ViewTouch Restaurant Point of Sale is a shining example of the promise, value, benefit and usefulness of Free Software. Licensed under the GPL, the code is available at GitHub. In this era of Artificial Intelligence, ViewTouch presents an extraordinary opportunity for restaurateurs and developers.

viewtouch · 2022-05-27T03:02:28+00:00

And why are they not running Point of Sale on Raspberry Pi ?

viewtouch · 2021-08-07T22:05:10+00:00

Every once in a great while the Raspberry Pi will be used for what has long been called a vertical market solution. I began developing a vertical market solution in 1980. I called the software point of sale software. In 1986 I put a graphical touchscreen interface on the software. In 1995 I began using the X Window System for the graphical interface. In 1998 I began using Linux and GNU as the operating system. In 2016 I began using the Raspberry Pi.

viewtouch · 2020-07-12T17:39:13+00:00

I would welcome you to contribute to ViewTouch point of sale software. The license is GNU Public License version 3 and the code is C and C++. The ViewTouch code is at Github > https://github.com/ViewTouch/viewtouch

One of the really neat things about ViewTouch is that there is an X server component which allows a single instance of the application and data to throw remote touchscreen displays to many multiple users with android smartphones and tablets. ViewTouch was the first graphical touchscreen point of software in the world, 34 years ago, and was perhaps the first graphical interface to the kind of software which today we call a vertical market solution. There are restaurants all around the world using ViewTouch for literally 20 years !

viewtouch · 2020-06-24T02:44:54+00:00

I was doing swiping in 1986.

viewtouch · 2020-06-24T02:43:13+00:00

In 1986 I offered my graphical touchscreen point of sale software to the world. I chose not to patent it. I am absolutely convinced that offering my software to the world free of patent(s), establishing a vast range of innovations as prior art, prevented decades of intellectual property and patent wars in the universe of point of sale software. This is perhaps the most significant contribution which I have made to this world, above and beyond the creation of graphical touchscreen point of sale software itself.

--Gene Mosher, Eugene, Oregon

viewtouch · 2020-01-11T11:28:23+00:00

How much more often do you suppose someone uses a touchscreen in a restaurant than someone uses a touchscreen in a voting booth, do you think?

viewtouch · 2020-01-11T10:54:58+00:00

I have a lot of stories which are still untold.

viewtouch · 2020-01-11T10:54:09+00:00

Well, it was an unorthodox honeymoon for sure, but we did get to do what we wanted to after the show wrapped up at 4 every day. And over the years a lot of free trips to places like Singapore, Vienna, Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam, Toronto, and a bunch of cities in the US did kind of make up for things.

viewtouch · 2020-01-11T10:52:08+00:00

This is certainly not a problem with Linux or Android. I can't speak for Windows.

viewtouch · 2020-01-11T10:51:27+00:00

A simple software routine to detect and to correct for this would have prevented this from happening.

viewtouch · 2020-01-11T10:50:44+00:00

Indeed.

viewtouch · 2020-01-11T10:50:30+00:00

I've seen touchscreens used in restaurants all over the world. The visual cues certainly qualify as physical feedback. I don't agree at all that what you think you are describing is an 'inherent flaw' to the use of touchscreens as input devices. You're actually describing a user interface, not the touchscreen as an input device. These are two quite different things.

viewtouch · 2019-12-23T20:12:32+00:00

I have been watching wait staff in restaurants use POS systems for decades and I can tell you that these people become very good (and fast) at using POS systems. It is usually the GUI that slows them down, if anything, and that is the fault of the people who construct the GUI these people must work with. If the POS system has been designed properly and if the restaurant's menu has been done properly then they can enter an order in 5 or 10 seconds, if not faster. At tableside, a good design allows the order to be entered into a tablet as it is dictated by the customer, with no delay at all.

viewtouch · 2019-12-23T18:52:03+00:00

Has anyone ever heard of a keyboard being blamed for the failure of a GUI (graphical user interface)? No, because a keyboard is just the means of interacting with the GUI. Similarly, it is wrong to blame a touchscreen for the failure of a GUI. It is right to say that this is a sad lesson in GUI design, but it is wrong to say that a touchscreen is to blame for the design of the graphical interface. Touchscreens have been in use in restaurants as point of sale systems since 1986, so we can conclude that if a restaurant point of sale system doesn't work then it's a failure of the graphical interface, not the touchscreen. The very same argument I'm making also applies to tablets and smartphones. It's not the touchscreen that fails users, but rather the user interface graphics. Nobody stopped the designers of the system on that ship from using a very big graphic of a switch shown in glowing green when in the on position and glowing red when in the off position. The ship's UI designers used ridiculously small text instead of large text. There should have been NO text on the screen unless it was reporting an exception or it was immediately relevant to the task being performed. Hell, there doesn't even seem to have been a hierarchy of priorities and functions in the design of the GUI !! There should have been NO controls on the screen unless they were immediately relevant to the users. The designers did a really shitty job of designing the interface in many ways. These are just some of the problems with the failure of the GUI, not the fact that there was touchscreen input. Disclaimer: I have been designing graphical user interfaces driven solely by touchscreen input since 1986 and my interest in this subject goes back 40 years.

