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
I ported rather than rebuilt because the business logic in a repair ticket is years of accumulated edge cases, every one of them put there by something that went wrong once. A rewrite throws all of that away to improve an interface no customer will ever see. On a product facing the public I would have argued the other way.
