Thomas Karam

android and open source enthusiast

About Thomas Karam

I'm Thomas Karam. I am an Android developer, with over 12 years experience in IT. The past 5 years have been all Android, which I love! Scroll down below to see some of my work.

Portfolio

I'm Thomas Karam. I am an Android developer, with over 12 years experience in IT. The past 5 years have been all Android, which I love! Scroll down below to see some of my work, or contact me for more information.

Santa Tracker

From Google Play "Play games with elves in jetpacks, rolling gumballs, sleighs powered by rockets and Google Cardboard. Once the 24th arrives, follow Santa in his journey around the world."

Main responsibility was the development the "Dasher Dancer" mini-game. Overall worked with a team of 3 developers to complete 3 minigames for the app.
Implemented custom OnGestureListener
Used the Sensor class to detect the device being shook, using the accelerometer
AnimationDrawables were used to provide animations while characters where idle and when a gesture or shake occurred
Extensive performance tuning, including reducing overdraw and and analyzing systrace results

Viggle

Viggle is a second screen app, providing rewards to their users for using the app while watching TV. Users would check into a TV show to earn rewards and play mini-games to earn additional rewards.

Developed and maintained a real time fantasy sports mini-game for football and basketball
Worked with WebView, WebViewClient, and JavascriptInterface classes
Server was written in Java, utilizing Akka for messaging between components
Events were pushed to the app in real time using PubNub

CLS America's Thorium product is a satellite based communication system for fishing vessels. A tablet app communicates via bluetooth to the satellite hardware. With the app the user can view weather reports, email, GPS coordinates, and file reports to fisheries about their catch.

Integrated the open source library OpenDataKit to handle parsing and display of XML based forms
Customized OpenDataKit library with a custom domain specific language, which I defined, to provide dynamic form functionality
Created custom Layout extending ViewGroup, used in a map to display wind direction and weather event paths
Used bluetooth to communicate with the satellite hardware using a serial protocol

DIRECTV

Worked with a team of 10 developers on a tablet specific app. The app's primary functionality was to act as a TV guide. It could additionally stream video, manage a DVR, and act as a remote control.

Developed a horizontal scrolling ListView (this was before the release of the RecyclerView)
Helped provide guidance to junior developers
Triage management to bring the app to market

Turtle Beach Kiosk

Turtle Beach is a gaming headset manufacturer, and their headset kiosk is in Gamestop and BestBuy stores across the country. At the heart of the kiosk is a tablet running a custom app displaying production information. Please read more of the project here.

Read the press release here.

Developed from scratch a full screen application, utilizing rooting techniques to disable status and notification bars
Created methods to update content on the tablet via both a polling of content servers when wifi was present, but also via manual intervention with an SDCard inserted into the device.

Texas Instruments

From Google Play "TI's app is the design enginer's best resource for information related to TI's products. Search for parts, technical documents, and application block diagrams in English and Chinese. View datasheets, pricing, inventory and purchase options for parts. Plan your designs from any place with 3G or WiFi access and share the information with your colleagues."

Helped develop product catalog screens utilizing TabActivities
Created pre-installed SQLite database which would install on first launch of the app
Developed an update process of the SQLite database using another database for updates from the store due to large data updates not feasible to handle exclusively in the SQLiteOpenHelper.onUpgrade() method

Contact Thomas Karam

Feel free to email us to provide some feedback on our templates, give us suggestions for new templates and themes, or to just say hello!

tom.karam@gmail.com