Week #704
Monday was a public holiday in Iceland, it was Commerce Day or Verslumannahelgi. It is a big travel weekend and bookends the summer holidays.
Wednesday we got back to the Reykjavik Office and are slowly getting things back in order.
We got caught-up on Adventure Mazes publishing tasks. We’ve been updating the PDFs slightly and tweaked the logo. There is a digital download if you want to print it yourself. The website is mostly made-up of horizontal block banners. We kept it simple so it also works on mobile. Since each block works more-or-less independently, we also have a tiny PHP if statement to rearrange them based on the date. That means as Halloween approaches, that block is at the top. In November the Christmas mazes are featured. As we add more books, we can continue to dynamically re-order topics based on the time of year.
We use Heroku for most projects. It is easy to work with and simple to turn over to a customer without them needing a dedicated IT team to manage it all. As part of that process, Heroku is pretty good about keeping minor versions of software up-to-date, but every once and awhile we need to go in and manually back-up and update bigger version jumps for the database, python or the Heroku stack. We took advantage of the slow summer days and made some improvements.
On Friday, we had a PETALS sync meeting. After the long summer, we’re getting back on track by reviewing tasks, updating the priorities and generally getting back into a rhythm.
The Miami Project continues to move forward. We started to connect Stripe so that in the future we can collect payments. It is still too early to figure out pricing, but we’ve built it into the app and the backend so it is ready to turn on at any time. The other important thing that needed to be built to make this happen is to make sure the app won’t work unless the customer upgrades. Otherwise, you can roll-out a payment scheme, but if a customer doesn’t update, they never see the payment button! Otherwise, most of our tasks are not Quality-of-Life type of improvements: Better mobile views on the website, more SMS and push notifications, referral program and other small things.
The VR Project is now back to the front of the queue. We’ve taken the SwiftUI code for the Vision Pro and ported it over to the iPad. Most everything works fine, but we need to change some colors; the Vision Pro is a default dark/glass theme and the iPad is white. The other team making content is finished and next week we’ll start to get raw images and video we can plug into flush out the UI a bit more.
Week #705
This week we learnt about PaperCamp 3! It is a little over a month away in London and we’re seriously contemplating going. 10+ years ago, we were invited to PaperCamp 1 (or 2) and missed it and have forever regretted it. That saw the seeds of “Little Printer” be born – which we still think is a great idea!
On Wednesday we had a meeting about the depreciation of the Island.is SSO (Single Sign-On). We used this on several projects so we’ve been aware of the End-of-Life deadline for awhile. On projects which did NOT need strong user-authentication, we’ve moved to 2FA using a TOTP (Time-based One Time Password). But we have one project that needed the strong authentication. This meeting was the first to figure out how best to deal with it going forward.
We fell behind on our ⪮ Good Morning newsletter due to travel and work, but we’ll do our best to get 4 interesting links out for August.
We have some raw 180° spatial videos to test in a Vision Pro. So the VR Project is now in full swing! This is exciting and certainly will lead to more projects. The goal here is to make a prototype app and workflow. They customer wants to be able to replicate the workflow for several of their projects, but since no one’s done this before, we’re also learning what works, what doesn’t, what’s feasible and what has the ‘wow’ factor. Then we can better harden the app to make the updates dynamic and improve the workflow for future projects.
Now that we’re a good 8 months into the year, we spent some time re-evaluating our hourly work-load on some projects and looking into our rent contract. Taking an average of expenses for just 1-2 months can miss a bunch of annual payments, but using the last 8 month (or even 20 if we include last year) gives us a better average monthly spend. Taking all these numbers, we’re looking to update our rates and workload in the fall and going into 02025.
The old adage about where to complain about Twitter when Twitter was down now applied to Mastodon! Our local instance is down. There were less than 100 people using it and even less active. I’m not sure if the owner is away or even aware, but it’s been a week and it isn’t back up. We partly don’t care, but it would be great to know if it is coming back-up so we can either continue or migrate our data somewhere else. Certainly a LOW priority these days.
Week #706
We continue with the Miami project as it is slowing down for us. The remaining tasks are not as urgent and are cleaning-up and making the general experience better.
We’ve been getting back into Swift Programming. We had two goals this week: one was to get some Bonjour networking messages passed between two different devices and the second was working with some 3D models as navigation elements.
On Friday, we sent out Season 3, Episode 8 of our ⪮ Good Morning newsletter. It was a bit behind scheduled, but better late than never!
We also had our PETALS sync where we went over tasks and reviewed the project status.