Software enables touch-screen application creation

An Acquire Digital Multimedia product story

Edited by the Marketingweek Marketplace editorial team May 6, 2009

Acquire Digital Multimedia has developed the Kiosk Designer, a version of its editor software that enables users to build an interactive touch-screen application from scratch.

Aimed at kiosk manufacturers and kiosk software development companies, the Acquire Kiosk Designer uses the same design engine as Acquire Premier Editor 3.3 but has been optimised for kiosk applications with a set of specially developed plug-ins.

Acquire typically builds a project using a collection of pages that are played sequentially using a script (or playlist) and this design architecture is ideal for kiosk applications.

Kiosk Designer includes a new flowchart-based viewer that enables users to build an application on screen in the same traditional way that they would have done using a block diagram flowchart.

The user now has a visual representation of the individual pages of their application and can drag and drop pages to different places in the flowchart.

Each page can contain up to 1,024 separate rich-media elements, any of which can be made into interactive 'hot spots' that when touched can jump to other pages, navigate around the application, or set variables that can be used anywhere else in the Acquire project.

Users can even use external triggers such as scanners, sensors, switches, video cameras, external databases, and so on.

A typical example might be a system that scans a barcode to display a product photo with its associated features along with pricing from a retail store EPOS database.

Another example may be a pay-per-use secure web browsing kiosk with an onscreen virtual keyboard, showing advertising based upon keywords in the web pages.

Kiosk Designer's external scripting engine enables users to create fully featured applications using VBScript and Javascript.

There are many standard controls such as text entry boxes, interactive buttons, onscreen keyboards, secure web browsers and connections to live databases.

Users can easily integrate card-readers and cashmechs to allow payment, and when using an unattended payment service, chip and PIN payments can be accepted.