The beta

iChecks is being tested with a small number of working crews before it goes to the App Store. Builds are distributed through Apple's TestFlight, by invitation — there is no public link, because the point of this stage is a handful of people using it properly rather than a lot of people opening it once.

How to join

1. Email christophe@argocy.com and say roughly what you'd run checklists for. One line is plenty.
2. You'll get a TestFlight invitation at that address. Install Apple's TestFlight app if you don't have it, then accept.
3. Builds expire after 90 days, so you'll get a fresh one before that runs out, with a note on what changed.

Apple gives testers' email addresses to the developer — that is how a TestFlight invitation works — and it is used for sending you builds and answering you, nothing else. Apple also collects crash reports and basic usage data from TestFlight builds and shows them in aggregate; that is Apple's mechanism, and it is the only reporting of any kind attached to this app. The privacy policy spells both out.

What this build does

• Run any checklist in the library, tick items, add a comment to any item
• Every tick saved the instant you make it — a run survives a force-quit
• Resume a half-finished run hours or days later
• Completed runs in History, with timestamps and the time zone they were captured in
• Write and edit checklists in the app, or import and export the files
• Light, Dark and Night themes
• 43 superyacht checklists to start from

What it deliberately doesn't do yet

These are the next releases, and only if this one earns them. Listing them here so nobody installs the beta expecting them:

• PDF export of a completed run
• Finger signature on sign-off
• Location stamp
• Sync between devices
• Teams, invitations and shared history

What's actually being tested

One thing: whether it is faster than paper. The most useful thing you can do is use it on a day you would have used paper, running whatever check you would have run anyway — not tour the features.

If you get the chance, these are worth pushing on:

• Interrupt a run. Force-quit the app, take a call, let the screen lock — then check nothing you ticked was lost.
• Use it at night, on a darkened bridge, with the Night theme.
• Use it in gloves, and tell me where the targets are too small.
• Write your own checklist, and import a file if you keep yours in a text editor.
• Try it on an iPad — the layout is a different one there.

What's needed back: whether it was faster than paper, and where it got in your way. Send it from the About screen inside the app — that fills in the build number automatically — or just reply to the invitation email.

Which of those comes first isn't settled

The list of what's missing, above, is 5 candidates rather than a queue. Nothing about the order is fixed, and one person at a desk is the wrong one to fix it: a PDF export matters enormously if someone downstream keeps asking you for the sheet, and not at all if nobody ever does. That difference isn't visible from here.

So there are two things worth sending beyond bug reports:

• Which of them you'd genuinely use — and what you would stop doing by hand once you had it. That second half is what separates a real need from a good idea.
• What isn't on the list at all. It is bounded by what I have thought of, which is not the same thing as what the work needs.

There is no form and no survey — a form only collects the answers someone already thought to ask for. Send it as an email and it is read by the person writing the code. Where an answer changes the order, the note attached to the next build says so.

Costs and commitments

The beta is free, there is nothing to buy inside it, and there is no obligation attached to leaving it — remove the app from TestFlight and that's that. When iChecks reaches the App Store it will be paid; the prices aren't set, and they'll be published before anyone is asked for one.