The crew app: what it is and how to open it

The office screens and the crew screens are different surfaces on the same account. A desk has a mouse, good light and both hands free. A boat in the rain has none of those.

Getting in

Sign in normally with an emailed code — see signing in — and go to /field. Crew members land there by default.

Install it to the home screen

Do this once, on the phone the crew actually carries. It is not cosmetic: installing is what lets the app open full screen, keep its own storage, and work when there is nothing to load from.

The app offers it. Open /field on a phone or tablet that has not installed it yet and a bar appears at the top: Put LakeOps on this phone. On Android that is a single Install button. On an iPhone there is no such button anywhere on the web — Apple does not provide one — so the bar tells you the two taps instead, and they are the two below. Dismiss the bar and it stays dismissed on that device.

• iPhone — open it in Safari, tap Share, then Add to Home Screen.
• Android — open it in Chrome, tap Install on the bar, or the browser menu, then Install app.

What it shows

A live chart: the boat, the stops around it, and the day’s work ordered by where you actually are rather than by a list somebody made in the office. Opening a stop gives you the property, its access notes, its items, and the buttons that matter — the clock and Mark done.

One pin per stop, with the count on it

Each property is a single marker carrying the number of items still to do there — four dock sections and a lift left to set reads as a 5 from across the bay. It is one number because a phone in a crowded bay cannot show twelve overlapping dots and still be read at arm’s length. A stop with nothing left keeps its pin and loses the number.

Tap a stop and two things happen. It becomes the one you are going to — the distance, the arrow and the line from the boat all move to it. And its own pins appear: the individual pieces with work left on them, each at the end of the season this trip sends it to — the water in spring, the shoreline in fall. Tap the big button to open the stop itself.

If the stop you picked is not the closest one, the row at the bottom says so and offers the closest — Closest is 1233 Lake Vermillion, 0.2 mi — tap for it. Take the offer, or tap your stop's pin again, and the app goes back to ordering the day by where the boat actually is. When you are already headed for the closest stop there is no line, because there is nothing to offer.

The rings around the boat

Two faint circles are drawn around your own position as a distance scale — they resize as you zoom, so the chart always tells you roughly how far away something is without measuring. The outer one carries four small arrows at north, east, south and west, and the north one is red. Turn the chart to face the way you are going and they turn with it, so north stays north instead of staying at the top of the screen.

The buttons are big. Anything the crew presses is sized to be pressed in gloves, on a mounted phone, on a moving deck.

Everyone sees the whole pool

The crew app does not hide work from you. If a job is open on the water you are working, it is on your chart — because the boat that ends up at a shoreline is the boat that should be able to do the work there. See deploying a crew for how the pool is narrowed to a lake and its zones.

Sun mode, for the twenty minutes the water is a mirror

On a bright day there is a stretch when the sun is on the water and nothing on a phone is readable through polarised sunglasses. Tap the sun button beside the follow-me control and every panel goes opaque, every edge goes heavy, the chips go up a size and the stop markers thicken. Tap it again to go back.

Done, and couldn't do it

Every piece on a stop has more than one answer. Mark done is the ordinary one. Can't do it asks which kind of can't. Can't do it today is for the canopy that is frozen in, the water that is a foot low, the lift that is not the one on the record — tap a reason (or type your own) and the piece stays pending with that reason: the office sees it, and the stop stays in the pool for a boat that can do it. Not needed this season is the other answer — it closes the piece as skipped, it is not billed, and the reason is there in October when somebody asks.

That second verb is what lets a stop close from the water. Closing a job prices the work and emails the customer a total, so LakeOps will not let it happen while a piece is still open — and if you tap it anyway, the app says so on the spot and takes you to the piece that is stopping you, rather than accepting the tap and failing quietly two hours later.

Seeing what is still on the phone

The number on the Sync tab is how much has not gone up yet. Tap it and you get the list — every completion, note, clock and photograph still on the device, in the words that were on the button when you tapped it, with a Send button. "Three waiting" is a number; this is an answer.

What a crew member can and cannot do

That is decided by their role. A typical crew role can run timers, mark items done, add photos and write notes, and cannot touch rates, customers, service plans or anybody’s access. If a button is missing for one person and present for another, the role is why — see permissions and building your own role.

The one habit that matters

Pull the day pack before you leave the dock, while you still have bars. Everything the app can do without a signal depends on it, and it takes one tap.

For the shape of the whole thing rather than the how-to, see the crew app.