Mobile app 1.6.0: the app reads as one app, and the broadsheet arrives on the phone

Version 1.6.0 is out on Google Play. The headline is not a feature: it is that the app looks and behaves like one thing for the first time. Every list, button, sheet and animation now comes from one place rather than from whichever screen happened to be written first. Alongside that, the class broadsheet arrives on the phone, and a school that keeps its dates in the Hijri calendar can now do so throughout.

The iPhone and iPad app is coming soon.

The app reads as one app

Fifty-odd screens were rebuilt against a single set of parts.

Lists are ruled rather than boxed. A long roster reads as a record instead of a stack of cards, which is what a school register actually is. The rules line up with the names beside them, which sounds like nothing until you see a list where they do not.

Every button is the same button, at the same size, with the same behaviour when it is busy. No control changes size at the moment it is pressed, and none rewrites its own label to announce that it is working. Every sheet sits on the same scaffold, and every menu opens as a sheet.

Motion is one scale, with a real answer for a reader who wants less of it. Turn on Reduce motion in your phone's accessibility settings and the app stops animating rather than merely animating faster. That includes the busy indicator, which previously kept pulsing regardless of the setting.

The app follows your phone's theme again. Appearance now names all three states, so "Match device" is something a reader can choose rather than only something they have not yet changed.

Text size is respected properly. Dashboard tiles grow with the reader instead of clipping, and the placeholder shown while a list loads is measured from the same text as the rows it stands in for, so the page no longer changes shape as the data lands.

The class broadsheet, on the phone

Every pupil a row and every subject a column, in the four shapes the web offers: scores, every assessment as a sub-column, one subject with its own totals, or one subject carrying the session's earlier terms.

The phone fetches the rendered sheet and hands it to you to share, rather than redrawing it. A broadsheet is a page, not a screen, and a version of it that had to be scrolled in two directions would be a worse document than the one that prints.

Hijri dates, throughout

A school that reads and enters its dates in the Umm al-Qura calendar can now do so on the phone, matching the web. Choose Gregorian, Hijri, or both.

Nothing stored changes. Every date is still kept in the Gregorian calendar underneath, so it still sorts, filters and drives the academic calendar exactly as before, and switching back costs nothing.

Money, per pupil

A pupil's invoices and payments now open from their own record, each list downloading as a CSV named by the server. A family's fee screen reads as a statement, and reads the same way whichever of the two family accounts opens it.

Elsewhere

• Messages. The history pages properly instead of stopping at the first twenty, and any message opens in full rather than being clipped to a preview.
• Grades. They open on the current session, group by period the way the pupil's own screen does, and hold the list to the filter you set rather than quietly widening it.
• Parents with children at more than one school. The child you picked is the child shown on every screen, and there is a way back into your own account from a child's.

Fixes

• Opening any date field crashed the app for a school using the Hijri calendar. The picker's buttons could not lay out, so the sheet rendered as an error with no way to choose a date or even cancel. It affected roughly fifteen places a date is entered.
• A date carrying a time could show the previous or next day, depending on where the reader was sitting. A refund recorded late in the evening read as one day on one screen and another day on the next.
• Signing out left the phone registered for the previous person's notifications on three of the four ways out of the app, including the one offered after a password change on a shared handset.
• A notification tapped while the app was closed landed on the dashboard rather than the thing it was about. That included the clock-in reminder, whose whole point is that the tap is the action.
• A correction to a staff clock-out was recorded in the phone's timezone rather than the school's, so a correction made while travelling could be filed against the wrong day.
• The app no longer gets slower the longer you stay on a list and page through it.
• Quick actions no longer overflow their row at large text sizes on the student, parent and teacher dashboards.
• Restoring the app onto a new phone from a backup no longer leaves it unable to make any request.
• Answers written in Arabic numerals now sit on the same side as they do in the browser.