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View Full Version : An idea for a graphical *NIX point-of-sale app



HungSquirrel
December 1st, 2004, 05:34 AM
I just started work for a US retailer whose name will not be mentioned. 8) The retailer uses point of sale terminals that are a Windows application running on Dell machines with Windows 2000. After a few days using them, I realized that the GUI frontend is absolutely horrible and unintuitive. The layouts are inconsistent. The biggest beef I have with it is the transaction total and the change due are in tiny fonts. The app itself may be fine under the hood, but the whole GUI seems to have an unprofessional feel to it.

That got me thinking. Are there any good graphical point-of-sale apps written for *NIX systems, for example using GTK2? What about text-based? I think it would be a neat project idea to create a customizable POS (point-of-sale, not the other kind of POS!) backend and GTK2 frontend with tweakable fonts, images, etc. released under the GPL or a BSD-style license. As a bonus, the app's development could be financed by install CD sales, and maybe even by selling systems with a *NIX OS (such as our dearest Ubuntu!) and the POS app pre-installed, launching a configuration utility when it is first booted...

Anyway, tell me what you think! Would it work? Does something similar already exist?

amoser
December 1st, 2004, 10:34 PM
I found this link today, it kinda fits what you are looking for.

http://linuxdevices.com/articles/AT2874315267.html

~Alan