Week #743
On Thursday we pushed a big update to the PETALS app. Of course there were a few minor deploy hiccups. Something todo with minor changes between the settings on the DEV server compared to the PROD server cause some HTTPS infinite redirects.
On the VR/Tablet front, we’ve continued to work on some permissions on the web admin tool to manage content. We’ve also been exploring porting some experimental code to view stereoscopic 360 images in to the VR app.
On our join Calendar redesign project, we worked on converting some Figma sketches into responsive HTML. The original design was great for a single event and countdown. We took that design and made a compact view that displayed 4-5 countdowns in the same space.
One project from Australia needed some minor tweaking. We’ve built several systems now for various companies to help them with logging worker’s time to projects and pushing those timesheets into their accounting software Xero. This small tweak was to track jobs as contracted and alert them to invoice them accordingly.
The WebRTC continues to move forward. We’ve refactored a lot of code to make sure it is all working on the web with multiple participants. We’re now looping back to the code to make sure it can also work on iOS (android later, but WebRTC is an open standard so we’re not too worried)
For some projects we introduced a QR code TOTP for two-factor authentication. We moved this direction since island.is closed their SSO for non-governmental organizations. Instead of paying the fees for other services, we copied the University of Iceland and recommend an authenticator app. That has worked well, but some of our customers manage to delete the entry, never save it, can’t find it, or change devices. So we have no way to reset the 2FA except to call us. Our goal this summer is to replace that with an SMS reset. Request a reset, get an SMS with a code to a number you have on file, use that to login instead, then re-setup the 2FA.
We also soft launched our Ornithoto app for the iPhone. This is a camera all that takes long exposures by using different blend modes between video frames to create a single image. We recommend you download it now, even if you aren’t planning on using it. In a few months we’ll set a price on the download, but if you download it now, all future updates will be free.
Week #744
There are two potential new Australian projects. The first is a rather large on to help inventory management, installation teams and more is on hold until the ‘actual’ workflow is hammered out to a repeatable process that we can convert into some web-based forms.
There was a bunch of iOS dev work on various projects. After soft-launching we got lots of little feedback about the Ornithoto app. We made some bug fixes, lowered the required OS version and made some UX improvements.
For a friend, we’ve been building a small data tracker. In the past she’d used several different apps to track a medical condition, medication and other health metrics. Sadly, these apps keep going offline or are region locked. Off-and-on, we’ve been building a simple tool for her to collect, record and visualize the data on a calendar view (and maybe more in the future). Since it is a not a public projects associated with a company, ironically, it might have a longer life-span than others.
We continued with the WebRTC project. We didn’t manage to get the iOS WebRTC libraries integrated yet, but we did manage to bring the iOS and tvOS apps (mostly) up to parity with the web. Almost all the features of the web are not APIs to the apps. The tvOS app needed a bunch of button refactoring since moving focus on a screen with a remote is very different than direct touch input.
Our bi-monthly VAT was due for March/April. We use a service called PayDay.is which managed all the invoicing, expenses and payroll, so the VAT reports are usually just us quickly reviewing to make sure we didn’t forget to add any recipes and pressing send.
Bric-à-brac
Something in our heads this week made this bubble up: SEGA’s mid-90s “WELCOME TO THE NEXT LEVEL” marketing campaign.
