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 Who am I?
At the risk of sounding Narcissistic, I decided to add a small section about myself. Personally, I like to know about the people I collaborate with. If you're interested in the things I am, feel free to drop me an email or join this project. William Bull |
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What do I do professionally?
I work for QNX Software Systems, Ltd. manufacturer of the worlds most reliable operating system. All boasting aside, QNX produces some of the best embeded technology on the planet. It is considered a "mission critical" operating system. This basically means that it is used in projects where loss of uptime or reliability could cause human death. Aside from all that serious stuff, QNX's Neutrino operating system also has a full blown desktop development environment. You can even download and install it yourself and write some code, if you like. (http://get.qnx.com) My job is quite varied at QNX. I am their primary user interface designer. I am also a technical program manager and I work for both R&D and the Marketing department, as needed. By far, I am a man of many hats. I occassionally code, write, draw up designs, go to meetings, and talk ... a lot. |
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What projects have I done?
I have drawn thousands of icons and user interface mockups for companies like QNX, Be Inc., ZeroKnowledgeSystems, IBM, AmericanExpress, and many others. I am actually a professional "icon artist" - if anyone can really have such a title, I do. Much of my work on the BeOS is now lost, as the company was purchased by Palm, Inc. I originally designed a dynamic (i.e. on-the-fly) UI skinning architecture, implemented at QNX. This included an application for designing parameterized vector graphics. Aspects of this are similar to what is now known as SVG. Properties of the vector based graphic were mapped to UI internal resources, to be rendered as byte-code or written to compilable code. I designed and wrote the constraint-based anchoring library used to evaluate the vector graphics geometry. (Similar technology is found in software such as AutoCAD.) I designed the "look and feel" of almost all of QNX's graphical software, their desktop environment, their user interface elements and on-screen branding. This includes every sample application, splash screen, icons, check boxes, menus and window borders... since the release of the Photon microGUI v2.0. I originally designed QNX's package installer and collaborated on the package architecture. This involved designing a metadata system to represent software dependencies. I also created a categorization system to handle the vast amount of public domain software. I organized, named, and documented over four hundred categories each with their own icon. I have contributed artwork and small amount of user interface design recommendations to the IBM Eclipse IDE project. Eclipse is great modular IDE written in IBM's Java (J9 - an efficient implementation). As a demonstration of QNX, I worked with several engineers to produce a PDA environment. I wrote the documentation, designed applications and coded several key systems to deploy a fully-functional hand held environment. Previously, I produced the user interface and architecture design for a version of the National Semiconductor WebPAD. Outside of work, I am actively developing a semi-persistant online world, the Summermeat Inn and the Broadback Valley. To produce this, I have needed to develop some specialized software - the MemeticAI Toolkit. Associated content magement tools such at this website and Mason have also been created, as needed. |
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Is that it?
Of course not! If you'd like to know more -- just ask. I'm always and email away. I'd just like to finish things up by saying that I don't believe any of the doctrine that computer science is developed or mature. For all my informal experience I have found more satifactory progress from my own endeavors than from anything I've seen "reseached". We are at the cusp of new technology and it is made by people who "do", not people who say "do not". |
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