POSWizard

Today a new point of sale application for the Mac has been announced. Checkout, currently in public beta, brings the beauty of the Apple Macintosh platform to the point of sale.

Aesthetics are very important nowadays, and in some branches the design of the POS systems is just as important as the design of the rest of the store. Though Apple hardware is more expensive than other terminals, it offers design, robustness and ease of use that cannot easily be met by Windows based terminals.

Checkout is a very new application, and is build with the Apple philosophy in mind: it is intuitive, easy to use and ‘intelligent’. One of the most remarkable features of Checkout is the search function. Just start typing in the search bar, and Checkout will automatically filter out invoices or orders without the typed words in the customers name or item properties. Very neat, but how fast will it be in a database with thousands of documents?

Checkout is aimed at small general retail shops. It supports bar codes and serial numbers, but does not have sizes and colours. There is no product tree, and the quick tour shows only two user levels. Furthermore, Checkout is a stand-alone application, which does not support networking. Also hardware support is very limited. The site only mentions support for USB barcodes. There is no support yet for serial devices, customer displays, cash drawers, receipt printers, magnetic strip card readers or any other common retail device.

There is no price set yet for this software, but I assume it will be quite cheap seen its limited feature set. Let’s wait for the end of the beta, and see whether user feedback will make it into a true POS application. Without any further changes, I would only suggest this software for very small retailers who care more about hardware design and simpleness than features.