We have been building online stores with an add-on iPad point of sale system for a couple of years using the extremely secure Drupal framework.

Grandiflora was our first client, and we jumped at the chance at providing a seamless experience for their staff. They use their florist iPad POS to manage courier delivery as well.

You can use the iPad to take orders and process them, send receipts to a nearby wireless printer, and take customer details and add them to your customer database.

Credit card details or cash can be taken in a number of different ways depending on your choice of payment facility. We support Westpac, the Commonwealth Bank, ANZ, St George, NAB, Paypal, EWay and we’re working on more service providers.

The iPad is always in the secure hands of the staff member, and they can easily use it to show the customer something that might interest them. This really works well for retail iPad POS where you can conveniently demonstrate stock from a supplier site.

Staff and customers love the iPad POS. The benefits of connecting your POS to your website are many. Because your POS is driven by a website it’s effortless to manage inventory, and therefore you can keep your reporting in one place, and have seasonal sales and stock availability immediately to hand.

With an iPad POS you can flexibly meet the customer where they are, even at a market stall or their home if you are running a party plan business.

Prices are quite reasonable compared to an old fashioned unsearchable till! Our solutions start at $2900+GST – and that includes a website with a pre-rolled template.

Get in touch and have a look for yourself.

Early in the piece we were contracted to produce a Business Analysis and pathway for the new DAAO with an eye on financial and data sustainability.

We conducted a 360° review, cross referencing current use cases with academic research requirements and new methodologies. We also interviewed stakeholders and potential investors in academic, arts, business and government and worked through a web of licensing issues. From this we developed a number of models and pathways and graded each for  likelihood of outcome given different environmental factors.

Our key argument remains that it is vital to maintain ground with this resource. There is no doubt that the reach of biography databases is much greater than imagined, and syndication multiplies the impact of what is essentially traded cultural capital. The DAAO therefore must remain current to be a viable source of data.

Our research made it evident that a stakeholder “user pays” model for this dataset is inconceivable without synthetic intervention. So the key outcome of the DAAO is a push to upgrade the ongoing freshness of the data through collaboration with contributors.

At this point we delivered the Business Analysis and we began the User Experience pass. We dialled up uber-UXer Lotte Meijer to collaborate, and set our top level goal to devise a way to encourage users to participate by contributing information about artists. Around the time of the first UX meeting, Mr. Snow and I went to a “happiness” lecture, and watched a Youtube video from The Fun Theory which is an initiative by Volksvagen. The premise is that you can change people’s behaviour by making things more fun. So this idea infected our process and we’ve delivered a complete interface that uses various game and fun tactics to encourage continued relationships from data contributors.

When it became evident that the brief required bringing Australia’s design history into the fold, we ran a Design Workshop that invited participants to contribute and discuss issues of interaction and research requirements from a design perspective. We also used this opportunity to test some of the search tools and interfaces we had selected to use in the DAAO.

We were very lucky that the DAAO team work so hard and are so great at logic problems! Gillian, Olivia Bolton and Jo Croucher were incredibly generous and giving in thinking and we had a lot of fun.  Each meeting ended in a big high as we worked through pumping out one creative solution after another.

The Software Requirements Specification (Technical Specification) was written largely by us in consultation with Gillian and her team. It documents the end to end features of the site and, along with its reference documents, forms the master build document for the DAAO going forward. It is a living document in that it will continue to evolve as features are added and refined.

Another key document that we produced was the UX wireframes for the site. They document features of each step of each user path through the site itemising each element and interaction of each page. Based on these we also produced a set of screen designs and style guide for the look and feel of the new DAAO. The SRS, Wireframes and Look & Feel are the documents from which the final site can be built.

We are now very happy that the baton for the build has largely been passed onto The Interaction Consortium who are working with Gillian and the DAAO office.  We continue to work on various parts, including branding, front end templates and user experience (UX) testing.

Go team ! We’re all looking forward to August!

During our initial tactical media lab we demonstrated that, while post production house websites were very beautifully designed, Google fairly much ignored them. Our challenge was to develop a design and user experience that was gorgeous, functional and SEO-happy. With iPads just around the corner at the time there were even more good reasons than usual to do away with Adobe Flash.

The collaborative design process with which we engaged Cutting Edge’s Art Director Brent Grayburn was a lovely experience with fantastic results. Laudanum developed a custom Drupal theme with jQuery for interaction and media control along side Colorbox + Longtail for full window HTML5 video playback.

