About Me:

I’m Phil Downey. I attend Wilfred Laurier University and am aiming to complete my BSc in Honours Computer Science in April 2010. I’m one course away from a Global Studies minor as well. I’ve developed a passion for all things related to user interfaces, including interface, interaction and experience design/development. I’m currently reading WPF Unleashed to learn how to take advantage of the new features available in UI’s for Windows 7 and Vista. I’ve completed a 4-month directed study in User Interface at WLU under Dr. Angele Hamel, as well as been employed as an Interaction Designer full time for 4 months in the summer 2009, and part time ongoing since September 2009.

My Projects:

audiophonik:

audiophonik use to be a music blog I attempted to maintain in second year of University called “Take that you bastards”. The title was a bit unsavoury, so I decided to create a new name – audiophonik. With the change in name, also came a change in content. The site was used as a personal blog for music and tech. However, audiophonik didn’t last long. I got busy with school, and the blog went neglected for a long, long time. In September of 2009 I started something called The Linux Experiment [more info below] with some colleagues. The experiment consisted of us, the guinea pigs, using Linux as our primary computing environment for four months. During that time, I started realizing there was a lot of technical stuff I was learning but couldn’t necessarily post on the Linux Experiment because they weren’t related to Linux. So I decided to start up audiophonik again!

The Linux Experiment:

Abbreviated as TLE, The Linux Experiment was a 4 month experiment where 7 people of varying technical expertise decided to use Linux as their primary operating system. Due to concerns about being able to work from home, and continue Visual Basic development, I opted to dual boot openSUSE 11.1 and Windows 7 Professional RTM. After the end of the 4 month period I switched over to Kubuntu 9.10 as my preferred Linux Distribution and have been using it as needed.

Visit: The Linux Experiment

Project MORIS:

Project MORIS was the final project for the directed studies course I took in fall of ’09 at Wilfrid Laurier University. Tyler Burton, Jon Fritz and I analyzed the current course registration system at WLU called LORIS.

We broke the system down functionally, preformed a survey on students who’ve used LORIS before, and rebuilt the interface with the user in mind. We also added a few functions that would drastically help out the users in their registration process.

Because all three of us are familiar with Visual Studio, we used the C# and the Windows Form Designer to create a prototype model of our new proposed interface. Tyler and Jon focused on the analysis, while I was tasked with creating the prototype.

In April of 2010 Jon and I gave a quick 6 minute feature highlight presentation of Project MORIS to a user experience peer group based in Waterloo called IxDA Waterloo. You can view the presentation we gave as well as download a copy of the prototype below:

Presentation: Redesigning LORIS [.ppt]

Presentation: Redesigning LORIS [.pdf]

Application: Project MORIS [Requires the .NET Framework 3.0]

Keyfinder:

An example of the power of distributed computing, this web-based project uses a dedicated botnet and any number of in-browser Java applets to perform a distributed brute force attack on an RC4 ciphertext. The site is written in a combination of HTML, PHP, AJAX, JavaScript, and Java. It was written by myself, Tyler Burton, and Jon Fritz. [text adapted from jonathanfritz.ca]

Visit: Keyfinder.