustainable Materials application - The FITS Sustainable Materials Library.

Additionally, I have taught applications support to professionals in a corporate environment and web design to students in academia. Teaching is interesting as it forces one to see the lesson through anothers eyes. In this manner one can develop a curriculum which sets a student up for success and helps them build their own self confidence through discovery. Occasionally, I also teach Aikido at the dojo I frequent in San Francisco - but that's 'a whole other story'.

To read the granular buzzword-details behind my work you'd be best advised to vist my resume´ page or download it using the link below.

To learn a little more about me you could visit my biographical page.

To look at some of my work - just use the navigation bar above.

  Normal Resumé/CV (Standard)

  Extended Resumé/CV (Detailed)
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RIA is a large measure of how web technolgies have progressed in recent years to exploit a lot more of the functionality which is built into modern web browsers so as to dramatically improve the end user experience as we browse sites and use web applications.

For the most part, Web 1.0 web sites are dependent upon tables for layout and often use nefarious pop-up windows for additional functionality. Some used tableless layout to build their pages. Those were the maverick sites you visited where the same site looked a little different across various browsers ( IE, Netscape, Firefox - Safari came later ).

HTML Table tags as you might guess are really intended for tabular data. Think spreadsheets and you've got the concept. Using tables to lay out a web page is quite a reliable means of ensuring that a page looks the same across many browsers. Without tables, web page layout became a gamble because the manner in which each browser OEM (Netscape,Microsoft, Opera) interpreted markup and style sheets varied slightly. However, the downside is that the browser has to draw the table first and then fill its table cells with content. That was a problem in terms of performance when most of us viewed web pages with dial up modems. It also meant that early versions of speech generating software would read aloud the table architecture they witnessed as they narrated page content to a visually impaired web visitor - pretty frustrating for the end user.

So in a nutshell, Web 1.0 was what the internet started with and it defintely served us all for some time, but thankfully we have made some progress since. For more on things Web 1.0 take a peek at the very magnificent Wikipedia.

Web 2.0 sites employ AJAX technologies and augmented Cascading Style Sheet standards (CSS2 and CSS3 and... ). Ajax stands for Asynchornous JavaScript and XML but you need only remember that it enables more pleasing visual effects within a browser as well as enabling the update of subsets of data upon a web page without having to recreate the entire page anew ( a Web 1.0 limitation ). Web 2.0 sites often use JavaScript to change how pages are rendered 'on-the-fly'.

In recent years, browser manufacturers have converged upon a common set of standards. This means that the browsers we use today interpret web markup code in much the same way as their competitors. This is a big change from how they behaved say back in 1995. Additionally, the end user experience has been greatly enhanced by the use of powerful JavaScript libraries and frameworks written by very smart developers.

Each browser has a Javscript interpreter. Web 2.0 technologies are often heavily dependent upon libraries such as jQuery or frameworks such as Mootools. In fact, to use them you must have Javascript enabled in your browser. This setting is on by default but some people used to turn it off to prevent pop-ups from interfering with their browsing experience. Again, don't worry about the details, just bear in mind that Web 2.0 exploits these technologies where Web 1.0 didn't or more accurately couldn't as they did not exist.

For more on Web 2.0 take another look at Wikipedia.