TBC
Porting a Flex 4 point of sale system to phones and tablets for a Florida tire chain with more than 20 locations, so sales could be transacted out on the floor.
Numbers
- 5
- Team size
- 2 months
- Build time
Problem
TBC runs more than twenty tire locations in Florida. We had built them a point of sale system in Flex 4, and the transactions it handled were happening away from the terminal it ran on — out on the floor, next to the car.
Solution
I ported the existing Flex 4 codebase to iPad and iPhone using AIR for Devices, restyling and reworking the desktop application's behaviour so it held up on every handset form factor rather than rebuilding it, which is what two months buys.
Analysis
Porting rather than rebuilding is usually the right answer for internal tools and usually the wrong one for customer-facing products. The business logic in something like a repair ticket is years of accumulated edge cases, and rewriting it loses all of them to save an interface that nobody outside the company will ever judge you on.
