Week #769
One project we’re working on this week deals with RTMP video streams. We are both sending streams to a remote server and then consuming them in an app. There is a whole web portal component that we’re not building, but we work closely with the team to help coördinate what we need.
On the iPhone 16 and 17 pros, they have a new capacitive camera control button. We spent an afternoon looking through the swift libraries on how to use the new button. Either we’re missing something or this is half-baked, because a lot of things we’d want todo it doesn’t seem that you can. *Sigh* hopefully it will get an update, but it really feels like a missed UI opportunity.
Apple (finally) published a version of their App Store online and it includes Apple Arcade. This information has always been difficult to get unless you manually looked at the store every day. Now we have a platform which makes it MUCH easier to analyze changes over time.
Prepping for the Christmas holidays, we put together a small package for some of our clients. This year it is a small LEGO wreath and instructions. We published the LEGO Wreath article with everything you need to make your own and how to customize it.
This week we also meet-up with another old friend and co-worker for a morning coffee. It was great to chat about all sorts of topics; video doorbells, NAS, chatbots, work and more.
This week we started getting email promotions for “Singles Day”. This is a strange holiday to us since it was invented without our lifetime in 02009 by the online shopping giant Alibaba. They choose 11 since it looks like two individuals, but November 11th is also Remembrance Day to honor the end of WWI. Originally Single Day was a day to push more capitalism on single people to make them feel back for not being married. Now it’s a weeklong sale trying to sneak-in before the infamous Black Friday. (The day after US Thanksgiving). Neither holiday Europe celebrates, but they’ll happily jump on the shopping bandwagon.
Week #770
For one project we have a web app and a corresponding iOS/tvOS app. To bring everything into parity, we went through and created new accounts on both, invited friends, created sessions, and tested other onboarding functionality. We took screenshots of everything and dump it into a doc with some notes. We did find a few places where the web had functionality the app didn’t so we went back and added it where needed.
We took advantage of some single’s day promotions and looked at a new monitor, a new printer (the old one works fine, but it is a DELL and no one in Iceland sells toner – it is End-of-Life’d when we run out), but we settled on a DVI-to-HDMI dongle. It required some tin-snips to “make space” for the dongle on an old monitor we had sitting around, but is up and running for way less than a new one!
This week was full of good intentions, but everyday we started with a todo list and got side-tracked by something else. We’re suppose to be helping one company raise some serious money while building another, while making a prototype for a 3rd so they can sell themselves for big money. It’s not all glamorous, in between, we still have to update WordPress plugins, fix CSS bugs, and copy-n-paste numbers into reports.
On Wednesday, the iPhone’s wallet app finally let you add your digital passport (if you’re in the USA). We were curious so we gave it a try, but constantly got errors. After a few tries, we actually read the error message and it says “Cannot add expired Passports” and we laughed it off and tried again. But sure enough, our passport expired 6 months ago! Due to the government shutdown (or inefficiencies) the US Embassy in Reykjavik has only 1 day this month to process passports – and now we’re booked in.
Thursday was a very productive day, we touched 5 different projects and moved them each along significantly.
Friday we wrapped-up all our normal end-of-week tasks and had a few meetings to figure-out tasks for next week.
Bric-à-brac
Reportedly, St Mary’s and St John’s CE School‘s motto for many years was “Audio, Video, Disco“, Latin for “I hear, I see, I learn“. This motto gained some notoriety in 01983, after all three words had gained new meaning in English.