Pulse starts life as a face clock-in prototype

Where it started

Mintage Pulse did not start under that name. At the end of August 2022 we opened a new Android project with a simple goal: let employees clock in and out at a shared tablet by looking at its camera, instead of signing a book or swiping a card. The project went by working names at first; the Pulse name came much later.

This first month was short. The repository was created in the last days of August, so most of the work landed in two days. That is why there is little to show yet, but the shape of the app was already clear.

The first screens

The first piece of work was a sign-in screen and an options screen. Both were stubs: enough to sign in and reach a menu, without the finished design. They gave us a path through the app so the next features had somewhere to live.

The second piece was device registration. A clock-in kiosk has to know which account it belongs to before it can record anything, so we built a screen that registers the tablet. Only the core functions went in at this stage: enter the details, send them to the server, and remember the result on the device.

Each of these was tracked as its own small task and merged into the main line when it was done. That habit, small steps that each leave the app working, carried through the rest of the year.

What came next

With sign-in and registration in place, the obvious next step was the kiosk itself: a full-screen camera view where people actually clock in. That became the focus of September.