TOPIC: Thoughts on HIP mobile

I downloaded the mobile version and have played around on it a little and had a few thoughts. I don't know if anyone else has mentioned these, sorry if they are redundant. I have an Ipad, but I would be using my Iphone if I use the mobile version. (I'll be saying "click" when referring to touching the Ipad/Iphone screen)

- When clicking on the boxes to input the client info you have to click out of one box to click into the other box. It would work better and reduce half the clicks if clicking on the next box automatically opened it and kept the keyboard visible.

- It would also be nice if the icon for editing your comment that you have preloaded in the template was located at the top of your comment instead of the center of it on the left side of the screen. It's hard to see where in the beginning of your comment is. And since some of the comments can stretch across the full height of the screen, sometimes the button for editing a comment isn't even on the screen. This would also work well with the brackets feature where many inspectors only need to see the title they've given their comment in order to know if they want it selected.

- Related to the above, it would allow for finding comments easier if you had the options of limiting the number of lines of a comment which appear(similar to email preview options on the Iphone, 1, 2, 3 lines, etc.).

- And also related to the above, the scale of the text could be allowed to shrink even smaller using that slider at the top menus page and it would still work just fine in my book. I am use to and read smaller text all the time. This would again allow more comments per page.

- Being able to swipe a finger from left to right across the screen to go backwards in the menus would be faster than the top left buttons if using hip on an Iphone. Both being available would be a nice additional feature.


The photo input was...  different. I'm just not use to it just yet so it was a little awkward for me. 

- One idea I had would be to allow a right to left swipe across the screen automatically take you to that section's photo page. Similar to the above idea.

- I noticed there is no place to just take a photo which will not be slotted in a section. Many of the photos I take do not go into the report so having some way of including these photos as you go would reduce some input time later and a little onsite since there would be no switching between HIP and the Iphone photo app.

- Can the center "options" menu(Grid, HDR & Panorama)  which is native to the Iphone be included in the HIP camera? I use the HDR and Panorama about 15-20 times each during inspections.

So I don't know yet how to implement the mobile version. I want to speed up reporting onsite, but I don't know if adding the mobile version to the phone I take all my photos on is the way to go. Currently I take all my photos and load them a few times during the inspection. I stop and take notes each time I load them onto the laptop. I think taking notes as I go would be more streamlined, but it wouldn't be faster until dropdown list are implemented on the mobile version.

Just when I was feeling good about my reporting methods, Dom brings out the Iphone HIP mobile.

Thanks for the great notes Cameron. It's always enjoyable to read well thought out, constructive comments!! Obviously this is the first release of the mobile for iOS and our to-do list for it already has over 30 items on it and we'll constantly be adding to it thanks to guys like you.

1. Good idea.

2. I'll see how easy it would be to do this.

3. This one has actually been discussed quite a bit and is on the to-do list as option. Have you used the Search feature to narrow your narratives down by the way?

4. Added to to-do.

5. I'll see if we can add a swipe feature with the way we have things setup.

6. I'm not sure if a swipe for pics is needed since the button is always in the same place and easily accessible. Thoughts?

7. We've discussed adding the ability to add unlimited pics to the Client Info screen and just having the first be the cover pic.

8. We are actually triggering the native camera right now, I'll have to see why those options aren't showing right now.

#3 -  :-[ I missed that entirely. That is better than scrolling. I write my notes a little toward the list-heavy side so I have fewer, but I don't have to search much.i think I would need to adjust some of my notes if I use the mobile HIP. Having more specific notes which don't have any lists would work better.

#6 - The only reason I find swiping controls convenient is because my fat fingertips miss the correct buttons all the time.  

#7 - Yeah that one is kind of difficult for me to decide what would be the most convenient. I like the automatic slotting of photos because it seems to be extremely convenient that by the end of the inspection all your photos would be in the right areas and possibly captioned. But I have found it is always a good idea to take multiple pictures to make sure you get the clearest shot. This means that I would have to go back and delete or un-slot photos from sections. I think the reality is that being able to slot photos and captioning them as I'm going probably doesn't save me much time. When I'm sitting at the office it only takes me about 15 minutes to slot and caption the 50-60 photos which end up in the report. I would definitely use a dedicated photo section of the mobile reporting software.

The problem is,Dom, you've made inserting photos, slotting and captioning them so quick on the desktop HIP that now anything else seems slow!  That's a good problem to have, you are your only competition.  ;D

You are 100% correct on the time slotting photos. It's so fast in HIP that it's still faster to slot in HIP because there's no wait time for pics to load. I've told people if they need optical zoom, stick with a camera as it's faster.

I think the client info for unslotted pics is probably best for now. Otherwise you're right that you'll spend time unslotting which is no fun. No other program is as fast slotting nor do they save unslotted pics so we're unique in this area.

I think ill focus on taking notes with the mobile for now and see how i fare. I'm going to take an inventory of my reports and see what comments I am using the most which could be written with no lists. That will benefit reporting on both the mobile version and at the office.

Oh! That just gave me an idea! It would be really slick if hip could compile data from a group of reports so you could track the comments you use most. I know there has been talk of getting HIP to compile basic inspection info, but think of the reporting refinement an inspector could do with compiled data from the whole report. Phew! I just got nerd-bumps up and down my arm.

That would be much harder as comments vary slightly from inspection to inspection and we also purposely don't use a central database for inspections (easier for portability). Despite that though it is actually a cool idea that I'll have to think about how to do!