We managed to satisfy four very different departments by providing custom fullscreen background images per section and optionally per page. Also with clever use of content types we were able to allow the same media to be tagged to multiple different pages – even down to each editors’ own microsite.

Future work will include CDN video distribution (Content Delivery Newtorks) and FTP/Intranet roll out of the theme.

whale:king st rossetti$ convert ribbons/*.png -append composite.png

If one wanted to append them horizontally instead of vertically one would switch out -append for +append.

Earth v Sky

The owners of the Fishcakes, an architect designed house overlooking Seal Rocks beach front, invited us to stay. It is without doubt the most spectacular beach house we’ve ever visited. Although the building seems high and potentially exposed the design is such that its incredibly private while affording 180° views of the beach, ocean and bush.

Their website needed to convey that same sense of tranquility and relaxation that we experienced whilst there. A simple calendar, schedule of tariffs and contact form are the only features that interrupt the beautiful photographs.

Thanks Fishcakes!

For Sydney florist grandiflora’s recent redevelopment we’ve built a gorgeously designed Drupal theme incorporating custom Drupal & Ubercart modules. The site is lavishly illustrated with photographs by Gary Heery, designed by the lovely Yolande Gray with a timelapse of a magnolia opening by Ian Hobbs. Needless to say Saskia and all the flowers are loving the new site!

Store keepers can now sell seasonal flowers that are on the floor today. With a couple of clicks roses are out and tulips are in. Photos from the morning markets go up straight away to Twitter where they are syndicated to the grandiflora blog. Customers can log in to the site and create reminders for their future special events – never forget another anniversary! Still underway are a social style guide to help the staff communicate their brand effectively and an upgrade to their electronic profile including forthcoming EDMs.

Location: Bondi Junction Westfield atrium, Bondi Junction, Tower 1

When: July 2007

Zina Kaye installed Hyperplex, an intervention within a sophisticated LED system that disrupted the media saturated environment of Westfield Bondi Junction shopping centre with a series of obscure, but subversive conversations. Shoppers and flanneurs were able to peek into the lives of several people who corresponded via the LCD system. Three pairs of characters: an eloquent couple who have moved from lovers to best friends; an eccentric brother and sister who correspond through coded exchange; and two teenagers tossed about by their desires, ’spoke’ to each other in a mix of colloquialisms, aphorisms, sayings and mixed metaphors.

The conversations dealt, in part with the proliferation of the language of fear. These tensions were subtley translated within Kaye’s script from different generational perspectives. Viewers eavesdropped on part of a conversation and could contemplate the familiar yet fragmented nature of interpersonal communication.

To view the work and artist interview:

Zina Kaye: Hyperplex interview and installation

Press:

Hyperplex – Ella Maudie. ANAT Filter 67.

Active Loitering – James Dodd. ANAT Filter 67.

Text Messages: Zina Kaye, Caia Hagel & Tim Georgeson – George Alexander. ArtAsiaPacific No. 56.

Hyperplexic, desalinated by not scary – Ann Finegan, Artlink Vol 28, No. 1

See also:

What’s in Store: Visual Merchandising News – Amanda Carr. WGSN.com, September 2007.

T100 October 2007 Visual Merchandising Report. T100.cn

An artist is scanning ACARS at Melbourne Airport, and showing the information on LED signs at a new exhibition in the Australian Centre for the Moving Image opening 8th June 2004.

Zina Kaye makes visible a cross section of the data that orbits an airport, drawing connections between the dispersive & disorientating nature of air travel, and the quietly invisible chaos of radio traffic. The work is called ‘The Line Ahead’ and can be seen during the ‘2004: Australian Art Now’ exhibition until mid-September.

Viewers in the gallery are presented with a giddy vision of the chaotic movement of data and the private conversations of aeroplanes: flight numbers, origin and destination shown on three giant LED screens. Behind the scenes, a Winradio-built antenna is bolted to the roof of Melbourne Airport, connected to a Winradio receiver sitting on top of a Linux server. The Open Source ACARSd project decodes the messages, transmitting them to the signs at the gallery and to The Line Ahead website.

Kaye finds inspiration in big engineering such as space stations and radio telescopes, and her work often reflects on the systems that make these things work. She exhibits in Australia and Europe.

Note for the present

This work is still live and scanning Sydney: visit the website for latest flights: The Line Ahead.

Collector’s Edition

A collector’s edition of this work is available. Please contact Clare Lewis at Terminus Projects for enquireies. Clare (at) terminusprojects (dot) org.