Tomas Apodaca
selected work
contact me on: emailmastodongithublinkedin
A photo of an Ulaanbaatar neighborhood, taken from a drone.

Digital Maps of Ulaanbaatar

2014

I was engineering lead on a team that worked with the city government of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia to update internal and public maps of the city with the goal of improving the delivery of urban services. We photographed neighborhoods with drones and generated vector maps from the images. I procured satellite imagery and worked with the city to organize community mapping efforts using Open Street Map.

I did this work at The Asia Foundation.

Developers at a hackathon, creating an election app with API Pemilu

Indonesian Election Data and API

2013-2014

I led engineering on a team that partnered with the elections advocacy organization Perludem to build a database and API for the 2014 Indonesian legislative and presidential elections. I wrote scripts to extract and transform candidate data from web pages, PDFs, and images; directed the team that built the API application; and helped organize efforts to promote the API to Indonesian application developers.

I did this work at The Asia Foundation.

An iPad displaying the Scrub Video app

Scrub Video App for iPad and iPhone

2012-2014

I co-designed and -coded this video creation and sharing app for iOS devices.

Scrub Video is built around the concept of button-free interaction with video—you tap anywhere on screen to pause and play the video, slide your finger to fast-forward and rewind and pinch to seek. This pattern is applied to interaction throughout the app, affording a fast and fluid interface.

A still image from a GE video, showing a cross-section of a violin encased in resin

Short Videos for the GE Show

2010-2011

A series of videos for the GE Show, designed to showcase General Electric's diverse technical and engineering work in the fields of manufacturing, medical imaging, air traffic control, solar energy and rail transport. The collected videos were viewed hundreds of thousands of times on YouTube, but have since been removed.

I was part of the team that came up with the concepts for the videos; I helped shoot and edit them, and contributed photography and animation.

This was a smallpower project, in collaboration with The Barbarian Group.

A still image from Rien que la Vérité, showing two women having a conversation

Rien que la Vérité

2007-2010

Rien que la Vérité was an original dramatic tv series that aired in the Democratic Republic of Congo to millions of weekly viewers. I co-wrote and co-directed the show and was deeply involved with every aspect of its creation and marketing.

This was a smallpower project.

A map of the united states with multi-colored dots representing people using the MoveOn National Town Meeting application

MoveOn National Town Meeting

2005-2007

As part of the team at Stamen, I helped design and code this map used to host nationwide live events. As tens of thousands of people listened to live audio of an event hosted by MoveOn, they saw themselves and other participants on the map, submitted and read others’ questions and participated in on-the-spot surveys.

There were several different versions of the map for a series of events held by MoveOn in the lead-up to the 2008 elections.

A visualiztion of web browsing history, with multicolored arcs connecting moments on a timeline

Root Markets Sketches

2006

Root Markets was a start-up that made tools that people could use to track and analyze their own online activity. As part of the team at Stamen, I helped design and code a timeline tool that allowed people to visualize their browsing history.

As part of the development process, we generated a series of interactive sketches that explored different ways of presenting browser history data. The sketches are unpolished, but they helped us quickly test ideas and document our design process. You can view a subset of the sketches here.

A screenshot of the Vito Acconci website, showing projects connected by elastic lines

Vito Acconci Portfolio

2006

As part of the team at Stamen, I helped design and code this portfolio site for the studio of legendary artist and architect Vito Acconci.

The studio organized, tagged and captioned hundreds of images of their projects. The entry page to the site presented the tags in an alphabetized list. Clicking a tag led to display of the matching projects, with shared tags represented as translucent arcs connecting images.

A stylized map showing the paths of taxi cabs in San Francisco

Cabspotting

2005

As part of the team at Stamen, I helped design and code this visualization of taxi cab movement around the city of San Francisco for the Exploratorium. The data was gathered in real time from gps devices in the cabs.

Access to the API was offered to interested artists. To encourage participation, I created Fly Cab, which traced the path of a single cab over the course of several days at 2000x normal speed and in three dimensions.

You can read about and view Fly Cab here

A still from the Poultry in Motion cartoon, showing a row of chickens standing on a conveyor belt

Poultry In Motion

1999

An interactive cartoon that appeared along with three other pieces on a CD-ROM produced by Angry Monkey. The cartoon follows Ambrose Chicken's adventures from egg to fast-food dinner table. The CD-ROM won a silver award in I.D. Magazine's 1999 Interactive Media Design Review.

This was an Angry Monkey project.