Recent Enhancements and The Roadmap

What lies ahead? In 2019 we will see some work done to add a customer facing display, enhancement of the integrated customer database, refinements in the menu development tools and the addition of reverse ssh to simplify installation and improve support. Some other work which may happen this year includes replacing the bitmapped fonts with outline fonts.

Significant improvements recently have focused on allowing exceptional 'behavior' or, as I like to call it, 'more granular control', on individual displays. The latest improvement allows a display in a restaurant's bar area to sells its bar drinks at a price which include sales tax when served to customers in the bar area while the displays in a restaurant's dining area sells those same bar drinks at a price which does not include sales tax when served to a table in the dining area. It's a significant convenience to not have to deal with coins when bar customers pay in cash. Tax Rates are configured here..

By adding the -g flag to the cmake build file, setting Eclipse's build command to "make install" from the /build directory and pointing the Run command to /usr/viewtouch/bin, it's possible to actually both debug and install a live system interactively with everything in the proper directories. The graphical interface to gdb in Eclipse allows the precise object fields to be inspected and the events traced, which is a huge help.

A Personal Note: There is still more software which I have and which I would like to make available here at GitHub but I'm not a programmer or even a script writer so I will need a bit of help to do this. The availability of this 'Free' Point of Sale solution and of ViewTouch as a framework/platform for rapid development of touchscreen solutions in other markets and scenarios depends entirely upon my own financial resources and upon the willingness of others who have skills which I don't have to work with me to improve what is now available. I have been able to make a difference, but there is more to do and I'm asking everyone to offer a bit of their time to increase the impact of Linux and free software in this world. Until Linux and Free Software rule the world of end user solutions their promise will remain unrealized. I've dedicated my life and my personal resources to this end and I hope that others will offer a bit of their time and experience to achieve this dream. --Gene Mosher

2019

NeroBurner has been on fire. Beginning his work in June, '18 he has made vast strides in modernizing ViewTouch, replacing many instances of custom code with standard code. I intend to come back here soon and go into some detail with regard to this but for now I say thank you to NeroBurner for making the ViewTouch code base much more standardized, modern, and certainly improved. The current C++ standard which all community members should be working with is C++14 or later.