Week #753
On Monday, we returned to Reykjavik. Most people wouldn’t have noticed we left or came back. Which is a testament to the ability to work remotely and that we’ve managed to decentralize most all of our tools.
Tuesday our Web Hosting had a ‘major’ issue with one server (coincidentally it was the one we are using) which required some downtime. It wasn’t a major inconvenience and the small team did a great job. That got us thinking again about backups. (It seemed to be an issue with memory and not hard drives) What if they couldn’t restore from a backup? (it’s happened before!) We have a great system for local backups, but we need to think of a simple and smooth way to backup the databases and files on the server.
On Wednesday we increased the price of our experimental camera app: Ornithoto to $1.99. You can read more about the app here. But our general thinking is to release the app for free and after a period of time, we increase the price to something nominal. This will keep support requests and questions to mostly paid customers. We won’t get rich, but we won’t loose our minds.
We have a second experimental camera app currently called DejaView. We finally went through the code and found the bug that was holding things up. It wasn’t super difficult to untie, just needd the time and space to find and fix it. It is now available for free online. We’re looking for feedback and bugs, then after a few months we’ll set a price for this one too. So grab it while you can for free future updates.
For our surveys projects, we have an internal goal this summer to breath some new design life into the look and feel of the data collection and the reporting site. The University of Iceland have a nice style guide that we used as a basis. We moved to a new web font: Atkinson Hyperlegible and cleaned-up our CSS to add better theming and dark mode. Our previous CSS workflow was written probably 10+ years ago using LESS. CSS now supports variables natively so we’ve made the jump to just vanilla CSS which we combine and minify in the deploy process. the variables.css file which defines all our semantic variable names for colors in light and dark mode. Then using more specific CSS selectors we can add a theme name on the <body class="theme_name"> to override all the previously set color variables without adding more CSS definitions.
Compiling WebRTC libraries for tvOS has gotten the better of us this week. We’ve been debugging and trying loads of things with not much success. Our next step is to deprioritize this and try to get some outside help.
We had a meeting on Friday and sometimes you gotta say the same thing again and again and when others are ready to make the connection they will. We had a break through and we’re pretty sure we’ve brought this up to the client several times before. Maybe it’s the way we said it this time, maybe they finally made the connections, but either way we’re moving things forward.
On Sunday night our time, Monday morning Australia time, we had a project review. We went through all the updates and found and fixed a few bigs before deploying for the customer.
Week #574
We continue to update CSS files for our charts and reports. We’ve switched the basics like the webfont and converted all the color references over to variables. Now that we’re implementing dark mode CSS, we need to go through all those color variables and make sure they work well on a dark background. Our next two tasks are to re-design the login page to give it a bit more ‘flare’ then go back over all the charts and clean those up and add a bit more interactivity.
This week the Australian customer reviewed the changes and came back with fixes. Some where minor design fixes, some where mis-communications on what data was editable, and a few bugs and feature requests.
Meeting-wise, we had a few great chats this week. We’re pushing forward on a prototype game project. Working with an illustrator friend, we’re flushing out the concept. We also met-up about our WebRTC project and having a small reset on priorities.
We also went down a rabbit hole of LUT files. These are used in post-editing images in video. They are presets you can apply. Portable filters. We looked around and very few camera apps we could find support LUT files, so we made our own and it works great! We’re going to kick the tires for a while and se about creating favorites likes or importing and saving LUT files for quick access. Right now it loads them from the file system, so adding more is as easy as dropping them into folders.
Bric-à-brac
We were listening to a podcast interview with Australian comedian Mr. John Robertson. In it, they mention his creation The Dark Room. The Dark Room is the world’s only live-action videogame where Robertson comperes your way through a room-sized text-based adventure game where there are prizes to be won, if you can get out of The Dark Room.
We found a recorded from 02024 PAX West conference. Not for children or the faint-of-heart. It’s an amazing adventure of improve comedy with the aid of text-based choices on the screen. It’s got our mind spinning with ideas.