Stevens Construction iOS Suite
A suite of eight iOS apps that turned a construction economist’s research into tools a contractor could use in a job trailer. We did not build them. We took the suite over in 2014, revised it to work with Swift, modernized it, and kept it running through 2018.
From the archive · no longer in production
Stevens Construction Institute, Inc.
iPhone + iPad · iOS
Swift conversion, modernization, ongoing maintenance
A takeover, not a build
We want to be straight about this one: we did not design or build the original apps. Stevens Construction Institute already had the suite shipping when the work came to us in 2014, and what we took on was keeping it alive. The apps come out of Matt Stevens’s research into why construction companies lose money, published in two McGraw-Hill books, and they put those methods on the device that goes to the site instead of leaving them on the office shelf.
What the suite does
On iPhone, single-purpose field calculators: dual-rate overhead allocation, break-even, return on investment, and project overhead sizing, each answering one question completely on its own labeled full-screen keypad. On iPad, three data applications for the job trailer: field productivity, cost-to-complete analysis, and work-sampling studies of how a crew’s day is actually spent. Those hold a project’s data across its life and print reports a lender will accept, which is what made the suite worth maintaining rather than replacing.
Swift, and four generations of iOS
The first substantial work was the language. In 2014, the year Apple announced Swift, we revised the applications to work with it, alongside a round of modernization and cloud work. From there we kept the suite current as iOS kept moving underneath it. A pass in 2016 rebuilt the cost-to-complete app’s interface on constraint-based layout and moved its assets into modern catalogs. Another in 2018 brought the oldest app in the suite, six years old by then, up to current deployment targets and signing requirements.