Over the years, I’ve of course worked on a ton of projects, and some of them I open source. Usually I do this if the project was school related, back when I was in college, or I want to hand over the project to the community. Of course, neither go very far after that since it seems like you need to be known and you actually have to build something useful. Anyway, here I’m going to list some of those projects and where you can find them.

Back when I was young, I made a program that converted a text file into an exe. This allowed shareware vendors to create self running catalogs. It was a pretty neat program, and had search, colors, mouse support, etc. I called it CatGen, and I even sold a copy or two. Not technically open source, but it built you a .BAS file (QBasic/QuickBasic) that included the text file. You can find it here (warning, not coming from a controlled source): CatGen 3.0.

I went on and started looking into 3D graphics, and at one point I wanted to become a game programmer. I studied all the latest books on OpenGL, DirectX, SDL, etc. It was fun, and I created my own game engine from it. I submitted it as my senior design project in undergrad. It was a full blown Quake 2 engine including rendering, physics, animations, sound, and music. I have to go find that code.

I went on to work for Motorola after college. I was working in a research and design group in the cell phone division. I was actually working with the people who designed the original RAZR, and my pride and joy was the “morphing” phone called the MOTOROKR E8.

I wrote all the software for the original prototype, and helped in analyzing and fine tuning the morphing, capacitive sensor, and the haptics. By the way, the haptics on this phone were amazing. Pushing down on the buttons felt exactly like a button, even though the keyboard didn’t move.

I decided to move on from there when the company was doing poorly, but I did take something with me. I took the idea I was using for the user interface and made it my own open source project (with the okay from my boss at the time). I called it MiniUI. This was a hardware accelerated, scriptable user interface. It allowed all the effects we take for granted on our smartphones now to be created simply and easily through XML and simple scripts. I wrote two papers on the project which can be found through the following:

• http://sourceforge.net/projects/miniui/files/Documentation/1.0/MiniUI.pdf/download
• http://sourceforge.net/projects/miniui/files/Documentation/1.0/ctirs08_submission_4.pdf/download

I also have a demonstration video, but it is pretty low quality and the recording was very laggy (hence the tearing on the screen).

To this day, that project still gets downloads, but I’m not sure why. It’s now 2-3 years dated. It also started getting more hits since I started this blog, but that is probably just be coincidence. Otherwise, I’d start believing you guys are stalking me.

Lastly, we come to my latest project. At my company, I created a data access layer for an application framework we use from Aptify. It’s an adapter of NHibernate and NHibernate.Linq to their proprietary system. It’s actually fairly complex, and after doing it I wonder why I finished it. Now that it’s done, though, we’re loving it. I submitted it to Aptify for their Aptify Innovations Award contest. I was one of the top finalists and spoke at their user conference in Las Vegas. After presenting my work to their community, the community voted me as the winner.

So I guess that makes me an award winning developer, although it’s a fairly niche area. You can find my project up on bitbucket at: http://bitbucket.org/markglenn/apics.core/src.

So what now? Well I’m currently working on a commercial client product in the message queuing market. Hopefully I can get that to the market in the next couple of months. In the future I’ll discuss more about the product as I build it. For one, I have a lot of interesting things to talk about in regards to some of the tools and middleware I’m using to create it.

Also, again, I’m going to Startup Weekend next weekend in Chicago. Actually if you go to that link, the top story (as of this writing) may look familiar. Yes, it’s my article! Chris, one of the people running Chicago Startup Weekend, asked to republish my article on the site. So I’m a proud guest writer. Not bad for a guy who got B’s and C’s in english and writing classes. Anyway, I hope to see you there. Also make sure you have your tickets for the event.