Mobile app 1.5.0: staff clock in from their own phones, and Arabic reads the right way round

Version 1.5.0 is out on Google Play. It is the first release in which the app does something for a member of staff on their own behalf rather than on a pupil's, and that turns out to change what the app is for at a school. Alongside it, online tests now carry Arabic and other right-to-left scripts properly.

The iPhone and iPad app is coming soon.

Staff attendance, on the phone it belongs on

A member of staff can now clock in and out from their own phone rather than from a machine in the office. That is the whole point of putting it here: a signing book on the front desk is a queue at five to eight, and a shared tablet is a device somebody else is holding.

Clocking in is a punch, not a form. One press, and the server decides whether that was an arrival or a departure. Nothing is typed, and nothing can be back-dated from a phone.

Where something stands in the way, the screen shows it as a checklist rather than as a failure: a device not yet approved, a location permission not yet given, a punch outside the school's own window. A refusal that names the one thing to fix is a refusal somebody can act on.

Your day, and your month. Today's punches and the hours behind them, then the thirty days before it, with leave and school closures already accounted for.

Your timesheet prints, over exactly the period the list is showing, so the document and the screen cannot disagree. A member of staff downloads their own without needing a permission for it, because it is a record of their own hours.

A morning reminder goes to anyone who has not clocked in while the window is still open, and there is a card on the dashboard for anyone who opens the app themselves.

It is a clock rather than a tracker. The app asks for location only while it is in use, never in the background, and there is no version of this that will ask for background location. Nothing is watched between one punch and the next, and the reminder's wording says only what a clock can honestly know.

This device. Enrol the phone you clock in from, and see which phones are approved. A phone already approved for a colleague says so in those words, which is what closes buddy punching without a fingerprint reader or a turnstile.

An administrator with the permission manages the school's attendance sites from the phone as well, and gets the board, the timesheet and the leave list built from the permissions they actually hold.

Clocking in works on a day the school has recorded as closed. Staff work when the pupils are away, and refusing the punch locked schools out of their own timesheets over the holidays. The minutes count; the day still derives as closed, because the denominator for punctuality is the days the school was open.

Arabic and other right-to-left languages

Online test questions, options and explanations now lay themselves out from right to left when that is what they are written in, both for the teacher writing the paper and the candidate sitting it.

The direction is read from each piece of text, not set for the whole school. So one paper can carry an Arabic question and an English one, and a field turns round as you type into it.

The screens themselves are deliberately not mirrored. A layout that moves depending on which pupil is on screen is worse for a mixed-language school than one that stays put.

Elsewhere

• Report cards. The head of school's comment now follows the school's own comment bands as a suggestion rather than as text already written, so opening a card no longer quietly turns a default into an authored remark.
• Fees. Recording a payment no longer implies a receipt. The receipt follows the verification, as it does on the web, so a payment later rejected has not already been acknowledged in writing.
• Attendance. A day now says whether a register was expected of it, rather than leaving an unmarked Saturday looking like a register somebody forgot.

Fixes

• Backing out of the clock-in screen while a punch was in flight raised an uncaught error. The punch itself was never at risk; it had already reached the server.
• A double tap on Clock in could send two punches.
• The attendance history screen could crash on a month whose first day fell either side of a rollover.
• A refusal was drawn in the same colour as a success.