INTERACTIVE PROJECTS WEB DEVELOPMENT AND UX DESIGN

This is what is flickering away in the background; an algorithm from Ancient Greece to find prime numbers.

It changes each time you load the page so right now it could be psychedelic siezure inducing flashiness or it could be sitting there looking rather blank.

I love this algorithm, because, well who doesn't like prime numbers?

The story of this project is an example of trying to see something which can't be seen. I had known about prime numbers since I was a child but it wasn't until I read about this algorithm, where you list all the numbers you know, then starting with 2, cross off every multiple of 2, then go to 3 and cross off every multiple of 3 and so on. I though this would be a pretty interesting though laborious thing to do with painting. So I did it. It is actually quite interesting, though it doesn't sound fun I'll admit. The finished paintings can be colourful and lovely, but you don't see how the primes interact, dancing around one another, creating different patterns according to how the original grid is arranged.

I figured I could write a program to simulate the activity and you can see how the patterns form.

>> SIEVE FOR PRIMES >>

I came up with this game by playing around with hexagonal grided paper.

OK that's not exactly true, I had been trying to come up with my own version of a cellular automaton that would respond to different strategies in human behaviour, but that's neither here nor there.

The aim of the game is to make a large triangle from smaller triangles in order to get another go.

>> PLAY STRIANGLES! >>

I love puzzles

I don't like sudokus much though, but making a machine to solve them was quite a puzzle.

Grab yourself a newspaper and use my sudoku solving machine!

I built this app over a weekend for fun coding practice. It still has some flaws which I want to iron out which will have to wait for another free weekend.

Testing this on users, I found the numbers can be quite hard to see, especially outside. The biggest downside of the program as it stands is the tedious inputting of the numbers. To counter this I need to add a function where the user takes a photograph of the unfinished sudoku and the computer inputs the numbers. I have found some code to do this, I just need to put it all together.

I made up the algorithm to solve the sudokus, and thinking I would have to add another part in order to solve fiendish sudokus, I tested it on a Times fiendish sudoku and was surprised to find I didn't need to so I didn't. Woe is me, clearly the Times' idea of fiendish isn't everyones, so that extra little algorithm will need to be built. Test and test again!

Return in future for the new and improved Sudoku solver.

There's already a link to this page but I want to talk about the actual page here.

I designed this gallery to avoid the traditional gallery of thumbs and carousel convention on most websites.

I wanted to save the user from clicking on images, going back, clicking on another. Modern browsers are a lot faster than they used to be so I don't think this convention is still all that relevant. However, the thumbnail gallery is a fast way to reach other images. To achieve this I have made the thumbnail gallery as a vertical repeating parallax element which scrolls faster than the main gallery, so that the user can quickly jump from picture to picture.

Users scroll through the gallery with each image being visible with a tiny part of the next or previous image being visible.

A gallery is by its nature about the visual, so as I was not doing a separate page for each image I wanted to include information without cluttering up the gallery itself. To achieve this I made information tabs about each work which slides out on hover for desktop and focus for mobiles.

My reluctance to update galleries in the past has been because I was using pure HTML and ftp client. It involved re-editing and re-uploading the website, which is why I used Wordpress in the past. Now I have learned NodeJS and how to incorporate a database into the site, so I can upload new images through MongoDB and keep updating the gallery.

You may have noticed I have a lot of pictures and I like Maths. So where do these two things come together? Making frames!

When you order mouldings to make picture frames from, they come in lengths, they have a width, and they have a rebate. If you have a number of pictures to frame, you want to order the right number of lengths of moulding. You also don't want to end up wasting lots of moulding that could have been used. To aid the struggling framer in this task I have made the FRAMING MACHINE! It doesn't actually do any framing so maybe that title is a bit misleading but FRAMING CALCULATOR doesn't sound as fun.

Keep your brain fit with these Maths exercises!

I made this for home school, it wasn't meant to be torture.