I am sufferring through the use of a POS software system that is truly buggy throughout. Buggy Sorts, Missing Reports, Limitations everywhere.
Am I crazy to think that a group of experienced Panorama developers could possibly work together to create a better product? While hearing the whining of the Facebook group that shows this is a pervasive problem, I’d love to think that this could be pulled off. It will take a huge amount of coordination and management, but I think it could be very worthwhile.
I am not a “naysayer” by nature. And I’ve also seen retailers work with woeful systems. Problem is, often they are required to use it because of orders from “Corporate”. And their system usually has to tie into a Big Brother, downstream.
That leaves independent Ma-and-pop, independent businesses. And, at the time I looked into it, those types of businesses had such a tight financial margin that they couldn’t begin to pay a professional fee for the job, which would mostly be a “one off”.
Maybe the tide is turning - I hope so - but even niche Panorama applications at a community college were eventually nixed as the IT department insisted on PCs. And then that department was required use a larger system with a $50,000/year (or much more) maintenance fee rather than my $15/hr for 3 hours every 4 months (just for the testing/tutoring department).
The EHR (electronic health record) market was another place where Panorama could fill in the missing reports from major systems like Epic. And I did that when I was “in charge” of the software configuration side. But the IT department doesn’t want to support both Mac and PC platforms.
So I absolutely agree that a Panorama Design could augment or replace what’s in the marketplace. But, unfortunately, the “Sell” needs to cover not only the user who will benefit from the data/reports, but also the IT department responsible for the hardware and security from within and without.
I did very sophisticated multi-user POS systems for several businesses until the early 2000’s when growing organic food offered more job security than Panorama. None of those files work on PanX and I have well over 1000 hours of rewrites just to barely get my business files working. They are not at the level that an employee could use them nor can they be without Custom Menus and an equivalent to the Pan6 Custom Mode .
nor can they be without Custom Menus and an equivalent to the Pan6 Custom Mode .
It sounds like you are under the (incorrect) impression that these capabilities are not available in Panorama X.
It’s true that the original custom menu feature from 1991 no longer works. This feature was based on Apple’s resource manager, and required awkwardly editing custom menus in Apple’s ResEdit program. This solution was also awkward because it required maintaining the resource files separately from the databases themselves.
Awkward or not, Apple dropped support for the resource manager decades ago, and also stopped supporting ResEdit. So there was absolutely no possibility of continuing support for these original resource based menus.
Starting in 2001 (Panorama 4) a new custom menu system was developed that was no longer based on a separate resource manager file. Instead, custom menus could now be implemented entirely within Panorama. This also allowed dynamic custom menus, which were nearly impossible to do when using the resource manager. At the time, I predicted that Apple would eventually drop support for the resource manager, and recommended that anyone using resource based managers transition to the new system. There wasn’t a rush - resources continued to work for over a decade - so everyone had plenty of time and warning to make the transition.
Panorama X further enhanced the custom menu system, so that now it’s possible to fully customize every single Panorama menu. In fact, the stock “built-in” menus are not actually built in, they are built on the fly with the custom menu system. All of this is fully documented, so there is no obstacle to setting up all of the menus in any configuration you please. In most cases it only takes adding a single statement to the .Initialization procedure of your database (though to be fair, that statement will most likely have a lot of parameters).
The best way to learn about Panorama X custom menus is via this 2 hour video that was part of the Panorama X Intensive training course. This video provides a complete tutorial from the basics through the most complex menu configurations.
However, the video above isn’t free. There are many pages of free help topics about custom menus, here is a sampling to get you started.
As for “Panorama 6 Custom Mode”, I assume you are wanting to lock out users so that they can’t get into areas they shouldn’t be accessing, for example going into graphics mode or adding/removing fields. Again, this is entirely possible with Panorama X, and in fact Panorama X ships with a number of locked databases that you as a user cannot get into - for example the Site License, Server Administration and Settings windows are all actually databases, but the user interface for these databases are completely locked down. This help page explains how to set this up.