Week #819
This week we spent some time working on the Australian Concreter’s web app. It connects with their Xero accounting system, but most of this work was around job scheduling. We put a layer on top of the Tracking Categories (jobs) in Xero to track more information than is available in the system; like duration, start and end dates, execution steps, etc. We’ve always visualized this as a Gantt chart, but now we’re tweaking it a bit more as colored cards for each day’s tasks.
For PETALS, we’re working on some basic Slack integrations. To start, it’s nothing fancy. We wanted to have the snapshot starts and nudge messages to also get posted to the team’s Slack channel as well as an email. If this works well, we’ll roll it out for others and add other integrations like Microsoft Teams.
For our school reminder schedule, these weeks are pretty quiet. At the start of the month we work pretty hard contacting participants pretty much every other day. We do this for several reasons; using different mediums: email & SMS to get coverage but also we want to give the school contacts enough time to round-up anyone still not completed with ample time. This week we sent out the “1 week left email” to participants and will pester the school contacts next week. For many schools in Iceland ‘winter break’ has started. Usually that’s a Wed-Monday break, either last week this week or next week. That breaks-up the month, so being aggressive early with reminders means we aren’t stressed at the end when some customers have low participation rates.
With the rollout of the iPhone DUO, we went back through a few (optional.is) apps and add some screenshots to App Store Connect. Triagemail, Dashbones, Rest, (Dice) and more are ready to go.
For another project, we’ve built a pretty comprehensive iPad/Mac app for presentations. Unsurprisingly, the customer has seen something using the browser and WebSockets. It is a way to send a private link to someone via email/chat and then using another tool, display content on that remote screen. It works great for static images and even for video if the connection is fast enough. This project makes use of USDZ 3D models which only comfortably render in Safari and Gaussian Splats, which we can nicely render using some Javascript libraries. Over the next few weeks we’ll explore this as another tool in their arsenal for the sales and marketing teams to present.
We’re helping with a small part of another much larger project. On Tuesday, we took our VR headset to the local soccer field and recorded some demo footage. We can’t (yet) talk about the project, but our part is focused on some pass-thru and we needed a large open field. Originally we showed test footage from our office and that wasn’t enough, so we took it outside to the backyard and that still wasn’t flat or enough space. The soccer field really made the pass-thru demo(s) come alive. We’ll see what the next steps might be.
On Thursday, we published an article about Half Sized Notebooks and our exploration of Quarter Sized Notebooks. If you have some A3 paper and a good stapler, you can easily make your own.
On Saturday, the Old Icelandic Month of Gormánuður started. This is the first month of the six-month winter season. ❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️ To celebrate and ignore the fact it is getting dark and cold, they are attempting to rebrand the start as Kjötsúpudagurinn, or meat soup day 🍖🥣.
On Saturday, we had todo some LED work. All the code and LEDs were installed and tested a few weeks ago. The model team assembled and are putting on the final touches and of course something fails. Debugging via chat with someone on the phone with their team isn’t ideal. Going in person and debugging via a video call is the way to go. We’re just a bit worried on where this error came from and why!
Week #820
It was also the end of the month this week, so that means paying the bills and backing up data. We have our ‘air-gapped’ Time Machine backup external HD. We plug this in once a month and capture a backup of all the major computers.
For another project that we started around Christmas 11 months ago – the one we were just going to swap the APIs for, is adding subscriptions into the app. “Just add a monthly subscription” is an easy thing to say and is actually pretty straightforward to add… but the sting is always in the details. Since this service relies heavily on a server-side component we need to make sure the subscription is valid, it hasn’t expired or been cancelled, puts limits on what’s possible in the app and more. We spent some time on Wednesday with the backend team setting this all up for their two apps. (It’s two different companies with slightly different products and target markets. Not the way we’d run it, but not our business)
This week we continued to work on the iPad app to help display content from the CMS/CRM. The customer is gearing-up to show some their internal sales team next week and they are going over everything with a fine-toothed comb. This is great because we’re finding all the little spaces and issues that we missed. They’re fixed and deployed making the whole service better, cleaner and more stable.
The LED model got a final inspection on Thursday. The next steps will be to transport it from the workshop in New York City down to Miami for display. Once it’s in situ, we’ll probably have to make tweaks to the lighting temperature and other minor fixes.
Someone who downloaded the Rest Music app reached out with a bug when importing tracks with no ID3 metadata tags. We did our best to fix it to fail more gracefully. If you need a CarPlay compatible, offline music app, Rest is free and actively being updated.