The kiosk becomes the home screen

Kiosk first

A clock-in tablet has one job, so in April we made the kiosk the screen Pulse opens to. The old options screen was removed. Administrative tasks moved into a menu on the kiosk itself, first a popup and then a bottom sheet that slides up from the edge, with employee search and a clear unregister flow.

The kiosk layout was redesigned around a header, a card-style camera preview and actions along the bottom. It picked up the Pulse colour palette, the Invernisoft logo in place of a title, and a heartbeat-style pulse animation between the camera and the controls. The app's package name and version numbering were updated to match the Pulse name, and the old device registration flow from the first version was removed for good.

More evidence on every clock

Before the kiosk tries to recognise a face, it now runs a silent liveness check to make sure a real person is standing in front of it rather than a photo. The check runs in the background, so the person clocking in does not have to do anything extra.

Each clock event now carries the device's location and the photo used to verify the person. We increased the size of that photo so the verification marks added to it stay readable when a manager reviews it later.

Keeping kiosks current

Kiosk tablets are often left untouched for weeks. Pulse now checks Google Play for an update when it starts and when it comes back to the screen, and installs it before carrying on, so every kiosk runs the same version. The build tools were upgraded and the README was refreshed to describe the app as it now stands.