Tom Byrne

I’ve just released a new Android App. It allows you to watch out-of-copyright videos from the Internet Archive Database on your phone or tablet. It’s currently early days and it doesn’t really have any browse functionality yet, just search fields. An iOS version will be coming soon also.

In this flash app I built for Evolvex, users can assemble furniture from different components in a 3D environment. When finished the furniture can be purchased, all of the components, along with a diagram of the furniture gets sent to the user.

I ended up writing an ANT task which can build an SWC based on a Flash Builder project file. This way I could integrate regular SWC creation into my deployment process, backing up all external code.

This is a microsite I built for Nokia with the great group at JWT. I built the physics portion of the site, all of the items and navigation moving around in the background using Box2D. I also built several of the pages.

I’ve been doing some work down at JWT recently and found myself building this silly physics prototype. You can add eggs and then smash them against one another or the walls.

As a language, I like CSS, it has a simple elegance that achieves it’s humble goals very nicely. It’s these humble goals that bother me. HTML is an XML based language, and fundamentally, all CSS is doing is targeting nodes within this XML and modifying their attributes. Of course, it’s not possible to, for example, modify the href property in an anchor tag, and this shows that the implementation of CSS is stifled by it’s modest goals. Also, CSS’ ever-growing list of selectors shows a fundamental inflexibility in it’s syntax. Selectors basically target specific nodes within your HTML, this sounds [...]

Grant Skinner, the renowned ActionScript developer, has recently been playing with applications that span both desktop computers and Android based smart-phones. An idea struck me that this dual-platform would be perfect for a environmental controlling system. Imagine, having installed a simple Remote Control app onto your phone, every time you walk into a hotspot certain controls can be sent onto your handset to give you control over certain systems around you.

When I first began programming I was appalled at the simplistic nature of the tools being used to create software; and whilst there have been admiral efforts in the past to make programming a more intuitive affair (think node-based programming) very few of these tools have lived on. In my opinion, this is symptomatic of a bigger problem in the way we build software; namely, the strong tethering between programming language, compiler & delivery platform. Imagine a system where, when you typed (in your preferred language), and behind-the-scenes, your IDE was converting all of your code into an XML based representation of [...]

Here is an application I built for Russell Investment during my time at the Farm. It allows customers to work out the best way they can distribute their contributions to maximise their returns. It presented some interesting challenges like building an efficient Data-Grid, and formatting text as it is typed by users (I got to finally use a diff formula). Please contact me if you’d like to see the finished result (as this is part of Russell’s product I’m not at liberty to publicly host it).

While at the Farm, I built this site for Bonds, leading one other developer. It connects with your Facebook account and plays a montage of your profile pics along with the Hipsters TVC.

Here is a site I built during my time at the Farm, leading with another developer. Unfortunately, we (the Farm) didn’t get the opportunity to design it as they wanted it to match a design from the States. That said, we did use it as an opportunity to finish building visual layout and data-mapping library, which means that based on the XML data coming from the back-end, the entire site can be re-laid out. Check it out here

I worked for about 9 months solid on this Virtual World for the Wiggles during my time at the Farm. I was heavily involved right from the conceptual stage, which I think really helped in creating a really great looking and technically accomplished result. In the end I lead a team of about 6 developers; 3 concurrently. Children would move their customised avatar around in the Big Red Car; traversing a richly illustrated, parallax-based world. They could enter the houses of the Wiggles & Co. and had their own house in the world where all of their prizes were stored. [...]

This is a microsite I built for MercerBell/Australia Post in my time at the Farm. It uses Papervision to move around the room, it took us a long time to get the room looking right, but I think it’s still quite a nice little execution.

I lead a team of three on this site for Sunbeam during my time at the Farm. I’m still very happy with the result, especially the navigation which still looks really great.

Here is a site I built for the Glue Society while at the Farm. It was very simple and clean and I still like it. They must have liked it too because they used it for the next years awards too.

These are some of the drawings from a diary I kept on a trip to Brighton & Spain.

This is a site I built while at the Farm, I love the design. It was a rebuild of their prior site (also built by the farm), to make it CMS driven. Due to the extremely lightweight design, I was really looking forward to the challenge of making this site as tiny as possible. The finished site was drawn completely in code (except for the several cursor images, which were gifs) and was about 60Kb in size, about the same as a large thumbnail image. Needless to say, I didn’t bother putting a preloader on it.

Here is a site I built during my time at the Farm, with several other developers.