Andy Szybalski

Hi there, I'm Andy and this page is brought to you by the color international orange.

I'm a product designer at Google. For the last few years, I've been a senior designer on the Geo team, where I helped create Street View, and led design on a bunch of other efforts including several versions of Earth for desktop and iPhone. I also designed the driver experience for Google's self-driving cars. Previously, I worked on Google's products for advertisers and interned at Apple and Firaxis Games, where I wrote some code and designed some maps for Civilization IV. I attended Stanford University where I received a BS and MS in Computer Science with a concentration in human-computer interaction.

Would you like to feed the dog?

Stuff I like

• This video of an Arctic fox hunting mice
• Achewood, a great daily webcomic
• Snark Hunting, a blog about naming and branding
• Orisinal, beautiful and fun Flash games

My current stuff

• Andy Szybalski (@andyszy) on Twitter
• Shared items on Google Reader
• Pigeon District, where I occasionally blog about cities, design, and technology.

My old stuff

• The Mooches is a webcomic I wrote with Max Doty. It chronicles the adventures of an oddly-shaped fellow named Sandbag and his three freewheeling housemates. We haven't updated it in years but you can check out the archive.
• Arborius is a little experiment in Flash programming and tree-pruning (warning: this will probably crash your browser)

A Painting

• Sutro Tower Inc (oil on canvas, 48 × 24 in., 2008)
• Listerine (oil on canvas, 24 × 24 in., 2002)

Some Photos

• My photos on flickr
• Eagle Park at Night (digital, 2006)
• West Wales (digital, 2005)
• Hearst Castle (digital, 2004)
• Moraga Creek (digital, 2004)
• Staffa, Scotland (35 mm black and white, 2003)
• Freeways (35 mm black and white, 2002)
• Western United States (35 mm color, 2002)
• Friends (35 mm & medium format, 2001–2003)

Also see some miscellaneous design work.

Software for Mac OS X

Most of this stuff has probably succumbed to bitrot, but feel free to poke around...

• Shellsilver is a little utility for launching shell scripts
• Lunamoth (beta) is a fast-paced 3D arcade game
• Pyper (experimental) is a musical development environment for Python

Papers, Research, etc.

• I gave a talk called "Maps Give You Superpowers: Lessons from Street View" at NACIS 2009; one of these days I'll get around to putting up slides from that talk.
• Happier Travels through Street View with Pegman, Google LatLong blog
• Getting from A to B with Street View, Google LatLong blog
• "Why it's not a wiki world (yet)", 2005 (PDF). Suggests technological and social reasons for the slow adoption of wikis, and examines the future course of the technology.
• Clara Shih, Armando Fox, Terry Winograd, Andy Szybalski, Maria Crone. Teamspace: A Simple, Low-Cost and Self-Sufficient Workspace for Small-Group Collaborative Computing. Proceedings of CSCW 2004. (PDF)
• Rafael Ballagas, Andy Szybalski, and Armando Fox. Patch Panel: Enabling Control-Flow Interoperability in Ubicomp Environments. Proceedings of PerCom 2004. (PDF 2.6 MB)
• Balancing Zero-Admin and Incremental Intergration in Ubicomp Environments, Undergraduate Honors Thesis, May 2004 (PDF paper 4.2 MB, or PDF slides 2.5 MB)
• Using Depth from Focus to Create Composite Images with Arbitrary Focus, 2004 (PDF, 8.5 MB) Removed due to space constraints

Painting at left: Sutro Tower Inc, by me, 2008.