Institutional Knowledge

“Like an air conditioned gypsy” and other obscure Who references.

Last week one of our mission critical systems hit a bump in the road and was offline a better part of the day. We have a web application called System Status that is used by the help desk to track the availability of such systems. Having resolved all the issues we left the building only to realize that we needed to update the System Status application to notify the help desk and end-users that the system was back online.

Three of us immediately whipped out our iPhones to access the site and change the status flag. At that moment it hit me, why on earth isn’t this optimized for mobile devices? Having found a practical place to experiment with the iUI framework, I set about creating a parallel mobile interface for System Status. This interface, which uses the iPhone interface metaphors, will allow help desk support staff to check and update the status of our systems while out in the field or away on business.

Here are a couple of screenshots to give you an idea of how the interface would look on an iPhone.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 20th, 2008 at 10:17 am and is filed under Ruby on Rails, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.