Week #636

This week shares its name with US phone area code 636, which is the western part of Saint Louis. Growing-up, we were 314, but were vary familiar with 636. This week also share’s its name with 636 Erika a minor planet orbiting the Sun.

This week we sent out our 4th edition of this season’s ⪮ Good Morning Newsletter. You can always read it online, but we’d prefer if you subscribed. Then you never miss it.

Last month, we met-up with some old friends and pitched them one of our many zany ideas. It was right-up their street and of course they loved it. We showed them our work-in-progress idea and presentation and we spent over an hour going through and improving it. We still have plenty of homework, but we’re on a great track to strengthening the concept.

We also met-up face-to-face with the accountants. They were very lovely and helped-us through a bunch of questions. Now things make way more sense and 02023 we should be almost completely on top of the accounts. We’ve always had a good overview of the financials, but until now we didn’t have all the reconciliation tools to all but complete the annual report. We are using PayDay.is for the online accounts and it is actually kinda fun in a nerdy way!

To paraphrase Mark Renton from Trainspotting “This was to be my final [deadline], but let’s be clear about this. There’s final [deadlines] and final [deadlines]. What kind was this to be?” For the umpteenth time, we hit in the final deadline for Hyperion, but next week’s the next final deadline.

Week #637

This week’s intrasteller namesake is astroid 637 Chrysothimis. It is part of the Themis family is one of the largest and longest-recognized dynamical families of asteroids. Its composition is believed to be similar to that of carbonaceous chondrites. To date, the Themis family comprises approximately 535 known asteroids. According to the Urban Dictionary, 637 is an abbreviation for Always (6) and (3) Forever (7).

We have two school surveys going on this week. The regular monthly compulsory school survey and a second high-school survey running just this month. For the high-school survey, we’ve emailed, SMSed, emails some more and now it was time for Robocalling. It is much harder to move the needle to get high-schoolers to respond to a survey than any of our other customer groups, but we keep-on trucking.

We do a lot of exploratory VR work as well, and this week we’ve run into a few bugs with the new Oculus OS updates. It was plenty of restarting of devices and computers, cable swapping and plenty of cursing, but it seems that we’re still in a good position with a few of the experimental projects.

More Hyperion deadlines, we’ll just leave it at that.

With some projects winding down and others in a holding pattern, we went back to explore some internal hobby projects, namely our iOS apps requiring the MailCore email engine. Previously, we had a heck of a time getting it working in Swift, but that was a few years ago. Now, it is a swift package and we spent a few hours this week re-creating everything in SwiftUI for the TriageMail app. We could re-use all the classes, but managed to hook it all up in the new swiftUI framework fairly quickly. In the process we smoothed out a bunch of rough-edges and added some functionality that we’ve been wanting. It is now being tested and a few new translation strings added, but soon should be available for download.

Along those same lines, we have a dedicated Newsletter reading app that also works with your email by reading a specific IMAP folder and threading the messages like an RSS reader does. That’s also been converted over to SwiftUI and is looking great! There is still a bunch of functionality to clean-up and test. Plus, the onboarding experience needs improving, but a version 2.0 isn’t far away.

Fluxcapacitor

We have always been fascinated by analog paper. In 02009, we wrote about the PaperNet, a way to try an infuse the digital with the analog.

Back in 02010, we wrote about Professional Oaths. The ideas was that if you publicly dedicated yourself to something, you were less likely to go back on your word. So many more industries need some public, professional oaths?

A year later in 02011, inspired by a page from magazine about Estonia, we wrote about City Swatches. A simple way to create sibling cities based on the same latitude or longitude.