Week #821
On Sunday, we had a call with a coworker whose PhD student is focusing on mathematics fluency. We discussed our survey software and how it could be used. The phone call took longer than it did to spin-up a new server and add the survey syntax file. That gets us 80% of the way super quickly, now that last 20% is going to take a LONG time to iron out!
We continue to dabble on our TIL site. We imported the October data, tagged it and now are looping back on the Assertions. These are meant to be used in the exportation of ‘subject predicate object’ triples. Using this we can form chains that connect any two tags. These are harder to write and we’ve been slacking, so we’re going back through and adding missing assertions.
On other projects, we work with a small team on developing various games. We help with SpellStruck which is available on Apple Arcade. Our original duties were around analytics, but somehow that always morphed into odd jobs. This week we’ve been setting up Build Pipelines (not Continuous). We have a mix of people on Macs and PCs, so it isn’t always easy to get a Unity build into TestFlight. When some people are sick, or out, or already started their weekend due to crazy timezone differences, it can be a blocker. With Unity Cloud Build we can make it so anyone with access can create and deploy a new build. This should reduce the feedback time from fix to testing. From git commit, to Unity Cloud Build, to Apple’s TestFlight, we have a completely automated G.U.T. deploy system in place. 💩
On Wednesday, we spent the day mostly writing. We’ve kept up a great cadence for the last two years. Part of that is prepping each quarter’s publishing schedule. We usually need 6-8 articles each quarter. Some are mapped out, like the series we always do in Q1 around our Omnibus, Annual Report, TIL and more. This quarter we’re adding an EDC post in December. To bridge that gap, we need three more articles. So we drafted two and gathered the screenshots and images needed. Now we can take the time to edit our first draft and don’t need to stress last minute about what to write. Instead we pull out the draft articles, re-read them with fresh and rested eyes, make edits and publish. It has been a much better way to work, but it does mean we need to be thinking more about the publishing schedule, topics and setting aside time to draft content. Which is what today was for.
On Thursday, we worked on merging a Gaussian Splat with a 3D USDZ file. For a project, we have a beautiful splat of a nature value, but we need to annotate parts of it. After working through the problem with the splat team, they recommended to use a low-poly 3D model overlayed on top of the splat. It makes total sense, use the best aspects of each technology. That required us to build the low-poly file and match its coordinates to the splat. Then update the web CMS models to handle two models to display, the base and overlay, which intern needs an API update. Then finally, we needed to update the tablet app with the new API keys and re-work how the models are displayed on top of each other. But it worked and looks great!
We also got pulled into a PhD project with one of our co-workers. He is supervising a PhD student and we re-worked our survey tool to have a few new features: sections, timeouts, the inability to go back, etc. We managed to get all the pieces together cleanly and deployed a survey server instance. Based on existing literature, this will test and track mathematics fluency in 1st – 5th grade students.
On Friday, we published an article about the Reykjavik Pool API. The city has an unofficial(?) api that we used to create some fun widgets, but no idea about the licensing or future reliability.
Week #822
We had lunch with an old friend on Monday to see what they are up to; and it turns out a lot!
For one project, we needed some sample content. For the start of the week we created several lists of text in different formats and styles. At the Monday, meeting we discussed some options, cut what didn’t work, then we went back and refined the content, created more text based on what we think we like and then put it into the prototype to test. We might still tweak or change the content. We’re circling some final product, but we’re not there yet, it will take a few more iterations and maybe some ah ha moment. Until then, we’re on general content duty.
In the gaps between projects, we re-visited some older iOS projects and brought them more up to speed for the iPhone DUO. We updated and re-compiled our Newsletters app. It is by far the most downloaded add, probably because of the name. We clean-up a few bugs, brought it a bit more inline with the Human Guidelines and checked it was working for the DUO. We also pushed a new app to the store, but reviews take a while now thanks to AI Slop submissions. The bar is slightly higher and takes a bit longer. Once it’s live we can talk more about it and share with you how it works.
On Wednesday we had a small side-quest to get our iPad/Mac app to run on AppleTV. It used to work in the past, but was a bit laggy. Now with the new, higher-powered AppleTVs the performance should be much better. We went back through the code and got it working again on the AppleTV, with the exception of viewing Gaussian Splats – those are not supported on tvOS (yet). End of Side Quest.
We’ve also been deep into the APIs for two different CRMs. Our client only recently got into HubSpot as their CRM tool. That is now the single source of truth, but they have a few older, ongoing projects that are using a different CRM tool. Luckily, both have a nice API which we can use to connect a small schedule task to reconcile any changes.
On Thursday/Friday Microsoft has had major issues and downtime with Outlook and Teams. Maybe that’s why it’s been so quiet?
On Friday, Apple’s new 4K TV and their new HomeView devices are available. Originally, we were interested in getting a new HomePod mini for the office and a new Apple TV for testing. The TV doubled in price without much new (a faster processor but the one we have is fine for us) and it seems the HomeView out sounds a HomePod mini. We’ll let the dust settle a bit and see where things go before we dive in.