Work
Santa Fe Institute
I worked at SFI for two years as a post-doc, on computer models of biological systems, such as Echo and Tierra. Some projects that came out of that:
- MacTierra (which I actually started while working on my PhD)
- Echo
- Space Explorer
- Some artificial life-related “bloopers”
I also collaborated with Christian Reidys on graph theoretic approaches to evolutionary processes, resulting in a couple of papers (Evolution on Random Structures, Evolution of Random Catalytic Networks).
Netscape Communications Corp.
I joined Netscape in late 1997, and have been there ever since (through a couple of mergers). I worked initially on the mail-news portion of Netscape Communicator 4.5 on the Mac, then moved onto the Mozilla-based Netscape 6 and 7 browsers.
I helped to write and maintain the original MacPerl-based Mozilla Mac build, and was one of the core contributors to Mozilla on the Mac (see my bug fix list, which is slow to load).
When not working on Mac stuff, I worked on Composer, the Gecko-based HTML editor. I was mainly responsible for the glue layer between the backend and the XUL-based UI, and the APIs to make the editor embeddable in other (C++) applications.
I’m always interesting in performance issues in projects that I work on. I spent serveral months in the footprint and performance team, looking at both platform-independent, and Mac-specific performance problems. While working on that team, I wrote my own profiling tool called Chronoscope, using the Metrowerks profiling hooks. The Chronoscope source is available on SourceForge.
Throughout my time at Netscape, I contributed to MacCVS Pro, which is a GUI-based CVS client, now hosted on SourceForge.
Camino was a skunkworks project that started life as Chimera. It’s a Cocoa application that embeds Gecko, providing a nice, native-looking UI on top of a kick-ass layout engine. I was a core contributor for several months, and was responsible for the name “Camino”.
AOL
AOL aquired Netscape in November 1998. Life at Netscape didn’t change overnight, but gradually the assimilation with AOL progressed, and the investment in Mozilla decreased. AOL finally ended internal Netscape browser development in August, 2003. The $750M settlement with Microsoft, which gave AOL royalty-free use of Internet Explorer for seven years, helped sound the death knell for Netscape.
Before the final killing-off of Netscape, I’d moved to working on a different project, which was AOL Communicator on Mac. AOL Communicator was a suite of applications, including Mail, Address Book and Instant Messenger, which was targeted at more advanced AOL users.
The first version of AOL Communicator on Mac was based on wxWindows (now wxWidgets), which needed a lot of work to bring it up to the level of quality and performance that we needed.
I worked on rewriting AOL Communicator on Mac to use a native Cocoa frontend, while refactoring the backend code to be more UI-agnostic, until the project was cancelled.
After AOL Communicator, the Mac team focussed on smaller, more targeted applications for Mac users. First we did AOL Service Assistant to help people set up their Apple applications for use with AOL services. I wrote the wizard-style interface, and factored the code into “steps”. I also wrote both much of the core radio engine, and the user interface for AOL Radio (review). Yes, that translucent display was my idea (as were the color choices). Obviously AOL still hasn’t got its act together, because AOL Radio for Mac still isn’t mentioned anywhere on AOL Music, and the links there all say “sorry, your OS is too lame”. Way to go, AOL. Oh, and notice how I had to link to Apple for those products?
Apple
I fulfilled a life-long goal and joined Apple in October 2005. I’m working in the QuickTime applications group (the team that does QuickTime Player). We’re working on cool new stuff.
Resumé
My résumé in html format.