Doug Pfeffer
News
January 5, 2012
I just delivered two apps into the Apple App Store, waiting for them to be reviewed. I'll post the details of one of them later, but number two is the fully realized and utterly useless Mike Ma Yourself application.
Mike Ma Yourself is a chance to experiment with Apple's facial detection tech in iOS5. Celebrating Mike Ma Appreciation Day seemed like a great excuse to ship an app. It processes the live video feed and super imposes one of several faces of Mike Ma. Tapping a face changes the expression. I'm doing some sort of fancy proximity calculations to determine which face is which between frames, so I can persist selected expressions. Images can be saved to the camera roll.
December 20, 2011
The Barbarian Group's 10th Anniversary party was one of extrememe merriment. We had a bank of iPads displaying fond memories from the past 10 years. I wrote custom OS X and iOS software to synchronize the video across the iPads over a local Wifi network. A server app running on a Mac Mini broadcast instructions to the iPad apps over Bonjour.
See a video I hastily took at the event here.
December 15, 2011
My sister and I made Stitchtagram. It's a product that lets you arrange your Instagram photos on a throw pillow. I designed and built it, she makes the pillows. Check out some of the customer photos, they're really awesome! It's been an absolute thrill seeing the site through from conception, design, development, and finally producing pillows that get delivered to happy customers.
November 20, 2011
Insta Gazette is a daily photo hunt. I helped out by whipping together a quick script to transfer appropriately tagged images from Instagram into Tumblr.
October 2, 2011
Hey! The Instagram screen saver I made (download) got about 25k downloads. That's pretty good for what looks like a 1996 Flash demo.
August 5, 2011
So I made this body hair simulator a while ago (see somewhere below).
Some Germans liked it, check it out: I Am An International Artist..
June 27, 2011
Recently we celebrated Mike Ma Appreciation Day at Barbarian Group. It was pretty great. I took it as an opportunity to try out some new face detection software in an iPad app. The end result is this fine piece of advanced augmented reality technology, named Mike Ma Yourself. See some screenshots here.
June 24, 2011
Here's this Hairrr.app, now downlodaable.
May 19, 2011
Hey check out this Instagram screensaver I made, Screenstagram. Some people seem to like it.
April 16, 2011
Ryan and I made a thing for Record Store Day It's called LP Roulette. See the full blog post here.
February 18, 2011
Check out Shrug Lyfe, a comic strip by pal Mike Rubenstein. I built this comic publishing app with Rails for him.
February 4, 2011
I've been checking out Cinder, the "library for professional-quality creative coding in C++". It's a whole new world. I've never tried graphics programming. I made a body hair simulator, it's weird: http://forum.libcinder.org/#Topic/23286000000636037.
October 12, 2010
Busy October! Among the usual work stuff two awesome things happened. The iPhone version of Be The Mayor I developed made it to the app store (it's free, check it out!), and myself and Ryan McManus released CrapLogo.me, a parody of the Gap logo fiasco. You can generate a crappy new Gap logo with your own name.
While the concept behind CrapLogo.me is mildly entertaining, its reception was absolutely shocking. We had 150,000 visits the first few days it was online. It got mentioned in AgencySpy, Mashable, BuzzFeed, Gawker, CNet, New York Magazine, Time Magazine, The Awl, Washington Post, Vanity Fair, and many more. Here's an recap we wrote up about how it happened and a little on why we think it took off as much as it did.
June 1, 2010
Launched Be The Mayor with Rick Webb and Emma Welles, here at The Barbarian Group as a side project. It got in TechCrunch which is kind of fun. More info on it at the Barbarian blog.
November 21, 2009
Finally got Last Night's Check-ins out the door. I designed and built this. It's sort of a diary driven by your Foursquare checkins. It’s super easy to use. You just sign up and it’ll email you a list of your checkins from the previous night, and you can email back some notes about each one. It’s awesome to look back a month after the fact and see what you were up to all those late nights.
June 12, 2009
Helped Splay with something Kanye liked it! (screenshot).
June 1, 2009
I built Rename the Swine Flu with Zach Slow and Bryan Denman. It was pretty popular, until it got overrun by racists Hungarians and we had to shut it down. Then Google turned of my Adsense account. True story.
March 15, 2008
Check out this analysis of emoji usages on Twitter I made. Also, follow twitter.com/probablyTrue. It's a bot that pulls short facts from Wikipedia 3 or 4 times a day. Original blog post.
Dec 7, 2008
Two side projects: Rappers On Twitter and One Kill per Second. Both built with Merb. I designed/developed all of Rappers on Twitter, and just did back end on One Kill Per Second. Worked with some Barbarian chaps on that.
Feb 5, 2008
Since the beginning of the year I've been a full time Barbarian, which is pretty exciting. Projects thus far: Tap Project, for UNICEF, and a blog that sucks in all this other content from other sources. Hopefully we'll productize that.
December 6
Fun to see a site I helped work on get written up by The Guardian: http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/digitalcontent/2007/11/voting_has_just_opened_for.html
November 13
Just launched the very exciting The 2 Husbands, which is being called the first million dollar online reality show. Lots of Rails and video processing/streaming going on there, so do check it out.
August 9
Product launch: RallyClock - Time Management via IM and the Web. It's nice and new and on Rails, built with Vermonster.
July 1
Little update. Two new internal Rails apps for The Barbarians, work on a product for Vermonster that should be released soon (Rails, Postgresql, JS, design), and I quietly released a personal project that's been marinating for a year and a half now: iKnowEm (on Rails!). And a wee little mini-site for my sister's project: Bullet Buddies. Have a looksee.
May 06
Little redesign for Wesley Mann's site. The old one was kind of wierd, I guess. Bird wings and a Western motif for an NYC photographer? It's still delightfully Rails-based, rest assured.
February 20, 2007
New projects: An internal workflow app for The Barbarian Group (Rails), another PHP app for Harvard Law, and more Rails work for Vermonster and IBC.
I'm still open to other interesting projects, time permitting. Get in touch!
October 4, 2006
Hello friends,
Quick note to say that I'm happily doing Ruby on Rails
exclusively from now on, largely as a result of working
on a hefty job (4+ months so far) for
these folks, with these guys.
May 19, 2006
Two launches in one week: Wes' site is done, too. Built with Ruby on Rails, Flash, and a Javascript drag-and-drop photo administration on the backend.
May 17, 2006
Introducing Quote-Fu, another quotes site, built with Ruby on Rails.
Feb 04, 2006
The Amazing del.icio.us Stemmer!
Jan 30, 2006
I launched two new sites to between late 2005 and early 2006: Pointfingers.com and BookPriceFinder.
Both are happily built with Ruby on Rails. I released the code to PointFingers which produced a small amount of buzz and a pretty good amount of traffic.
BookPriceFinder is a book price comparison engine that I'm hoping to make some money off of referrals. It's really just an experiment, both in terms of programming (writing the web crawlers was interesting) and straight money making.
Also coming up is my friend Wes Mann's photography portfolio. That's been on the back burner for a while, and I'm very happy to finally be getting it off the ground.