When you are building anything new, the product can look a little messy while you’re in the middle of the construction zone. Think about when a new home being built. Some people go into the construction site and it’s just chaos. But, other people can go into the home under construction and visualize what it will look like when it is finished. They can “see” the cherry cabinets in the kitchen with the granite counter tops. They can “see” the family room with the built-in bookshelves on either side of the fireplace….while none of it has been built.

Software development is really no different. There is the vision for the app before work beings. The app has to be designed how people work, not the easiest route to getting it done. It need to be simple to use while making difficult tasks easy. And much like a home, some of the “simpler” elements are much harder than you think to build, while some of the fancy items may actually be easy to include. But the real fun is having the vision and then seeing it through to completion, and then having the customers’ “see”the beauty of the product.

So how does the construction start for OnScene Xplorer 4.0? The design for the all new OSX 4.0 started with the release of the first version of On-Scene Xplorer 1.0 back in 2004. Yup, On-Scene Xplorer just had it’s 15th anniversary on April 14th. Of course things were different back then, but we have learned a lot over the years and the new version of OnScene Xplorer 4.0 will be the fruit of the knowledge gained.

Although a lot of the design of the new app is under the hood, much like an HVAC system of a new home, at some point you want to see the architectural drawings. Same for 4.0. We started with paper and pen and a bunch of sketches. Here is a snippet of the main interface:

With a road map in place for the under the hood stuff and a layout for the user interface, the software developers are now at work. The back-end work often is filled with trial and error as new methods to handle data and moving data around are investigated, worked with, refined, and implemented. Just like how HVAC techs fully appreciate a new system in a home under construction much more then the home buyer, it’s like that for software. Developers can look at code and make comments like, “it’s very elegant in its implementation.” For the rest of us? We want to see the granite counters.

OnScene Xplorer 4.0 is still early in development, but progress is being made. Here are a couple of screen shots of the “home” being built. Of course, there is more to come…

Oh, and you may have noticed something above that changed when OnScene Xplorer 3.0 was released in 2011, it’s the “-“. Yes, it was a subtle change in the name of the product from “On-Scene Xplorer” to “OnScene Xplorer.” Our baby is growing up.