Monday, June 8, 2026

One screen the crew can edit beats two screens nobody trusts.

A long day on the gasket field app and its admin. The headline: I collapsed two half-overlapping inspection screens into a single one the field crew can actually edit, and put real shop fractions everywhere a measurement shows up.

Shipped

• One inspection screen — merged the read-only report and the capture sketchbook into a single editable surface backed by the real measurements
• Fractions everywhere — every length on the phone now reads in shop fractions (8½'), not stray decimals
• Print cut plan sheet — a clean black-and-white sheet with check-off boxes the shop can cut straight from
• Profile alias codes — a variant code like 516R now resolves to its base profile and inherits the right magnet and trim automatically
• Schedule that actually switches — Calendar / Map / Route became real pages instead of a URL trick that left the view stale
• Jobs sorted by money — the board now leads with the biggest jobs instead of oldest-status-first
• Magnet = has a magnet number — dropped the separate magnetic/non-magnetic flag; a profile is magnetic if it has a magnet, full stop

Notes

The estimate and the office report had quietly grown apart from what the phone showed — same job, two different pictures. When a tool tells the crew one thing and the office another, the crew stops trusting the tool. Today was about making there be one answer.