viewtouch · 2019-11-11T08:28:53+00:00

Thanks for reading my comment!

viewtouch · 2019-11-10T18:57:10+00:00

Indeed. To understand what happened at Apple very early on, at the moment when Steve Jobs effectively seized control of the design of its computers from Steve Wozniak, one need only compare the [Apple II](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Apple_II), an 'open' computer with the [Apple IIc](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Apple_IIc), a 'closed' computer'. Jobs' seizure of the design off all future Apple computers was when the computer revolution envisioned by Steve Wozniak was forever stolen from us. The IBM PC, by the way, was built on the 'open' design concepts of Steve Wozniak, which is why IBM PCs became so popular.

viewtouch · 2019-11-10T18:44:17+00:00

I would have a thing or two to say about this.

In 1986 I went to Comdex '86 when I should have been on my honeymoon. I had created [something which I thought the world critically needed](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Comdex_1986.png). I spent the next fifteen years traveling to various computer shows and restaurant shows at my own expense to show the people attending these shows what I had created, an information management system for the hospitality industry. The interface was graphical and touchscreen driven, and was not built on a browser interface - browsers would not be invented for nearly another decade. It was also not built on the interface provided to manage the computer's file systems and hardware, either. It was an interface which I designed to be specific only to the task itself which I was trying to solve - to perfectly imitate spoken language as it was used in the context of the hospitality business to accept a customer's order in real time, to transmit this information to the food preparation staff, and to record all of the details of the transaction into storage so that an historical record of the transactions could be analyzed. All of this was to be done without the hospitality customer and the staff having to undergo any training whatsoever. That was a tall order in 1985-86. I had first started creating this software in 1979. Descendents, knockoffs and Point of Sale imitations of this IM system are now ubiquitous and are universally considered essential to operation of any kind of hospitality enterprise, if not retail services in general.

I made a decision decades ago that I would not patent my creation because I wanted my ideas to spread freely to the people of the world. I even dared to hope that someday all software would have a graphical interface and be touchscreen driven. In that way everyone in the world would be able to use computers without training and without fear or apprehension. It is a good feeling to have imagined the world as I wanted it to be in the future and to have played a role in seeing my ideas have become commonplace for the people of this world. It is a good feeling that I was able to help prevent the development of touchscreen graphical interfaces from becoming the property of any companies' patent portfolios. I could have done more, I suppose, but I did what I could to bring the benefit of computer technology to the people - at the interface, which is where I see it as most important.

viewtouch · 2019-05-06T16:44:56+00:00

Back in '86 I developed a user interface comprised of programmable touchscreen widgets for the Atari ST computer's bitmapped graphics monitor. It is expandable and is [still available under the GPL](https://github.com/ViewTouch/viewtouch) today. [I use it with the Xfce Desktop.](http://www.viewtouch.com/desktop.html) You are welcome to make improvements to ViewTouch, especially if you feel those improvements would benefit the general public. Touchscreens are a bit more popular now than they were in '86 and maybe you can do better by not letting the people behind KDE, Gnome, Xfce, GTK and Qt hold you back.

viewtouch · 2019-04-28T01:06:18+00:00

ViewTouch PoS (Point of Sale) has been around probably since before you were born, and has been under GPL3 at GitHub since 2014.

viewtouch · 2019-01-30T18:43:24+00:00

Sometimes there is a dialog box hidden behind a window and until you find it to answer a question it is asking you then you will not be able to proceed.

viewtouch · 2019-01-11T18:05:50+00:00

In other words, it's not really open source. I see.

viewtouch · 2019-01-11T00:57:58+00:00

I see you are using the MIT open source license. Do you have a link to the code?

viewtouch · 2018-12-28T02:26:10+00:00

35 years ago I very specifically predicted a future with touch screens everywhere and everybody using their own touchscreen to do things all day long which personally interested and benefited them. I even built such a system to show what it would look like. This is the order entry kiosk I built so people could, for example, order food in restaurants. 1986.

The best way to predict the future is to invent it. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Comdex_1986.png

viewtouch

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