Another double weeknote. We are still getting into the groove and trying to schedule the time to do the writing. It’s just that sometimes things get in the way. Last Friday turned out too be too busy to post, so here we are.
Week 424
This was a busy week prepping surveys. April is big survey month. We started two more surveys and will wrap-up 3-4 others. This means setting-up servers and importing lists and questions to start, while pulling out data from other surveys, pestering any one who has not met the response rate, and turning off all the services we are no longer using in the cloud.
Since Easter is in a few weeks we have a deadline to get the results out before the break. Otherwise, it is nearly a month behind schedule.
We also had a meeting about resurrecting an old client project. No matter how well you plan, you are always at the mercy of clients. And sometimes they are at the mercy of theirs. So a project that got shelved a year ago has now gotten some traction again and over the next few weeks we’ll relook at the status and see what we can do. Hopefully, once we’re done, we can talk a little more about the whole process.
Week #425
We spent most of the week travelling to the Netherlands for the UXInsights conference. We gave a short workshop, twice, once in the morning and then again in the afternoon. Then packed-up and came home the next day. It was good to get out and see a little bit of the city of Utrecht, but surveys needed our attention. So home we came to round-out the week crunching numbers.
We also spent some time working on some survey data for external clients. We crunched the numbers for the upcoming O’Reilly Cloud survey report. This was less involved than other projects. The survey was already built and completed. We were helping analyse the data for anything interesting that might be out of the ordinary for the report.
On top of all that we got another potential lead doing some work for a chocolate company. We have a meeting next week and we’ll see where that all goes.
iOS development
In our spare time between projects, we’ve been experimenting with a few iOS development projects internally. It has been fun and frustrating. Sometimes, things that are very, very easy on the web turn out to be more difficult on a device. Things like layout, floating, reflow, media queries are all very easy todo in CSS. In the Xcode design builder, there are no equivalents!
Since these are either hobby projects or for our own internal itches to scratch, it will be a while before they make it out into the wild, but we’re happy with how they are shaping-up.
In working on these little projects, it has given us a renewed hope and sense of awe in some of the very low-lying, boring technologies that have really changed our world. Most of our apps are using IMAP or SMTP and even with all their short-comings, they work wonders.