Beri.Media

Last week before heading off to Lucca

On Saturday I will arrive in Lucca for one month of working from abroad. But today I will cut some TikToks so I do not arrive there with a big backlog of videos, but can start working on the things I film there. My plan is to film a little mini series “Working from Tuscany”. I even thought of releasing a video every day, but I think this is not doable. And I do not want to restrict myself on this mini series. My motto is: Go with the flow, see what I want to film, what I want to create and also take some nice pictures. The lucky thing is, that the friend of mine, who is there with me is also into videography and photography so we are allowed to stop for a nice picture during the bike ride.

Cutting TikToks fits me anyways right now because I am out of tokens in github copilot and don’t want to waste time building some features manually where I know AI will be a lot faster.

Wednesday

Now I try to implement working notifications once you thank a video to increase engagement in the app. We might need a notification center where your thanks and maybe other stuff is listed. Oh and just to mention. I pressed submit in both stores. Let’s see what the reviews have us change in the iOS and android apps before we can actually bring them to the stores. I actually needed to take a screenshot of the app on an iPad 13inch. Super pain needing to create a new build on an iPad simulator for that. But whatever. Did it. Furthermore one of my TikToks just got 5.000 views and over 400 likes. The most ever. It was just a simple video about a day trip to the Tegernsee. But it feels really good seeing some work pay off. And this work especially. Because I really have fun with this kind of videography and I am really looking forward to doing it more and more in Lucca as well.

AI

Apple rejected our App for the first time in the real review because we are asking the customer to provide their name after they signed in with Apple which is apparently against their design principles, because the user already provides their name with the apple sign-in. Let’s fix this using Claude for the first time. For now I was on the github copilot pro plan for 10€ a month but now switched to Claude. Will try this out for one month and then see if it is better than codex (which we heavily use at work) and then go with the respective provider. But now, let’s fix this apple thing and hopefully some more bugs on top. I mean I have tokens again!

Saturday

On my way to Lucca now to work from abroad. After a successful bug fixing and smaller feature implementation session with Claude on Friday. On our drive the idea came up to run Claude on a server and connect to it via remote sessions. The server instance then has rights to access GitHub. Then one would be able to fix bugs via your phone. The next big features for Life Update will be:

• answer a video via right swipe with your own video
• Turn camera while filming
• Bring it to the stores

Unfortunately we have used all our build capacity on expo this month so we need to wait until April to create and submit a new iOS build. But I managed to create a new build with XCode. So not reliant on the build tokens of expo anymore.

Lucca all articles merged.

We arrived on Saturday. Sunday was a super nice day! Gravelbiking, coffee in the city & the two guys I am there with a similar nerds as I am and are always happy to fire up their laptops and code a few things. My recent plan is to let a Claude session running on my linux ubuntu laptop server at home, to which I can connect via a Claude remote session. Link github and maybe Notion to it and control it from Notion or my phone. In that way I could fix bugs on the go. Let’s see if this will work. Other than that I am big into filming. Which is nice here anyways, so I am really having fun!

Monday

First day working in Lucca, Tuscany. But in the morning, went for a run on the wall surrounding the city. I am a little nervous about how work will be. But that is mainly because I abandoned it completely from my head over the weekend - which is a very good thing - and the work environment is new.

Work went pretty well. The coworking space is amazing. And I collected more than enough shots for a daily TikTok. Let’s see if I can do so today again. But it does not feel like a hustle to collect this footage. If you find something you like, film it. I managed to build LifeUpdate with XCode but we need to fix an error with some caching logic before we can submit to apple again and to our external testers.

Aaaaand notificiations are broken again. But the week already feels long, which is super nice and I cut my second TikTok from the life in Lucca. Brings a lot of fun filming around. A day usually looks like this right now: We get up at 6:00, eat breakfast together, go to the coworking space we booked for the month, do some stuff on our own projects or go for a run, start working, search for something for lunch, work again and on the evenings either do something on our own projects, go for a run or just eat together. On the weekend a bigger bike ride is approaching.

