Pet Theory

Pet Theory is TECHNOLOGY

The Flash platform has grown way beyond banner ads. It is now a sound basis for desktop programs and data-intensive web applications as well as complex, content-rich sites.

I'm an expert in Actionscript, the programming language that undergirds the Flash platform.

My strength as a programmer lies in meeting the increasing demands on Actionscript with traditional software-development principles and tools. I relish the architectural phase of a project, and devoutly believe that the first is the half of everything.

Keywords: Flash, Flex Builder, AIR, svn, Ant, MySQL, Ruby on Rails, amf, design patterns, UML, Enterprise Architect, Photoshop, Illustrator, OS X, XMPP, XHTML, CSS.

My current project is Chat Is Democracy, a chat site that features diverse scenarios and roles to get users typing madly, then gives them a chance to pick chat leaders. The site is being built with three powerful open-source technologies: Flex, Rails, and Jabber. It's astounding what just a few people can create nowadays.

Pet Theory is Matt Garland, web multimedia specialist. If you're about to translate your pet theory into a web project, contact me. I can help at every step: vision, look, interaction and every phase of programming.

I am especially intrigued by projects that involve learning and politics. Code-driven fx are fun, too.

Geography Born in San Francisco, I spent my early years in Seattle and New Jersey before going to Reed College in Oregon. Next was Santa Barbara, where I got a Ph.D. in English. After proofreading at an ad firm for a few years, I discovered the joy that is programming. Now I live outside Portland with my wife Joelle and our squealing baby, Mira.

I'm available for short-term or long-term Flash, Flex, AIR or Rails projects. Contact me for any reason--I'm curious, what is your pet theory? And can I do anything about it?

Pet Theory is MEDIA

Flash has grown powerful as a media delivery platform: it combines text, video, audio and animation.

Flash is at its most original when various media are combined and cooked into an interactive experience. Then Flash becomes more than YouTube, or an mp3 player.

One sorely underserved market for interactives is journalism. Interactives in this field could be as compelling as Pac-Man and as analytical as a big-think article at the nytimes.com. But mostly they are uninformative maps or voice-over slideshows.

Are you interested in this market? Maybe we can team up, especially if you are myriad-minded and supple in all things visual. Could we be the first syndicated interactive columnist-team?

Imagine an interactive that not only links slide to slide and text to text, but video...to text...to graphics...to audio... Hypermedia means from anywhere, to anywhere, and hypermedia is my ambition. Coming soon: an interactive about Barack Obama's memoir and what it suggests about the Obama the politician.