Week #747
We continue to take small bits out of our WebRTC project. The libraries and sample code out there are all written in swift using UIKit. We have gone all in for SwiftUI, which is swift, but not the normal app life-cycle. We ported the sample code from Swift UIKit to SwiftUI and managed to get everything talking between the app and web. Baby steps.
The whole week, we did some prep work on a pitch meeting on Friday. The meeting was focused on something else, but we needed a plan B incase the audience wasn’t interested. Luckily, they were, and after a 2h meeting, our Plan B never got mentioned. It’s always a bit of a downer after you rush to put in a bunch of work to not even get it shown, but it’s not wasted effort. Once the dust settles a bit, we’ve got a really good prototype and deck ready to go at a moments notice.
On Friday, we published our article Disney Flowchart. Back in 01957, Walt Disney created a flow chart to better explain how all the different parts of his company interacted. We have thought about what our version of this flow chart would be, and how we can use it to identify places for improvement and things to watch out.
Week #748
Monday was a public holiday in Iceland. It was also Apple’s annual WWDC (World Wide Developer Conference). We have several projects using Apple’s tech, so we kept an eye on what’s new. The biggest change is this Liquid Glass theme for all the OS 26 versions. We’ll see how it pans out through all the betas.
On Tuesday, Salesforce and Heroku had a major outage. We use Heroku for lots of projects and for some projects the sites were down, others were up but we couldn’t deploy. It took over 8 hours for them to resolve the problems. Luckily for us, our surveys are done for the year and other projects in Australia were down mostly through their evening.
We continue to work on our WebRTC project. We have web-to-web video working, we also have app-to-web working, and app-to-app is nearly there. The next big tasks are to get it for more than just two participants via an app, starting to style it, get can video playback working, and the biggest task to get it working on tvOS. Out-of-the-box, this isn’t possible, but some people have managed it. But that’s a later task.
This week was full of meetings. Some Calendar UI/UX planning, PETALS planning, project feedback and more. It makes getting work done a bit harder when you’re stopping and starting for meetings, but they are a necessary evil to move some things ahead.
Finally, we watch as the US dollar (USD) to the Icelandic Kronur (ISK) continues to sink! At its peak in Mid-February, it was 142 ISK to the Dollar. This week it was down to 123 ISK. According to the US IRS, the average USD->ISK for 02024 & 02023 was a shade under 138. That means our invoices are worth 11% less than previous years, coupled with a 10% inflation in Iceland, these US jobs either need a drastic increase in the rates or de-prioritized.
Bric-à-brac
Iceland has a national tartan registered in the Scottish Register of Tartans.