As a consultant I got a job from a major public company to fix a new touchscreen based in-car dashboard they had built. It was a web app running on a cheap android tablet full screen. The thing worked well, they said, except that it would get stuck in demo mode, and you couldn’t switch out of it. They’d paid an overseas contractor a significant sum to build this and eventually fired them when they got stuck at this point.
Upon opening the code I discovered the entire program was a carefully constructed slide show with hundreds of jpgs in a jQuery carousel and some magic click areas coded in to jump the user between slides. Other than this code to jump to specific slides, there was no code at all. Even the text on screen was in the images.
I should note that their git repo consisted of about a hundred folders whose names were dates, and one folder named “current.” That was actually my first warning of just what I was getting in to.
"Upon opening the code I discovered the entire program was a carefully constructed slide show with hundreds of jpgs in a jQuery carousel and some magic click areas coded in to jump the user between slides."
Based on my narrow understanding of "standard issue practices" in car dashboard UI:s workflows, this was a common pattern at least at one major German automobile company. Static views and transition rules between them.
I was a bit involved in dashboard software a decade ago and was really surprised to learn this.
I worked on a very similar application (likely the same platform) and grew increasingly concerned while reading your post that I was the one who built this.
Upon opening the code I discovered the entire program was a carefully constructed slide show with hundreds of jpgs in a jQuery carousel and some magic click areas coded in to jump the user between slides. Other than this code to jump to specific slides, there was no code at all. Even the text on screen was in the images.
I should note that their git repo consisted of about a hundred folders whose names were dates, and one folder named “current.” That was actually my first warning of just what I was getting in to.