Run the day from an iPhone

1. 01

   Is this the website in a wrapper?

   No. It is Swift and SwiftUI with no third-party code in it at all, and nothing on screen is a web page. The reason that matters is not purity: a wrapper shows a spinner when the signal goes, because there is nothing behind it to draw. Here the screens are drawn from a database on the phone, so a job, its snags and the sheets already downloaded are all readable in a basement.

2. 02

   What happens when you raise a snag?

   The camera opens first. You photograph or film the defect, up to ninety seconds of video, and the form comes afterwards. A description is drafted from the media and shown in a box of its own, and it is never put into your note: the operative’s words and the machine’s stay apart, so anybody reading the snag in a year can tell which is which. The snag exists on the phone before the server has heard of it, and its photos wait for it rather than being lost.

3. 03

   Can you talk instead of typing?

   Yes, while you are photographing. Hold the phone up to the defect, say what is wrong, and it is transcribed as you speak, on the handset itself wherever the phone can do it rather than by sending the audio anywhere. The words sit there until you tap them into the note or into what-is-wrong; nothing is filled in for you. It is offered on photos and not on video, because a video recording already holds the microphone and two things cannot have it at once.

4. 04

   What happens to a save with no signal?

   It goes into a queue on the phone and sends itself later. Nothing is sent straight from a button, so there is no request to lose when the signal drops mid-tap. The queue retries with a widening gap between attempts and holds what it cannot send rather than discarding it, and Settings shows how many items are waiting, when the last sync ran, and any item that failed with the reason it gave.

5. 05

   How does somebody get into it on a site?

   Face ID, with a PIN that is set up whether or not biometry is. Wet hands, gloves, a dust mask and a repaired handset all beat a face, and an app whose only key is a fingerprint locks an operative out on a site with no way back in. Checking on to site is a QR scan at the gate, and that one needs a signal on purpose, because a check-in says you are there now.

Built with

Swift and SwiftUI, no third-party code

Offline

Its own database on the phone, with a send queue

App Store

Not listed yet

Approving site work from a phone usually means opening a job, then another job, then a third to find out whether anything is sitting on you, so the iPhone app has one list called Waiting on you that holds every decision across every site.