Point of Sale System
Developed a Point of Sale system w/ Kiosks in 2003 from scratch from user interviews & needs extraction per role. Went to extreme of building our own credit card gateway to avoid third party transaction costs. Credit card swipe was faster than anything else at the time, and nearly still, 10 years later. All UI done in flash, linux clients used for maximum stability. Never crashed, even when the power was out !
Later I was able to re-instance it at another Chicago restaurant (La Fette in Old Town). Scalability and ease of implementation held true to previous core components – yet the new functionality of Quickbooks Integration and various other administrative tasks improved workflow.
the core ideas behind it (‘thin client’/mobile, transaction-free gateway, eCommerce) have indeed become industry standard. Square, Shopify, etc. DTN/redundancy, p2p…
tools: Linux, mysql, Flex, flash, PHP, XML, Vital/Visanet gateway, Quickbooks, COM
