Photo Inspection Reports Mobile Application

Project Description

The company contacted Softengi as an outsource software development provider with a request to develop a cloud-based renewable energy business platform. As part of this project, Softengi was to develop a Photo Inspection Reports Mobile Application, which would help technicians inspect homes (both inside and outside) and structure and streamline the formation of photo reports of the inspection of the premises in order to exclude the human factor from this process.

Softengi Team Tech Contribution

The main challenge was to deliver both iOS and Android versions of the application with the most similar UI and functionality possible and ensure their concurrent release and updates. To make this possible, our development team chose the Xamarin platform, which enabled them to produce both iOS and Android versions simultaneously and guarantee their compliance with App Store and Google Play requirements.

The customer also wanted the application to have a high-contrast design so that it could be used outdoors, even in bright sunlight. To improve the screen readability, the Softengi team has developed a high-contrast design for the application and thoroughly tested it under operational conditions.

The application was designed to let users take photos of acceptable quality in low-light conditions. To improve the quality of the photos, our team developed a component capable of taking into account the device orientation, focal distance, presence of various AF modes, and the type of image desired. The application also allows for making readable images of documents.

One of the key features of the application was to generate the final report (in PDF format), which would be of limited size, but contain hundreds of high-quality images. So, our team ensured that the PDF report generation was accompanied by a heuristic image compression algorithm.

Furthermore, the customer required the reception of statistics on the use of the application. The solution was to connect the application to Google Analytics to track each user’s actions and switch between the application screens. The statistics received allowed the customer to generate ideas regarding the further improvement of the application.

Not least important is the perfect application performance when displaying a large number of images with a limited amount of read-only memory (ROM), the consumption of a small amount of traffic, and the use of the least amount of ROM necessary.

Conclusion

As a result of Softengi’s development, application users are able to:

• Take high-quality photos of a site;
• Pack photos into a single PDF report and send it over to the installation partner;
• Complete on-site surveys and forward them to the installation partner;
• View project details (information available on the project.)