It seems I’ve made it my mission in life to go around generating business apps using Codea. In fact, I’m building a little suite of enterprise apps and a company around them. Both the apps and the company will launch this fall, but I wanted to post this up, just for the fun of it.
Everything here was done in Codea. The basic controls are mostly those in Cider. There’s a good deal I don’t show here from editing people to setting shift lengths, but all that detail seemed a bit much. Besides, I filched the settings button to turn recording off and on.
I’m at the point where I’m seeking beta testers. If you’re interested, please send me a message.
I’m especially looking for folks who might actually be involved in scheduling something, whether that’s the crew at a burger barn, the workers on a construction site, or the medical team at an ambulance dispatch site. Anything, really.
I think there’s good ease of use in this app, and it provides a nice visual reminder of how a day or shift was scheduled, but I’m not sure it provides enough value to 1) get people to pay cashy money for it, 2) make people use it consistently even though it’s not integrated into a larger HR management system. So while I grind down the home stretch of bug-killing, I’d like to get some feedback not just on uh-ohs, but on overall functionality.
Very impressive. Really cool–pushing the Codea frontiers, seems to me.
I feel like any comments I’d make might be irrelevant in a business-app context. Are you familiar with the agile-development concept of user stories, though? If you wrote a single-sentence description of what a user does with it, what would it be? The utility of the exercise is to analyze how many taps it takes the user to actually do that action. Ideally it’s one tap.
Like, a user story for the mail app might be “the user uses Mail to send and read emails”. Most of the time, both of those things take one tap. We could even do it with Codea: “the user uses Codea to create programs”. Creating programs is an enormously complicated task, but as soon as you open Codea, you’re just one tap away.
My impression is that the market for business apps in general can bear more complexity than mainly-consumer-focused apps, so this may not be as relevant as it would be otherwise.
The task here is a simple one — though the video may not make it seem that way. It’s just a matter of “doing shift line up.” That is, the daily (or several times daily) task of deciding who is working where.
That’s the whole deal. The video, unfortunately, spends a lot of time on the one-time setup portion of the app. That is, getting your business defined, creating your resources, and determining your areas. The actual day in / day out task is simply picking up your resources and dropping them where you want them to go.
If you bring the task down to “assigning a person,” it’s a drag and drop. So, while being a bit more than just a tap, it’s still pretty simple.
The question is, for reasonable sized businesses, is the visual representation and feedback that the app provides enough to overcome the inherent tedium of doing that drag and drop? I know that a more specialized form of the application worked for some specific industries, but I don’t know how it stands up as a general solution.