Week #739

Last Friday, on the 5th anniversary of John Conway’s passing, we posted about Cellular Automata. It an algorithm near and dear to our hearts.

It’s funny how sometimes as simple off the cuff remark about an idea snowballs into something bigger. We’ve had an idea for a VR video and briefly pitched it in a meeting to feel out if this was even something the client would think was possible. They loved it and asked to see the proposal. We had to say it was nothing more than an idea. Within a few days they asked again for the proposal! When something like this lands, you take the chance. This week we started to storyboard the video. First with words and flow charts, then we moved to some sketches. Then we just opened-up iMovie and dropped in some clipart and stock images to start to get the timing and transitions. This “temp track” has worked well to start a conversation and see the weak parts of our story idea.

We took a diversion about got back into iOS development this week. We have one project which is going to rely heavily on some app technologies and we’re prototyping with web and iOS. While we were in Xcode we also started a new side-project with a friend to create a simple tracking app which combines a few different variables into as single interface.

For another project we’ve been using Zendesk to manage support requests. The volume of requests has massively dropped off as the project becomes more and more stable. The price of Zendesk was too much for what we needed, so this week we made the jump to Freshdesks. Luckily the REST APIs were pretty similar, so updating our backend was pretty minimal.

Peppered through out the week were plenty of small tasks. Both customers from Australia needed minor changes. A new link, a template tweak, etc. Nothing major or outrageous and all billable. It’s a good example of a typical week, some over-arching month long projects, interspersed with quick iterations, planing and pitches, mixed with fixing typos.

Week #740

This week is Easter Week. In Iceland, there are several public holidays which make it a shorter week. We didn’t get much work done, but did book several meetings.

We had our fortnightly Calendar sync meeting on Wednesday. Things are looking really good and we can start to move into the next phase from Figma to something more programatic. We also have a longer project with weekly sync meetings. We take 15-30 minutes to talk with the client and explain what’s been done, what we plan on doing and help them with any next steps on their side.

On Thursday, we had our fortnightly PETALS sync. We’ve done several laps around this new design with a bit of new functionality. We’re a behind our self-imposed schedule, but not by much.

We’re on the home stretch with our surveys. We’ve published all the reports from March and cleaned-up and turned over the data for our private customer survey. In April we’re only surveying our regular monthly student survey and our twice-annual high-school survey. We were pretty aggressive with our reminder schedule to the high-school students because this week they were off and next week has two more public holidays! We’re almost through all the spring surveys.

As part of some of the downtime, we took the opportunity to migrate two of our iOS camera apps from the older Swift/Objective-C code to more SwiftUI. This will make things more flexible and cleaner going forward. We managed to get both in working order, fixed a few bugs and got more beta testers on newer devices to give it a try. The next steps will be to publish the apps on the App Store for anyone to buy.

🐣 Happy Easter.