Week #670
We’re still stuck behind the 8-ball 🎱 with sickness. Some of the team is recovered, others are recovering!
One project to replace the sunsetted WorkFlowMax product with some custom software seems to be now off the table. They will probably replace it with Monday.com, but we’ll see. The deadline is this summer and we’re quickly approaching the point of no return. Our spring time is usually busy and 02024 will be no exception, so if they need our help, we’ll need to start ASAP and that doesn’t seem likely to happen. That’s one potential lead off-the-table.
In February and March, we conduct a lot of surveys. Which means in January and February we do a lot of prep-work. This includes collecting, cleaning and preparing lists, finalizing questions, spinning-up servers and plenty of marketing and getting customers (and potential customers) over the line before we send out the first email. This week we started to do some basic preparations. We listed out changes and texts that needs translations. Reviewed the gendering of the language we use in the survey. (Icelandic has three ways to decline words, we’re only changing them for masculine and feminine, but are actively trying to either add a third in a non-clunky way or re-write questions in a neutral way from the start). Any head start we can get will save us headaches later. Especially, since Easter is in late March in 02024 and will certainly cause problems with people just not being around to take the survey.
There is another project which we might come in on as the prototype specialist. If investor friends put money and resources into this company, we’d be brought in to make their wireframes a reality. This working prototype would be limited, but it serves two major purposes. Firstly, it helps internally to figure out if what they wireframe actually makes sense when you click around and use it. Secondly, this prototype is the working demo for the next round of investment. At which, they could hire the right types of developers based on what the prototype type tells them the weakness of the team will be.
We continued on with a small due diligence project. We have an SDK from another company and are just making a simple “Hello World” app using it to see all the pitfalls and issues. We then relay that information back to potential investors to help them frame their decisions about the viability of this technology.
Some of our extended team was at a Facebook games event several months ago. There, they were given several tips about push notification marketing messages. Some do’s and don’ts, plus a few more ideas that seemed to increase open rates. This week, after almost all the other major deadlines have been completed, we sat down and reviewed all the push notifications we are sending and tried to improve the text based on recommendations.
On Tuesday, we sent out the last of ⪮ Good Morning season 2. The feedback has been great and we’re iterating on the format only slightly for season 3. If you’re not subscribed, we recommend signing-up so you get it delivered fresh into your inbox monthly. Just 4 links and no self-promotion.
Week #671
On Monday a new potential project fell into our laps. It is a prototype for an iOS app and accompanying web backend. Nothing is agreed upon yet, but we merged some slack channels to keep the discussion moving forward and got invited to the Figma design files.
We have another older VR projects that is starting to warm-up again. It takes some effort to keep the code-base up-to-date and functionality in parity with what the various headset manufacturers offer, but a stitch in time saved nine!
We also spent some time going back over our old Newsletter iOS app. This app is an artisanal email client. It is designed to look at a single IMAP folder and thread the messages like an RSS reader. We wrote it a few years ago in Swift using Mailcore in Objective-C. Recently, we migrated the UI over to SwiftUI to make things easier to maintain. Over the holiday break, we plan on doing some reading, so getting this up to scratch was more than just a hobby project. Version 2.0 is in testing and should be in the App Store for 02024 – just gotta workout a few last bugs and tweak any beta tester feedback.
This week the long awaited arrival of Iceland’s newest eruption occurred on Monday evening. By Wednesday it was starting to subside, but things take time to figure out next steps.
Fluxcapacitor
Back in 02013, we got ahold of some pencils from a Portuguese company. We wrote about them in an article called Color Symbols. They were trying to come-up with a standard for symbols to represent color shades.
Also from back in 02013, it was Weeknote #148 & 149. Remember ClearLeft’s Chüne‽ We also mentioned a survey project at a new Innovation House. That was 10 years ago and it took us a while to remember. This was out at Eiðistorg where Vivaldi software has a headquarters. We never did the survey we talked about.
Happy New Year
This is our last weeknote of 02023. We’re closing the office between Christmas and New Years (or atleast that’s the plan).
We’ll hit the ground running in January with the barrage of usual posts: 02023 Omnibus, 02023 TIL, 02023 Annual Report and the 02024Q1 Newsletter.