ViewTouch is the only POS solution using distributed networking X windows. More than that, ViewTouch is the only POS solution which is a multi-user, network based, graphical environment. Every other product offered by any other vendor is either a bunch of computers with no graphical interface at all, or a bunch of computers, each with a single user, low resolution graphical interface which has no inherent support for and no concept of network or workgroup connectivity at the level of the operating system or interface.  How can this be? It's simple, really. Windows is not a multiuser OS or a networking windowing system which supports multiuser computing. Like the Macintosh OS, Windows was designed as, and remains, a single user windowing system.

In 1985, the idea of the graphic user interface was in its infancy.  The point of a GUI was to make the operating system, the 'OS', easier to manage, but it wasn't created to make specific application programs easy to use.  The GUI did make it easier for software developers to write applications for the OS, but in an indirect kind of way. Today all popular operating systems have a GUI to manage the computer's files and peripherals.  Sometimes, as with single user operating systems like Windows and the MacOS, it is closely bound into the OS's kernel. Sometimes, as with the multi-user operating systems based on Unix, it is not bound into the kernel. It is a far better situation when it isn't. The graphic user interface is also the software foundation upon which many software developers write applications. That's a big mistake as far as you are hat's a big mistake as far as you are concerned if the primary thing you are using the computer for is something other than managing the use of the operating system.

For developers, writing applications upon an OS nearly always implied using the built-in GUI for the application interface, too. They accepted the GUI as a suitable application interface because it freed them from dealing with issues of designing an interface from scratch. Unfortunately, it imprisoned developers and the users of the applications within the constraints of the restrictions and limitations of the graphic user interface designed to manage the operating system.  For many developers and users, indeed the majority, this two-edged sword still cuts both ways in contemporary applications.

At ViewTouch, we have never accepted any GUI offered by an OS as a suitable or appropriate interface for the specific needs of our customers.  We saw built-in, OS GUI's as a primitive and restrictive part of an OS when designing software which needed foremost to be easy to use. We determined that the operating system's role would not be allowed to limit or restrict the interface.   GUI's had been designed for everybody in general and designed for everybody in general and could, therefore, never satisfy the "Ease Of Use" requirement for the users of any specific application.  Of course, that meant that we had to create our own application specific graphic user interface and that we had to never stop expanding and improving it, but we took up the challenge.  ViewTouch always has been a graphic user interface first, designed to be perfectly suitable for the particular job at hand.  This is why ViewTouch doesn't look like Windows, or like an Apple Macintosh, or like anything but itself.  And, this is why ViewTouch is regarded by those who use it as the leading software of its kind in the world.

Although we've been doing this since 1985, only recently has a term and wide acceptance come to be applied to what we do, now that most companies realize that it's a better way, the right way, to write easy-to-use software for specific, unique situations.  That term is 'application centric'.  We've been building GUI-building tools for POS since 1985 and we have some of the best in the world.  Although on a much smaller scale, like IBM's Thomas Watson Research Center, Microsoft Research and many other companies, we experiment with concepts to address the neednt with concepts to address the need for better interfaces for specific, unique situations.  We have been satisfying customers since 1986; we thoroughly enjoy our work and realize that deriving as much satisfaction as we do from it is important to our ability to do our best work.

Many POS vendors play fast and loose with the term GUI. They talk about their interface as a GUI, but it is NOT a GUI because they send only text to the screen, and not graphics. The 'G' in GUI stands for graphic, yet many POS vendors don't send anything more than character cells to the display in purple, light blue, light green and pink. They have a User Interface all right, a UI, but it doesn't use graphics.

Bit mapped GUI's vs. Rendered GUI's

 We'd like to make you aware of the World Wide Web Consortium's page on Graphics Activity.  There you can read about the inherent advantages of scalable vector graphics over bit mapped graphics and the plans of the `W3C' to advance the base of Internet graphics from bit maps to the more advanced `SVG' format.  So what does that matter?  Well, it turns out that although the earlier gen turns out that although the earlier generations of ViewTouch and the current products from all other POS software companies are based on bit mapped graphics, the current version of ViewTouch is based on SVG - scalable vector graphics.  The advantages of the ViewTouch graphic user interface being based on scalable vector graphics are many, are significant, and they are dramatic.  If you're searching for a single term or reason why ViewTouch graphics are superior, this is it - the ViewTouch graphic user interface is based on scalable vector graphic instructions and is not made up by throwing a bunch of pictures on the display.

The single best advice we can give you to prepare you for any discussion of GUI's is this: Be sure that you understand whether the discussion is about the GUI as a tool to manage the operating system, often referred to as the Desktop GUI, or whether the discussion is about the GUI as a tool to make a specific application easy to use. If it is a discussion about a GUI for both, then it is about attempting to unnaturally force the former to also be the latter. It's never worked yet, and our money says that it never will.