Andrew Yaros

Hi, I'm Andrew!

I'm a software engineer specializing in HCI, a web developer, and an artist. This page serves as a hub for all my work. Scroll down to see some of the software, art, and design projects I've worked on. Or, use the links above; check out my blog, and visit the downloads page for vintage Apple content.

LisaGUI is a full recreation of (and expansion upon) the Lisa Office System's user interface in the form of a "web OS" written from scratch in JavaScript. It lets users create, open, and edit files using a document-oriented workflow. There are a few built in applications, the most recent of which is a fully featured word processor called "LisaType". While it still has some bugs and missing features, I view it as a big step towards making LisaGUI genuinely useful. The typesetting system it uses was written from scratch.

Aside from that, a couple of demo apps, and a recreation of the Mac's puzzle desk accessory, there isn't much else to do other than toy with the filesystem and settings. I do have more apps, features, and bug fixes in the pipeline.

lorie.gallery is an artwork portfolio website I developed from scratch for my grandmom, a professional artist with decades of experience. It was designed to mimic the aesthetics of a white-cube museum gallery. Artworks can be selectively viewed by choosing them from a grid-view of thumbnails. When displayed individually, each artwork is set within a prominent white border with metadata displayed below à la a gallery plaque. Starting from scratch allowed for full control over formatting without the excess overhead generated by a website builder.

The other component of this system is a portable editor utility. It modifies a local copy of the website which can be uploaded to any hosting provider. This editor allows individual gallery items to be created, modified, and reordered. It's based on a python script which handles file I/O and launches a GUI in a browser window.

This section contains two portfolios of mine.

The first is a collection of design projects from my time in Drexel's architecture program in the form of a digital book. This was before I switched my major to computer science. The portfolio contains six comprehensive projects documented in detail, followed by a gallery of assorted renders and drawings. Each page of the PDF is a double-page spread. This is a large file ( ≈ 90 MB) and may take time to download. (If you have issues opening the file in a third party application, try using Adobe Acrobat Reader.)

The second is a gallery of my own artwork. This contains a wide selection of pieces I've created across several physical and digital mediums. This is a separate instance of the website I created for my grandmother's portfolio.

I created the official website for Project Beta², a mod for the popular first-person puzzle game Portal.

Project Beta² is an artpiece that allows people to experience what it was like to play portions of the game as it existed during various stages of development. It exists as an extension to the original Portal Project Beta mod, which was released back in 2010.

When designing this, I took inspiration from the mod's original website (which also used Portal's concrete wall texture as a background). The content is displayed in modules designed to look like the iconic signs at the start of each level of the game, which contain icons describing the hazards players will encounter (which I redrew as vector files).

As with all my sites, the entire thing was hand-coded from scratch. In addition, I also wrote the copy. Please check out the site, and download and play the mod!

This is a redesign of the website for my father's ophthalmology practice. The original site was created and hosted on a medical portal in the mid-2000s and was in dire need of an update. The design retains a few formatting similarities for the sake of continuity, but is otherwise a complete visual and technical overhaul, coded from scratch.

The site's content was totally reorganized after conducting a thorough review. This included the elimination of a number of redundant and confusing pages. The presentation of the old site was disorganized; access to detailed reference information originally presented upfront has been consolidated to a single section of the site. The more immediate informational needs of patients are now prioritized. The new site also contains some basic (and necessary) features not present in the original, such as a footer with office contact details.