Introductions
Aspecto was founded by Malcolm Hall and Marek Bell. We are both young PhD students in the Computer Science Department at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. We are members of the Equator IRC project, which has given us the opportunity to work on many exciting projects with leading researchers at many of the top universities throughout the UK. Our projects lie primarily in the area of HCI (Human Computer Interaction) and UbiComp, and we specialise in providing great user experiences through novel uses of technology.
Throughout our PhDs we have met many people in all areas of computing, and have attended numerous conferences and workshops around the world. As a result,
our office environment became a melting pot of ideas for novel and functional software that people actual desire. Our expertise in HCI design, and our wealth of experience with other systems, has given us a keen eye for what users find attractive, usable, and functionally beneficial.
Aspecto became a creative outlet through which we implement some of the many ideas we conceive that either do not fit into the current Equator research agenda, or which require a commitment of resources that Equator can not currently provide.
For example, in developing the Seamful Game "Treasure" we developed a WiFi scanner that was compatible with all Windows Mobile devices and nearly all WiFi hardware they use. We quickly realised the potential this WiFi scanner component had, and subsequently embedded the scanner into a freeware application, WiFiFoFum. That application alone has been downloaded over half a million times and people are appropriating it for all kinds of uses; such as finding free WiFi, network security applications, and the common PDA hobby of wardriving. This application has attracted many large businesses to contact us, and has result in substantial and ongoing consultancy work.
Whilst WiFiFoFum highlights expertise in a particular mobile infrastructure, our Dynamo application highlights our expertise in design. Dynamo was the first full screen, animated task manager for PDAs. Recognising that the default task switcher included with most PDAs is slow to navigate, and avoided by many users, we sought to improve it. The resulting Dynamo application provides extremely fast task switching. It is highly responsive and allows users to quickly identify the application they wish to use, rather than forcing them to hunt through small icons and text lists. Dynamo has proved to be extremely popular, and has appeared on numerous cover CDs of computing magazines around the world.
Aspecto Software are a committed and highly driven team. We spend great amounts of time designing and coding applications at our computers, and are always up-to-date with the latest computing developments. We realise that computing is a rapidly progressing field, and have great interest in continually learning new programming languages and skills. We specialise in wireless, ad-hoc, network applications on Windows platforms, but our experience includes web design, web scripting, databases and many different programming languages. We've been programming computers since the ZX Spectrum, so our level of experience is extremely deep.
If you would like to ask the team a particular question about how we have implemented something, or would like our opinions on how to design or implement software you are working on, then please visit the development area in the forum and post your question there. We check it regularly and will try to be as helpful as we can.