A double-weeknote this time. Last week, time managed to slip away from us, but we caught it this week and made some time for a quick dump of what we’ve been up to.
Week #291
This week we had a meeting with an old clients about potential new and exciting projects. These are always fun to go into a meeting and people tell you about how much time they’ve spent thinking and pondering the problem. Even if it is something silly to you, you can feel their passion for the work. We then get brought in to help reassure them they are on the right track and be a sounding board for their good and bad ideas. We bring our skill set to compliment their ideas and needs while we learn a bit more about their product.
A brief aside took us by the QuizUp office this week to chat with the team. Many are sad the fun is ending, but there is still a lot of work todo. There are a lot of smart people with smart ideas plotting and scheming. Expect for some interesting things to happen soon.
We’ve also been hard at work on our top secret project. We now have a confirmed meeting in Week #292, so it is now a matter of polishing things enough to wow them at the demo.
In-between projects, we’ve also rekindled the old Triagemail project. We’ve always wanted a really simple, minimal email client and we’re back building exactly what we want.
This is also the week Apple released their new iPhones, Apple Watches and the new AirPods. Not much to say about these now, but over the next few weeks and months and more people get them into their hands, we’ll begin to really see the impact (or not) on our daily lives.
Week #292
Our Top-secret project meeting went very well. Better than expected, but still a long way to go as it moves up the chain of approval. Not much more we can say about that one.
We also started testing our first beta version of Triagemail this week. This is an iOS app we’ve been working on for a long time, but never had the resources or know how. Recently, we discovered the MailCore library to handle all the messiness of IMAP and SMTP to send and receive emails. That cleared the way for us to just focus on the design and workflow. That was built much faster than we expected. That’s what happens when you’ve been thinking about this idea for years! Now it’s in the hands of a few beta testers and we’re seeing how things are working in the real-world. We’ll fold that feedback into the project and hopefully release something before the end of the year.
A few tweaks and changes to the old educational survey products. We’re running a pilot test in Mexico for a few schools there and needed to fix a few bugs and add new users, but otherwise that’s ticking along nicely.
We also launched our first real-world test on the Volunteer Management Application. It is about a month behind schedule, but we found a group here in Iceland willing to test the system in its current (not so pretty) state, just to get feedback and force us to work on the project as their demands are needed. We’re excited and hoping that over the next few weeks and months to get some interesting feedback and stories about the software.
Bric-à-brac
We found this interesting service: Postacard. With Bots being all the rage, someone built a really simple SMS bot which takes your photo, plus a message, address and credit card details and creates and mails a physical postcard to you. It is US only, but the idea is brilliant. Selfie to postcard in less than a minute.
This is an origami style bird lamp. With its weighted beak and feet it stays balanced. The beauty is in its simplicity.
Metamaterial Mechanisms: I suspect we’ll see a lot more of this type of stuff in the future. As 3D printing becomes more pedestrian along with 3D printers in places like the Space Station, we’ll need tools and parts that either can be printed in once piece or have no small parts to get lost and burn-up on re-entery.