professional hilites

The Mackerel projects on this page are a selection of projects where my own hands are very evident. These are a small (mostly award-winning) sampling of the 100+ projects Mackerel created. There is a small box of awards somewhere in the closet in my studio.

Canadian Encyclopedia Plus (1995)

one of Canada's first hit CD-ROMs

My major contribution was the collage for the splash screen, which was then recreated for the packaging and became the basis for the product's identity for the next few years.

Another Mackerel team did the interface work on this project, while a third party built the database.

Echo Lake (1995)

Family multimedia scrapbook software

A whole adventure. Details here.

Try Tercel (1995)

Interactive diskette for Toyota USA

This was the last project I was the lead programmer for. It was the most Mackerel-stack like thing we managed to ever do for a client. Some things may have stolen more tricks from the stack, but the Mac version of Try Tercel felt really good and responsive. (Nothing felt good on a PC then. It was just enough for it to work.)

Changing the color of the car by switching color tables required my graphics team to really come through and deliver graphics with palette control they did not believe was possible at first. I got them to prove themselves wrong.

Birdsong (1993)

Light and Gemstones(1994)

Interactive kiosks for Royal Ontario Museum

Birdsong was also adapted to a CD-ROM. These were produced in Supercard. Birdsong is still in operation.

Ontario's Mineral Wealth(1993)

educational CD-ROM / Science North kiosk

ROLLOVER NUMBERS TO SEE DIFFERENT SCREENS

Touch screen activity to show products that require mining. Illustrations were done to spec by Andrew Plewes. This guy was one of the first real pros I ever worked with. He lived out of town and we only communicated by phone and fax. Ever.

First he sent a ten page fax with about 3 dozen illustrations and told us to pick a style. Then we sent him a list of rooms, and the items that had to be in each of those room, explaining that each item had to be big and discrete enough to be a touch screen target. I scanned faxes of his perfect pencils and then coloured them.

Balance of Power (1991)

visitor center kiosk game

This interactive kiosk game was created with Ontario Hydro to communicate the complexities of developing a long term energy strategy. I created most of the designs and did the SuperCard programming and the QuickTime work.

MacLibrary Interactive Catalogue (1991)

interactive product catalog on floppy disk

This was the first commercial interactive project created with Mackerel. I designed and programmed this in Hypercard and it fit on a floppy disk. It featured a listing of over 200 products. The customer could add products to their catalog and print out a complete order to fax to MacLlibrary. They really did this

The Mackerel Stack (1990-94)

interactive promotion on floppy disk

We kept building these things and fitting them on floppies. First in HyperCard, then in SuperCard. This screen from the original stack is shown at exacts size, in full 2 bit glory. One screen, 8k. We were making things small before people were ever talking about "bandwidth".