Gate Slate Live

Every factory, office, school and gated colony keeps a gate book, and every one of them has the same blind spot. The book records arrivals and departures in the order they happened, so answering the one question that actually matters — who is inside right now — means reading back through the pages and crossing names off in your head. At the moment you most need that answer, during a fire alarm or a lockup at the end of a shift, nobody has time to do it. Gate Slate keeps the answer on the screen instead of in the pages. Everyone currently on site hangs as a tag on a rack, under one large count, and the tag stays there until they leave. Sign somebody out and their tag comes off the rack immediately and drops into the day's log. The board only ever shows people who are still inside, so it shrinks through the afternoon, and when the last person goes it says plainly that the site is empty. Each tag carries a coloured tab telling you at a glance whether the person is a visitor, a contractor, a delivery or staff, along with who they came to see and how long they have been inside. That last figure is worked out from the clock every time you look at it, so the rack is never stale — leave the app on the gate desk for three hours and every tag will have three more hours on it when you pick the phone up again. If somebody said they would be an hour and it has been three, their tag turns orange without anything popping up or buzzing. Nobody is ever signed out automatically, not even overnight: a tag left on the rack from yesterday stays there and is flagged, because guessing when somebody left would be far worse than admitting it was never written down. Signing somebody in takes a name and a tap. Everything else — who they are seeing, their company, a vehicle registration, a pass number, how long they expect to be — is optional and can be added afterwards from their card, because a gate officer with somebody standing in front of them should not be filling in a form. Roll call is the part you hope never to use. Tap it and the people currently on site become a checklist: work down the names, tick each one as accounted for, and the count at the top tells you how many are still unaccounted in figures big enough to read at arm's length. Nothing you do there touches the register — it does not sign anybody out, and walking away from a half-finished check leaves everything exactly as it was. The day's log gathers the rest: everyone in and out today, how long each stayed, who is still inside, and a small bar for each hour showing when the arrivals came. Gate Slate is a written register kept faster, and nothing more than that. It is not a security or surveillance system — there are no photographs, no ID scanning, no watchlists, no background checks and no tracking of any kind. It does hold other people's names and vehicle details, though, so please tell visitors what is being recorded about them. Everything is stored in a database on the device itself. There is no sign-up, no profile, no server and no connection of any kind — the register cannot be uploaded or shared, because there is nothing in the app that could send it anywhere. Nothing is collected, nothing is advertised, and nothing is for sale inside it. Settings clears the whole register whenever you want, and deleting the app takes it with them.