Week #702
On Monday, we posted on social media some Puffin pictures taken in Borgarfjörður eystri. The post continued to get boosts for several days. The photos were taken with the TinType app, and two experimental apps we’ve been working on. The first is a series of filters, one attempts to emulate the LOMO camera look. The other app was inspired by Xavi Bou’s ornithographies. This app takes the video feed frames and flattens them using the ‘darken’ blend mode. It creates these timelapses in a single image.
On Wednesday, we sent out our seventh episode of the ⪮ Good Morning Newsletter. You can read it online, in your inbox or via RSS. We send out monthly newsletters on various, interesting topics.
We continue to update the Adventure Maze print-on-demand books. We moved from a themed amount of pages (24 pages for Christmas and 31 for Halloween) to just a simple 100 mazes per book. In doing so, we needed to re-setup all the entries on Amazon along with update the cover now that the spine has more pages along with the actual content. We’re not 100% done with all three books and they are available for sale! Next step, digital versions.
Since we moved office to Egilsstaðir, the place we’re staying doesn’t (or we can’t find) any dice. One app we’ve had on the back burner for awhile was an iMessages Dice Rolling app. It got bogged down in a lot of internal design decisions and has been stuck. Ignoring all that, we made a quick SwuiftUI dice roller for ourselves. There are probably plenty of web-based and app based dice rollers already, but as they say, there are also plenty of love songs and people still continue to write them!
Making our own Dice Roller app was a great little exercise. It is useful and a great example, tutorial project for anyone who wants to learn SwiftUI.
Week #703
The Adventure Mazes now have a Digital Bundle version. We’re still experimenting with pricing, but for $9 (the price of one book) you get PDFs of all three books. We have additional book ideas in the pipeline, so the bundles will get updated accordingly. The effort is low to sell digital versions, so we thought we’d try and learn more in the process.
We made some stickers last week that finally arrived. They are a secret, so we can post any pictures (yet). Normally we used StickerMule for these sorts of projects. In the past the quality has been great and if you are not in a rush, they have weekly deals which are a fraction of the normal price. But recently, their CEO went and used the marketing mailing list to spam everyone about Trump.
Our Miami work continues. All the major backend tasks are wrapping-up and we’re going to be switching gears next week, but not sure to exactly what.
The big VR project continues to tick along. We’ve ported most of the code over to an iPad app and are now iterating with the client’s feedback on layout and content containers as the content is being produced.
We also got back into some analytics number crunching. We recently released some new features in an app and needed to keep an eye on the general performance. One of our partners also needed some numbers about how various characters were performing in game, so we had to dig-up both how many games they were choose, but the number of player who have unlocked those characters so we could normalize the data into some popularity ranking.