The iPhone app

What the phone is for

The iPhone app is not a viewer for the Mac. It is a register in its own right, and the Mac is one of the places it can sync with rather than the place it lives.

A phone that has never seen a Mac still works. It holds its own register, records machines as you walk a floor, and syncs to Starkive Cloud when you sign in. A phone paired to a Mac reads that Mac’s register instead. Which of the two you are on is decided in setup and shown at the top of Home, so you are never guessing where the rows came from.

The app is built around four tabs: Home, Assets, Scan and Settings. The Mac’s five areas are still the vocabulary, but the shape is different. Tabs rather than a sidebar, with Scan in the middle because it is the one thing only this device can do.

Home: what is asking for something

Home does not list the fleet. It lists what needs doing, because an overview that shows everything has not overviewed anything.

The masthead names where the register comes from: the Mac’s hostname when paired, Starkive Cloud when signed in, or This iPhone when the register is here. Under it, the count of assets held and a standing line: syncing, on this device, signed in, or synced with a time. A phone that holds its own register is never called offline, because there is no network it is supposed to be on.

Below the masthead, two bands. Asked of you carries the work addressed to a person: jobs waiting, requests needing a decision, changes that were refused and will not be retried on their own. Your fleet carries the register reporting on itself: new devices that arrived incomplete, the warning figures, the rooms. Both bands render on every launch, and a band with nothing in it says so rather than vanishing.

Assets: the register, one tap in

The tab lands on the list. It used to land on an index whose top row said Assets, and the register cost a tap on a menu named after it.

Assets, People and Consumables sit side by side in a segmented control under the title. All three are on screen at once, the default costs nothing, and a sibling costs one tap. Nothing here pushes any more: the only push left in the stack is a person, which is a different object again.

The list carries a search field and a scope filter. Typing filters as you go. The scope narrows to what needs attention, which is what Home’s attention list hands over when you tap through from it.

Consumables is the one collection with an add button, and only on a phone that owns its register. A companion holding a replica of a Mac’s register has no way to push a row it invents, so the button is not offered rather than offered and failing.

Scan: the middle tab

Scan is the reason to have the app on a phone at all. It reads a QR code, a barcode, or a photographed serial, and it does the right thing with each.

A code that names an asset this device holds stays on the viewfinder. The card goes up, the camera keeps running, and Verify is one tap away. That is the walk-round case: you are scanning machines that are already recorded, and closing the camera between each one would be the wrong shape for the job.

Everything else closes the screen first and goes through the scan path. A pairing QR pairs. A tag that may simply be newer than the last sync gets a sync and a second look. A code that matches nothing opens intake, because a machine that has just come out of a box is not a failure.

Scan also offers a continuous sweep, which is a different job from scanning one thing: a walk-round that records every machine it sees without stopping at each one.

Adding a machine

Three ways in, on one sheet, because the right one depends on what you are holding.

1. Scan the asset tag

   The camera reads a barcode or a QR code. A barcode is usually a serial, so it seeds the serial field and is shown as settled. One of our own QR codes carries an asset tag, so it is offered as a suggestion rather than applied: you spend it on whichever field you meant.

2. Photograph the serial

   For a machine whose label is printed rather than barcoded. The text is read on the phone, and the intake screen asks rather than asserts: if the barcode and the printed text disagreed, you are shown both.

3. Enter it by hand

   No barcode, no label, or no camera. The tag is still reserved from the register, and the serial is simply a field you may fill.

A record, as folders

The whole asset is here, thirty-odd fields across eight groups, but never all at once. Each group is a spine carrying the one line that answers whether anything inside it is wrong.

Above the groups sit the two things done constantly enough to deserve permanent space: Verify, and the status stamps. Both work outside an edit session, because an attestation is not a draft.

Edit opens a session. Nothing is written until you press Save, and a session that ends in Cancel leaves no trace: an audit entry for a change that never happened is worse than no entry. The Save bar rides every level of the stack, so pushing into a group does not lose the four changes you staged on the way in.

History is at the bottom, out of the edit flow. It is a log, not a group of fields: nothing in it can be changed, and putting it among things that can invited somebody to try.

What the phone will not do

Some of this is deliberate and some of it is waiting. Both are worth knowing before you promise a customer.

• No network discovery. The phone cannot scan a subnet for machines. Bonjour finds things advertising on the current Wi-Fi and nothing else, which is a degraded subset rather than a feature.
• No administration. Sites, stockrooms, custom fields and automations have no authoring surface on the phone. They are configuration that changes what every device sees.
• No disposal. Disposal needs a method, a date, sanitisation evidence and often a witness: a desk job, not something to stamp while standing at the machine. The record’s delete dialog says so and names the step that works today.

Sync, and what the phone holds

The phone syncs on foreground, on connection change, and after a scan that missed. There is no timer and no realtime doorbell.

An edit made at a rack is written locally and queued. The queue drains when the app comes forward, when the Mac connection changes, or when a scan misses and triggers a sync. The receipt under a saved change says whether it has arrived or is held, and asks the route rather than the network: if anything is still waiting for this asset, the edit has not arrived, whatever the signal looked like a moment ago.

A phone signed in to Starkive Cloud syncs the other record types too: people, sites, stockrooms, consumables, and the audit trail. A phone on the Mac’s LAN alone keeps its last synced copy of those, which is the honest outcome rather than an empty list.