Hot on the heels of their recent new Premier Edition release, Acquire Digital Multimedia has developed a version of its powerful 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 optimized for kiosk applications thanks to a set of specially developed plug-ins. Acquire typically builds a project using a collection of pages which 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. Although it would be unusual to need so many, each page can contain up to 1024 separate rich media elements, any of which can be made into interactive ‘hot spots’ which when touched can jump to other pages, navigate around the application, or set variables which can be used anywhere else in the Acquire project. You can even use external triggers such as scanners, sensors, switches, video cameras, external databases etc.

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. Or perhaps a pay-per-use secure web browsing kiosk with an onscreen virtual keyboard, showing advertising based upon keywords in the web pages. Maybe even a digital ID photo-booth. How about a customer feedback questionnaire with interactive buttons? These can be created in just minutes using Kiosk Designer?

Kiosk Designer’s external scripting engine enables you to create fully featured applications using VBScript and JavaScript. In fact, there are many standard controls such as text entry boxes, interactive buttons, onscreen keyboards, secure web browsers and connections to live databases. You can easily integrate Cardreaders and Cashmechs to allow payment, and when using an unattended payment service, you can even accept Chip and PIN payments.

According to Neil Farr, MD of Acquire Digital Multimedia, “Even though we started as a kiosk focused company, Kiosk Designer has been a long time in the making because we realised that in order to make a product that would be interesting for kiosk makers, we would have to create something rather special.”