Over the last few months, Zach, Theo, Arturo and the rest of the openFrameworks gang have been hard at work to bring you the latest edition of openFrameworks: v006.

I’ve had the privilege of being included in the process, along with Memo Atken, Damian Stewart, and Zach Gage, to help openFrameworks run on the iPhone. Memo has also created some iPhone specific addons for accelerometers, multitouch, and more!

Memo has written up an awesome article about the process and first results, and how to get started with openFrameworks on the iPhone!

Zach and Theo are currently on tour teaching folks about openFrameworks and the first few oF based iPhone applications have reached the App Store!

I’ve seen a lot of Flash libraries attempt to increase their speed in string intensive tasks by creating a custom StringBuffer class.

In many other languages, a StringBuffer is much faster than standard string concatenation. I set out to see just which method was fastest, for both the tasks of combining a handful of strings (<50) and combining a large amount of strings (>10000).

Here is the test:

Read More →

I get to do a lot of interesting work with the Facebook Data Team. This past week has been quite a lot of fun as I’ve gotten to combine my two loves of social data and story telling by generating a series of graphics for a story about Facebook in the New York Times in the Business section of last Sunday’s paper as well as served up online. Graphics were generated using Processing.

I couldn’t be more happy and excited about the result of this year’s Malofiej Awards. The Malofiej Awards are the international Grammies of the infographics world.

I’m most excited about receiving a Peter Sullivan Award, or best in show, for the Ebb and Flow in the Box Office published in Feb 2008. I worked on this graphic with Amanda Cox, who did very well overall at Malofiej.

In addition to this, Map of Olympic Medals, a graphic I put a lot of time into, received a Silver Medal in the “Features” category.

These graphics, as well as the other award recipients, will be published in a book in the near future — I recommend keeping an eye out for it!

This past week the Economist published a piece entitled Primates On Facebook that described some research done by the Facebook Data Team. Since there have been a number of questions throughout the monkeysphere, we thought we would take the opportunity to describe our approach, the data, and our analysis.

Read more about our findings (and become a fan) at the Facebook Data Page
and my coworker Cameron’s blog at Overstated.net.

Almost two months gone by without design process updates. I’m really busy, and a lot of the things I’m busy on I just can’t show off the progress work. I’m excited about a handful of projects that are coming to fruition in the next month or two.

Until then, a teaser.
I just spent a moment tonight making this:

Every year for the last few years, my family has sent increasingly more complex and interesting Christmas cards. It’s become tradition to put well over 60 collective hours of production time – half of which past midnight (and not just by myself), hundreds of dollars and a frantic last minute mass mailing just to hear the words “best card yet” from our family and friends.

This year, instead of shipping out a hundred hand-made books or three-foot-long fold outs, we decided to save our fingers from the paper cuts and our wallets from the printing costs.

We had Kinkos whip up a box of these…

The inside reads: “Find them this holiday season at byronmurray.com”

Happy Holidays to you all, and thanks for a great year! Here’s hoping that 2009 is as fruitful as the last.

If you live in San Francisco, come out for the release party tonight!

After the release party, you will be able to download it for yourself!