I actually found the notification issue. If you reinstalled the app at some point you were never asked to enable notifications again. But this is a requirement for apple to allow the push notifications again. We now have a bottom sheet prompting you to set the notifications again and in the settings you can activate push notifications as well. I am really looking forward to this, because I was never receiving pushes from the beginning. Because I obviously reinstalled the app multiple times as a dev.

Thursday

Claude is running now on my linux server and I can access it from a remote session from the Claude app. Let’s see if this is actually useful. But I can fully control the access rights of Claude on this machine and restrict it to do exactly what I want. And just with a blink of an eye it is the long easter weekend. Let’s go to the beach, record videos, go for a nice bike ride to Pisa and along the way cut two TikToks with an advanced intro. On Monday a second nice long bike ride is incoming. Afterwards back to the coworking space.

Over easter

On easter Monday I went for a beautiful bike ride. And I cut one more TikTok. Cutting and videography skills are getting better and better and getting the videos out feels really good. Now it is already Tuesday. I am writing messages with Apples review team because they rejected our app again. Problem now is, that they cannot use the app in their full potential, because logging in with their apple account leaves them in an empty app with no groups whatsoever. So I updated the description for them to have an invite code to join the production test group and uploaded a dummy video for them to see in the feed. I hope they accept our app sooner or later, because friends and family are already asking when the app could be used by more people. I am a little excited if we might have produced something that people actually like and want to use.

Life Update got approved

by Apple. So we officially now have an app in both app stores. Pretty fancy tbh! And I moved all our tickets from Notion to a github project. So we can easily link PRs to issues now. Goal would be to have Claude work on just created issues raising a first PR that can be reviewed.

Film business

I have my camera with me every day now. And have coded less since then. But are uploading a TikTok now and then without any bigger effort. And still them serving as memories is already great. Eventually I want to build a new Life Update build, but this needs some thinking power and today on Saturday I was just not able to put that into it. In general I am not 100% happy with my video quality, but there is a lot to learn and I guess that is normal.

On Sunday then I managed to code a lot on Life Update. Check out the answer functionality build by Ludwig, improve the UI for it a little. Improve the UI of the groups page a lot and implement coach marks. Everything is in a new build building on expo and can be reviewed tomorrow in TestFlight. Hopefully it all works!

The camera switch problem

What we want? A user can start recording a video and switch the camera while doing so. The video should be stitched together and the user in the preview of their videos sees only one video with the camera switch as a cut. There is a library called ffmpeg-kit which is based on a very heavy and complex C library called ffmpeg. But it is deprecated. Also because of legal reasons, so this one cannot be used. Then there are provider like https://www.mux.com/ which are anyways great for our purpose, but are expensive. So no option either. That’s why I went for the option now to write my own wrapper around the Android and iOS native libraries that allow video concatenation inside of our expo code. For Android that’s Video-Muxer and for iOS it is call AVFoundation. I am having Claude Code giving me a step by step instruction so I can test and learn the implementation of such a wrapper. Let’s see if I am successful.

I actually was successful on android. iOS will follow soon. Claude Opus ruled. The problem is, that android phones have their sensors installed in different orientations. And even though you get the orientation of the sensor and can rotate the video you have to bake the orientation into the video before stitching front and back camera together. This does somehow not work. Which is why I asked Claude to simplify the script as much as possible before running out of tokens for my session. And that actually did the deal. The magic is now that I rely on the react native compressor library that automatically orientates videos in the correct direction. So: record front camera video, record back video, save these segments to an array, compress each segment on its own, stitch it together. I now only have to make it more reliable and faster. Maybe by starting compression already when the camera is switched. Super interesting problem to solve.

With videos I did not cut a lot lately, but my creative mind already burns for it. An I have a lot recorded a lot! I am thinking switching up the aspect ratio of my video again according to this website: https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/aspect-ratio/. I think 1.66:1 would be really cool for YouTube & Instagram.

See you next week! ✌🏽

Disclaimer: This blog is not AI polished. Not even corrected with ChatGPT. Raw from my techie brain trying to be artsy.