Week #733
We’re wrapping-up two parent surveys, prepping our March staff surveys and a private survey starting sometime in early March. On Monday and Tuesday it was Winter Holidays in the schools in Reykjavik, which meant we didn’t get a lot of work done because many of the people we needed to pester were off.
Overall, this week was mostly dominated by meetings. Secret meetings, a meeting about Calendar design, Apple App Clips discussion, a meeting about the web tool for AR/VR app development, and a long workshop presented by Apple about “Creating Immersive Experiences”.
We did manage to get some work done. One client in Australia seems to mostly buttoning down their business. We added a series of checkboxes to their web job tool. Their admin team can check if the customer has a credit check, if they have paid a deposit, plans have been reviewed, etc. They now get nightly email alerts for upcoming jobs that have not yet met some of these criteria. It is generally much more professional, not starting a job until all the T’s and C’s are buttoned-up!
On Wednesday, we posted about a Mini Thermal Printer we picked-up over the holidays. It’s been great fun to play with and we’re excited to experiment more with the possibilities!
We also moved a bit back into Swift coding. The tablet/VR app used the same code base, but not all the content was always available. Spatial video doesn’t playback on the iPad so it was omitted. We spent some time this week finding a way to indicate there is content on the VR headset not playable, but available on the tablet.
While in the app coding mindset, we looped back on some 3D models we needed to investigate and brushed-up an old game idea. We originally prototyped it in swift, then other team members worked on it in Unity, now we’ve bounced it back to Swift.
Week #734
This week we finished-up all the loose ends on the February surveys and started the March surveys. We have three surveys running this month, one long running which is in great shape, a private survey and our general school staff survey. Things are in good shape, but it is always a relief to get started and see data start to flow in.
We’ve continued with this week prototyping on a calendar UI slider. This slider is a bit unique in that it has 3 anchor points: “Today”, “This Week”, and “Sometime” at the 0%, 50% and 100% positions on the slider. The tricky part are the steps between those anchors. If today were Monday, we’d have six more days before we hit “this week”, but if today were Friday, we’d only have two. The same for the gap between “This Week” and “Sometime”. We’re experimenting with adding the #tags or @contexts there. In the spirit of GTD (Getting Things Done), if you have an @call or @email context, we’d stick those in after all the “This Week” tasks and before the “Sometime”. Depending on the person, there could be very few or very many of these. As a UI prototype test, it is going well and we’re getting a feeling for it all in quick HTML and Javascript.
On Monday we had a long sync meeting about a new project in Australia. This one focuses mostly around equipment and team utilization! It should be a pretty big project that we’ll talk about a bunch this year. Until contracts are signed, we’re still exploring white board sketches to map out any tricky parts. On Thursday, we got the green light that this project is going forward. The next steps will be to make a rough plan and milestones, get hosting and tooling sorted on their accounts (Heroku, Twilio, Mailgun) before we jump in.
Another prototyping project, which we thought was off the table and fell through the cracks, seems to now be back on! This should be an interesting and fun one where we get todo a deep dive into WebRTC. We’ve been scoping out a sort of 4 month engagement: First month plumbing, Second month features, Third month refine, Fourth month polish. The idea being that we can go from an idea to a workable prototype that they can go shop around for funding and to build a team.
Bric-à-brac
This week, the news picked-up a story about genetically modified mice. These mice were grown to include wooly mammoth like fur. Didn’t have that on our 2025 bingo card!