Happy New Year!
We’re heading into 02025. Week #726 was our first full week back at the office, but that doesn’t mean the last 4 weeks weren’t busy!
Publishing Schedule
At the end of 02024, we decided to pause the ⪮ Good Morning Newsletter in 02025 and instead focus on writing here. We’ll see how things go, maybe the pendulum will swing back. Our ◍ Quarter notes newsletter is still published each quarter. You can subscribe to get it delivered to your inbox or feed reader.
We have over 100 draft articles and it is time we go through that. So we planned out Q1’s publishing schedule. The cadence is to have one article published a week. That might be a weeknote like these, a regular article, or newsletter. That’s the goal, we’ll see how well it goes!
Week #726
This week, and year, have started slowly. Many of our contacts are still out and as they return, they need to dig themselves out of their backlog before we can get started again.
We started the week by updating and clearing-out old surveys in preparation for this spring. We’re looking to improve our sampling method. For big schools in Reykjavik, there is a chance that over the 10 years your child is in the school, you MIGHT not get randomly sampled. We’re starting to keep a hash list of previous participants and change the sampling to decrease the odds someone previously sampled will be sampled again.
As part of another project, we’ve been tasked with looking into Apple’s App Clips. One app we’ve been sitting on is a simple Dice Roller. We used it as an example app to build something in SwiftUI and made an App Clip. Now you can scan a QR code and get a quick dice roller without having to download an app. After getting everything setup we submitted it to Apple only to get rejected as Spam! We put in an appeal, but we’ll see how long this process takes!
We have an Apple Watch and found out there are options for the Portrait watchface that are not exposed through the UI! If you share a watchface from the UI to yourself the resulting Protrait.watchface file is just a .zip (rename it and unpack it). There is a /Resources folder with an Images.plist file. In there you can specify all sorts of things, like clock size, position, a background, foreground and image mask! We’ve managed to get nice portrait like effects using illustrations.
We had lots of fun with this! Our plan is to package up a few of our favorite experiments, re-zip them, rename them back to .watchface and put them up for anyone to download.
Summer Project has woken up! They managed to get some funding a few weeks ago and now are scaling-up. My contact who was coding is now trying to hire, plan and code, so we’ve stepped back in a bit to help with some of the lower-level maintenance tasks until they can hire more folks and get over the hump.
Our Australian Plumber project has gone quiet. They formed a new parent company and in that process they legally needed to setup a new Xero account for taxes. We took our own project code, replicated, OAuth’ed to their new account and changed a few of the variables for where to fetch projects, pay rates, etc. They entered some of their team members and projects and we correctly imported them. The goal was to switch over before the new year, but no word on how that’s going.
On Thursday, we sent out our 02025Q1 ◍ Quarternotes newsletter all about Clickbait and Dumbbells.
On Friday, we got back on track with PETALS. We had a team sync to plan and generally get back on track.
Fluxcapacitor
This week in 02014, was weeknote #152. Our triple weeknote Week #150-152 covers what we were up to 11 years ago!
Even further back in 02011, we wrote about Maximum Color Contrast. If you need to find out if black or white text has higher contrast on your chosen color, there are a few methods.