Week 4-5-6 is one of those great sequential numbers. This week share’s its name with the Ferrari 456 car, the British Rail Class 456 train and 456 Abnoda a minor planet.
It was a busy week this week even though we don’t have a lot of notes for things we managed to do.
We worked a bunch on our stealth project a bit more. As part of that projects there is an accompanying iOS app. We want to get some feedback from the team, so we sent it off to Apple to get into their beta testing tool TestFlight. After 2 or 3 rejections, we managed to give them all the additional information they wanted. The app (currently) is pretty minimal and doesn’t do anything more, actually less, than the accompanying website. The only thing not available on iOS Safari (yet) is web push notifications. Which is something we feel is important. The website is slowly coming along, but we also be mobile friendly. If we ever do manage to get Web Push Notifications on mobile devices, we’ll be ready.
We also started a new small consulting project. It will be a few hours a week and the plan is todo some pair programming. We have some skillsets and background that is missing in the company, but they know their goals, infrastructure and business better than us. So sitting down a few hours each week and working together through the backlog hopefully will be the best of both worlds. They get some training and work through their backlog faster. We don’t spent a lot of time with understanding all the business decisions or internal politics. The plan is to try this for a few months and then re-evaluate the progress in the new year. This is different for us, so we’re learning along the way too.
Internal
As it gets towards the end of the year, we’re going to need to get all our paperwork to the accountants. That means printing off invoices, bills and receipts. Which also meant we need to buy more printer toner. Sadly, in Iceland, there isn’t a lot of choices. We have a perfectly functioning old Dell printer, but getting refills is nearly as expensive as buying a brand new printer with toner. Luckily (for us and the environment), we found a company that still stocks our toner and we ordered three. (Next week’s note will probably include more printing talk)
We spent some time this week also going through two older iOS projects which we managed to break. When macOS Catalina was released, it offered away for iPad apps to ‘easily’ be compiled to run on macOS too. While it is easy, it doesn’t always work and we messed-up something so bad, we just had to hard-reset and go back several steps. Luckily, in doing so, we managed to fix a few other bugs and move some progress forward.
The first is Triagemail, a focused simple email applications. It is our daily email app and first port of call to graze the inbox before tackling it properly.
The second is Newsletters. This is not public yet, but it is a very artisan email client. Rather than check your inbox, it groups and clusters newsletters like an RSS reader. We managed to fix a few bugs this week and if we have some time, we want to work a bit more on it and release it for anyone to use.
Bric-à-brac
This week we learnt the work myriorama. They are a set of cards that can be placed in any order and they will make a logical panorama.
