Flash It

A flashing is the length of folded steel that caps the join between the roof and the wall of a building. During construction, roofers and builders will need to order numerous lengths of flashings, specifying a specific cross-section shape, often with special folds, materials and colours, sometimes with lengths tapering from one shape to another at the other end. Mistakes in specifications can result in wasted materials and significant delays.

The Flash It app solves all of these problems by providing users with an intuitive, yet feature rich, interface for drawing the cross-section shape for each flashing. Users can prepare orders with multiple shapes and lengths, along with their own annotations and photos, and have a PDF of their order emailed directly to their supplier.

In addition to designing and order creation, the Flash It app includes a range of additional features making it an indispensable tool. Users can save their own library of common flashing designs, share orders and designs amongst a team, the app supports phones and tablets, multiple languages, as well as metric and imperial measurements.

The core of the Flash It app is the flashing designer. The designer is an entirely bespoke view, built upon Google's Skia drawing library, and using a range of low-level gesture recognisers.

Every tap, drag and pinch has been carefully considered to offer users a digital drawing interface that is incredibly intuitive to learn, while supporting all the elements specific to flashing design. The app includes a library of inline animations and tutorial videos for first time users.

By implementing a true cross-platform architecture, the very same code used to present the drawing interface in the app is also used to render the drawings as images on the server and embed into PDFs, ensuring that nothing gets lost in translation from app to supplier.

At We Make Apps, the successful start-ups are always our favourite projects. No other type of client really grasps the importance of innovation and continuous improvement.

We specialise in providing the complete implementation plan for start-up ideas. We spend the time with our clients to learn the intricacies of their world so we can best translate it into the app space.

The Flash It app is a model of this kind of process - flashing design is a highly specific domain and requires someone with intimate knowledge and experience of the industry, while implementing this kind of bespoke drawing interface requires a specialist company like We Make Apps.