43P04T34

My wife, a nurse, uses Epic. Her hospital has committed $350 million to implementing it over a 3 year period. $25,000 per employee. I could write a book about my attitude toward this particular boondoggle and so many others like it. Everybody thinks that the browser interface is the only interface that apps can or should have. The app interface universe, including Apple and Google interfaces, is a colossal, idiotic blunder. Throughout my life I have seen almost nothing but the crap you describe. And nobody in the press, tech or otherwise, even writes about it - the way things are isn't even brought into question. The prevailing view is that 'if this is the way it is then this must be the best it can be'. It's the biggest con job of the computer era, in my opinion, but I can't even get an interview, or an article written, so we're screwed, as you note. I have hopes that someday this will change, but Apple, Google, Oracle and Microsoft have blown it and as long as people accept what is, instead of what could be, we will remain screwed.

No. I'm not in the business of web sites. My thing is PoS. If you have any PoS questions, let 'em fly.

Yeah, just wait until your eyesight starts failing. Then the fun begins. But I digress...

I live by certain axioms and I'll pass a few of them on to you because they reveal my attitude about all this. I hope there isn't too much in them which is self-contradictory.

The user interface is a window of opportunity which will never close.

The only user interface which a user will ever be happy with is one that a user can completely customize for himself.

Software Developers should never have to know what the user interface looks like, to spend any time working on the user interface or even have to care what it looks like. It's not a software developer's problem. Software developers have their hands full simply making sure that everything underneath works.

It's complicated, obviously. I am accustomed to looking at it this way: the management of software development is often overlooked except in the video game industry. There needs to be some real vision in the heads of the people who have the authority in the process of software development. There need to be people as dedicated to the issue of user interfaces who are dedicated to making money, to selling hardware, to keeping their jobs at all costs. This is a battle which, except in the video game industry, needs to be fought. If app developers had 1% of the vision and creativity that the video game teams have then apps would be a helluva lot more intuitive and easier to use than they are.

I have a client, two of them, on the St. Lawrence River near the Ogdensburg bridge, not all that far from you!

Now, to your comment. First I'll note an irony which your comment reveals. Over the years I have often been told that my fully integrated, self contained reports are not what people want, but what they want instead is for me to export the data to Excel. And that, of course, if I did that, would turn my report solution into their report problem. So I never did that. It's as if they just can't get their head around the fact that they are asking me to be able to ride their bicycle backwards.

In general, the PoS companies like to break Pos & hospitality management functions into components, then sell the components separately to make more money. That will make them more money but it will also break the vision I have of Pos & restaurant operations automation, so I never did that.

I am not really that well up to speed on what everybody is doing. The number of companies in the game is too many to count. What you're describing is a rather complete array of hospitality management components and I suspect that nobody is both offering them all and doing so at an affordable cost to the hospitality market. What I have done is at least make it economically and pragmatically possible, by placing my software under the GPL. Let me know if you don't know what that means.

You didn't ask this question but what I think you would benefit from next is if your customers could order their donuts & coffee from their own devices, and that this ordering process would include payment for these items as well. What you would get from this is information about how to maximize profit on your most popular menu items and how you could further engineer your menu to offer more items like the ones your customers prefer. Is there such a thing as donuts fried on demand?

Maybe you should email me about being a client. A Raspberry Pi and an android Tablet and you've arrived. I can't promise that I have everything you're in search of but I can promise that at least nobody is going to tell you that what you're in search of is simply not going to happen. I will be able to tell you how many of each type of donut you've sold on any day, week, month, quarter or year, but I won't be able to tell you how many to prepare tomorrow. That could be done, at least, if it's not already being done, because there is no reason that it can't be done.