Brad Larson, Ph.D.
About
I'm an engineer, both by training and by mindset. My undergraduate degree is in Chemical Engineering, and my Master's and Ph.D. are in Materials Science. The closest I come to a degree in computer science is my undergraduate minor, but I've been programming on the side since I was little. I regard computers and programming as a means to an end, but not the ends themselves.
My day job is with a company that I co-founded based on my work in grad school, called SonoPlot, Inc. At SonoPlot, we build and sell robotic systems for printing microscale features on surfaces. These systems are used in directly printing microcircuitry and in manufacturing low-cost, high-density biological research tests. We converted all of our control software to Cocoa over two years ago, and all of our systems now ship with iMacs as control computers. I write and maintain all of our software, so this is how I was introduced to Cocoa development.
I became fascinated by the iPhone SDK when it was announced, but only started doing development after I saw Apple's examples of the iPhone's processing power at WWDC 2008. Three weeks later, I had created Molecules, my little 3-D molecular visualization application and had submitted it to be in the App Store at launch as a free, open source application. The response shocked me (to date, Molecules has been downloaded over 540,000 times), as did the interest in the application's source code and my tutorials about it. I started work on a much more ambitious project, and six months later had Pi Cubed in the store. I listed under the name of my little consulting company, Sunset Lake Software, and charged $10 for it. It has been a decent success, bringing in over $20,000 in sales.
Both of the applications I worked on caused me to dig deep into the various Cocoa frameworks on the iPhone. I became involved with the Core Plot open source framework, which is attempting to create a robust plotting / charting library for Mac and iPhone, and that has exposed me to other elements of the core frameworks. I'm excited to be able to share some of what I've found with everyone in this class and hopefully to encourage you to create applications above and beyond what's out there right now.
Web sites
http://www.sunsetlakesoftware.com (personal)
http://www.sonoplot.com (work)
Profile on Stack Overflow
http://stackoverflow.com/users/19679/brad-larson
Applications
Pi Cubed
http://www.sunsetlakesoftware.com/picubed
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=311433261&mt=8
Pi Cubed Lite
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=322897795&mt=8
Molecules
http://www.sunsetlakesoftware.com/molecules
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=284943090&mt=8
The Core Plot framework (I'm a contributor)
http://code.google.com/p/core-plot/
http://groups.google.com/group/coreplot-discuss