Ahh.. the weekend. Time for rest ..or rather .. work. It’s been so busy this week, but there’s so much to do. First, a few photos before I get into the details of work. The weather and the view were rather spectacular yesterday.
I did manage to get out of the house briefly yesterday but the majority of the day was spent working.
I had a few sick iPhones to fix and one in particular was a bear. An OLD iPhone 3 that “a buddy” jailbroke for this guy. Those are the worst. The phone was so mangled internally with a bootloader that didn’t match the IOS and all sorts of Cydia duct tape holding things together, that it was no wonder he had problems with it. All told it took a week of several standard reloads, DFU reloads, pwned DFU reloads and finally a good beating with an ancient version of redsn0w (newer ones wouldn’t even talk to this phone) before it finally gave up. I like this photo because it shows the final stretch to success and my old-school terminal (older even than the phone) ..
After that I spent another 6+ hours with Vito on the Volunteer Network app. He finally let me play with the code and I managed to not break much. For some reason I’ve always been better at breaking than building. But I can tell you from experience.. breaking is so much easier. :-)
We focused on the map view today. The map is really a key part of the app because whether you’re a charity or a volunteer, you’ll be using the map to find someone to help (or help you as the case may be). Originally the map was a very basic affair. Although it was fast and worked well, the pins didn’t give you too much information:
Once you clicked on a pin, you got basic information but then had to click on the name to enter a profile screen to read about their skills/needs. If it wasn’t a match, you clicked back to go to the map again and continue searching. This was a bit clumsy and time consuming. What we did was change it so that if you’re a charity and you click a volunteer pin you see the skills they have that you need. And if you’re a volunteer clicking a charity, you see needs that match your skills.
This way, you know what you’re getting into before you even click on the profile to potentially engage. We had to come up with shortnames for skills/needs and of course change every view that the map was in. This was a small change that shuffled a lot of things. We’re moving along at a pretty good pace now.
