Developer John Murphy — a full-time, corporate developer in a large city secondary college for seven years, graphic design specialist, and registered teacher — has released a college cafeteria POS (point of sale) solution that’s Mac compatible, called SoftWatch Cafe.
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“Cafe has been beta tested in two local [New Zealand] high schools,” Murphy told MacCentral. “It works with a bar code scanner and a Concept keyboard. Around 400 hungry students are funneled through the system each lunch hour. The first time it was used was a baptism of fire for the package and me, but it coped and with a bit of code tweaking, it now screams.”
The two cafeterias are cashless; parents are sent an invoice every month. Of course, some students need monitoring, so the college principal takes a record of boarders’ purchases to the hostel each evening and discusses diet with the students who are of concern, Murphy explained.
“There is a stop card function if cards are lost or parents are worried about overspending,” he added.
The solution works with all recent versions of FileMaker Pro and the Mac operating systems that support them. Murphy said that SoftWatch Cafe and his other solutions aren’t “boxed” software, and it’s usual for a client to require modifications to suit his/her needs. The most productive method is to combine this with the training of the client’s database manager, according to Murphy. More details, and contact info, go to his Web site.