James Closs

Open House London is an annual event in which 800+ buildings of architectural significance are opened to the public for one weekend. The app enabled users to define comprehensive search criteria by which listings could be filtered, maintain a list of favorites, and plan daily itineraries. It also included full mapping functionality and the ability to search for buildings of interest nearby.

I was the sole developer of the app that accompanied the event and maintained it from 2017 to 2020, when the event was scaled back due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The app had regularly attracted 25,000+ unique users across the event weekend, and because of the time-sensitive nature of the project, it was absolutely critical that it ran without bugs.

I built the app in Xamarin.Forms with the vast majority of the codebase consistent across iOS and Android. I worked closely with the UI designer to maintain the integrity of the design across platforms and with the back-end developer to specify the REST API used to retrieve information on the participating buildings. Finding ways to asynchronously load large amounts of data without compromising the user experience was a key challenge.

A Xamarin.Forms-based app prototype that featured Goozby, a Tamagotchi-style character, to encourage children to spend time away from their phones. Points were awarded for the time when the phone was screen locked, which enabled the character to grow.

The app required a native Xamarin component on each platform to maintain a background process that tracked the locking and unlocking of the user's screen. Users could challenge themselves not to exceed a certain amount of screen time per day and would receive feedback from their Goozby based on how they were performing.

A framework I developed for the production of mobile games, initially for Java feature phones but later ported to C# and Xamarin for iOS and Android. I created 30+ games using this framework, which collectively sold over half a million copies. Aspects of the framework were licensed to Digital Bridges (now I-play), Electronic Arts, and Nokia.

The framework included an emulation layer that enabled J2ME games to run in a Java AWT environment for desktop and browser and on Android phones with no code changes. It also included an ANT-based build tool that would target 1,000+ handsets with wildly different specifications from a single XML configuration file.