A Windows desktop app for producing commercial appraisal reports. It is built for one commercial appraiser, who has written these reports in Word for decades. Spenser owns the product. The app runs on one machine, offline, for one person.
HOW-WE-WORK.md is the standard this project is held to. It is the rules the
build has to clear and the reasoning behind each one. If you want to know how
the app got made rather than what it does, read that first.
app/ |
The product. Python server, React screens, its own engine and templates. The code reads no project files outside app/. At run time it also uses the settings and key files in the home folder and the jobs folder the appraiser points it at. One dev tool reaches wider: demo reset finds the repo root. One styling test reads the design system and skips without it |
Start Roy R. Fisher.command |
Double-click to run it on a Mac |
The delivered appraisals are his clients' confidential work, so they are not in this repository and will not be. Neither is his own folder template, which lives inside one of them. They stay on the development machine.
Several tests read that material to check the built Word file against a real delivered report. On a clone without it they skip, and say which private file they wanted. Everything else runs.
The design system and the firm's brand assets, its logo, letterhead and photography, are also not here. They are the firm's property rather than this project's, so they stay on the development machine. One styling test reads them and skips on a clone without them.
The previous version of this project, a set of AI skills that drafted reports by following written instructions, is also not here. It is kept as a local archive.
The appraiser can make a job from a form, and it creates his own eight folders on disk, named the way he names them. He can pick which sections the report needs, and the app proposes a list from the kind of appraisal. He can see what has arrived in his folders next to what the report still needs. He can build the subject photo pages, which produces a real Word file. He can set up his own API key on a settings screen.
Photo pages are the only section that produces a document. Everything else is listed so the report's real shape is visible, and says plainly that it is not ready yet.
335 tests; the ones that need that private material skip on machines without it.
- There is no Windows launcher. The only way to start it is a Mac shell
script. A
.battwin is a chore, not a hard problem, and nothing else is Mac-specific in the app's path. - The design system has not been adopted. The screens still run on the old stylesheet, whose brand red is wrong.
- No section other than photos builds. The next cheapest family is the image pages: aerial photo, neighborhood map, plat map, building sketch, comparable sales map. Same machinery as photos, which is proven.
- Reading an engagement letter is offered on screen but not built.
- Turning the finished Word files into a delivered PDF is not built, and the old tool for rendering numeric grids drives Excel through Mac-only automation.
The web interface is built from source and the built files are not committed, so a fresh clone needs one step before the app will serve anything:
cd app/web && npm ci && npm run build
Then start it with Start Roy R. Fisher.command on a Mac, or
python3 app/run_app.py.
The target PC will not have Node. Whatever we eventually hand him has to arrive with the interface already built, so that build is a packaging job for us and never a step for him.