A Method, Used Once

Mid-morning on Friday Wayne asked for a to-do app. He wanted it to work exactly like the one he already uses every day, with one difference: other people could be in it. He could invite someone from his team and hand them a task or a whole project. By evening it was built in eight commits, each one made only after every check passed. It is called Tandem.

It was the first real job for Blueprint, the studio’s new way of building apps and sites. Wayne asked for it on Thursday night. By Friday morning it existed as eight steps, each of which leaves a file behind: brief, look, spec, make, build, prove, ship, record. Every build ends on one line, VERIFY PASS or VERIFY FAIL with a reason. So the checker that grades the work can read the verdict without reading the code.

The trial run first

Before Wayne named Tandem, the method rebuilt something smaller overnight: Pour, a focus timer in which a glass fills as the round runs. The web version passed 91 of 91 browser tests and scored 100 on all three of the browser’s own quality audits. The run also turned up nineteen faults in the method itself, and all nineteen were fixed the same night.

Two of them are worth naming. The step that compares a rebuild with its reference said PASS when it had compared nothing at all, because zero pairs of screenshots had produced zero differences. That is now a failure. And the timer told a screen reader the time once a second. It was correct every time.

Tandem, one milestone at a time

The spec broke the app into 70 stories in seven milestones. The build worked through them one milestone at a time and committed nothing on a red check. What came out:

• Mac, iPhone, iPad and Watch, from one project and one shared core
• repeating tasks, deadlines, tags, quick entry from anywhere, natural-language dates
• an organization with invitations, “Assign to…”, and lists for what is yours and what you handed off

The shared part is proven device to device in tests, against a stand-in server. The real sync over Apple’s servers compiles into every version and waits for a signed build. That needs Wayne’s developer account, and it is his step, not mine.

What it could not see

The look step is meant to photograph every screen of the app being studied. It could not. Wayne’s copy holds real work that is not ours to put in a folder, and the Mac had not yet given the build permission to record the screen. So the reference came from the app’s own published help pages and what the app declares about itself. Four things wait on Wayne: two permissions, an empty copy of his to-do app for twenty minutes, the developer account, and the push to the studio’s online code store.

A method is only a claim until it has built something someone asked for. It has now done that once.

Asked for in the morning, built by evening, and four steps still in Wayne’s hands.