The last two weeks have been a blur, lots of things happening outside of the office taking focus in week #368. We did managed to still get a bunch of things done. So here’s the run down:
iOS Apps
These last two weeks, we’ve spent a bunch of time cleaning-up several of our iOS apps. A few minor updates to the Red Days app. This is a list and countdown of public holidays for the US, UK and Iceland. Using a lot of the same code-base, we also released a new app called Emoji Calendar. This lists out all the holidays, not just days off, for the US, UK and Iceland, but tries to display them as two character emojis. Both of these could easily be webpages and Red Days started off that way, but with these two apps we are mostly exploring calendaring on the Apple Watch. This has no built-in browser or support for web-clips. Even if it did, it is unlikely they would also support watch complications. Those are what we’re most interested in, tiny, glanceable piece of code that run directly on the watch face. No need to ever launch either of these two apps.
The third app we pushed live in week #369, was How Far: Iceland. This makes use of the built-in Health.app on the iPhone. Even if you’ve never used it, you probably have been logging some data. Steps, altitude, distance and more. This little app reads from that common database and tells you how many equivalent times you have completed local Icelandic distances. For instance, we can see how many times we’ve climbed the highest mountain in Iceland, just by going up and down stairs at work. This would be difficult to be a webpage because you need direct access to the Health.app database and for privacy and security reasons, there isn’t any API. This is our test app to get feedback, if things go well, we’ll be expanding it to many more well-known distances.
It feels strange not to be doing web work all the time, but broadening our horizons and experimenting with place the web isn’t (yet) makes our decision making and tools sets more robust. It also helps us lobby for more places the web should be and we can make better informed arguments for why.
Internal
Several internal things managed to get done in the last two weeks as well. Every two months, we need to turn our tax information to process our value-added-tax. So we printed out all the invoices, bills and receipts and we spent some times going over the books. In the process, we also went over everything from 02017 and put together our 02017 Annual Report. Hopefully, this is useful to others starting out.
We also got ourselves a little company birthday present. Last year at the Material Conference, we had the wonderful duo from Solidwool come and talk about their process of creating a new material. This week, a new Hembury Chair we ordered arrived. It is a thing of beauty. We’re really happy to have it and i’m sure it will spark more discussions as people sit on it.
In Week #369, we also got a notification that said 500 days closing the move ring on your Apple Watch. Which means we’ve been with this wearable for 500+ days. It has certainly be an interesting experiment, one which warrants it’s own post.
External
As for external projects, we managed to get done a few tasks. One project we just about wrapped-up is building a small, custom CRM tool to help them track construction in their industry. It is a straight forward Django app to CRUD some customer data, but it took a bit more time to get it all setup on their hosting. For another customer, we continues to tweak their survey collection tool. Mostly focusing on some of the emails that are sent from the system to help stylise them a bit more in the hope for improved engagement.
Bric-à-brac
Man is the lowest cost, 150 pound, nonlinear, all-purpose computer system which can be mass produced by unskilled labor.
— A 1965 NASA, man-in-space report