echo 'Hello World';

“The future is always beginning now.” - Mark Strand


My name is Ryan Bailey and I am an interface designer at McAfee Labs in Alpharetta. I work mainly in PHP and JQuery and dabble around with some other languages. I have several years of creative experience in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. I've been making websites for over 10 years and really, really love my job.


Now that that's out of the way, I can finally get to what this project is about. The NextStep Interface is my blog about my 20% work here at McAfee. Many people are familiar with the Google 20% timesplit in which employees are allowed to work on their own projects and, as a result, have received multiple great ideas from employees working on side projects. My "20%" that my manager, Anthony has so graciously allowed me to undertake will be to work on a brand new interface, which I have named the NextStep Interface Project. 


Here at McAfee Labs we focus mainly on data mining and data visualization, that is, taking massive amounts of raw data and making logical and useful. In the information age that we live in, there is no shortage of data, yet a surprising lack of useful conclusions that can be gleaned from it. So working on making data useful and beautiful is what I attempt to accomplish on a daily basis. 


The NextStep project specifically is aimed at answering the simple question of, "Where's my flying car?" So often when watching movies or TV shows, the hero will interact with their computer in mind blowing ways that seem so foreign to the ways that we interact with data on a daily basis (either through spreadsheet or db result lists). I believe I can help take a step in the right direction (more on this later). 


By no means do I think I'm doing anything groundbreaking or revolutionary. I'll be using this blog as mainly an area to write my thoughts of how the project is going, cool links, and information to some of the guys and girls who really are the revolutionaries. I think it will be pretty interesting to see how far things go.