If you have ever looked into "Pole Displays" (those things next to a cash register with the green text), you know that they are

A) A pain to set up (Serial commands, etc.)

: Expensive and complicated (Pole Display, Serial Adapter, Troi Plugin)

C) Usually green text... blue is even more expensive

E) lastly, you'd need to make sure a script runs whenever you add a product to an invoice (so the description/price would be sent to the pole display)

The whole setup could end up costing $600CA ($400 US) plus development time, and what do you end up with? An ugly pole next to your screen with 2x20 characters of text, that most customers won't even look at anyway!

I was just pondering how I might instead use an LCD display as a second monitor for the customer display. As I thought about it, it wouldn't even be that hard to integrate with FileMaker!

For maybe double(?) the price, you could get a 12" LCD screen and a second video card for your system.

Here's how it will work:

You'd make an additional database file for the customer display. The window would be set up so that it covers the entire second monitor, and a bit more so that the user doesn't see the borders around the window (you'd have to experiment to see what positions FM will remember). You can now put whatever you want in this window (Advertising, Invoices, Product Information, whatever!), all controlled from your regular database files.

Example Scenerio:

Good idea. That could explain why I've been seeing some extra LCD displays pointed at the customer lately when I go into some fast food places. Along with sale info, they also show some extra advertising for us impulse shoppers.

"Do you want fries with that?"

I've done this sort of stuff for real time race results displays in some systems I've written. These normally runs on macs so I use the extended desktop feature which "places" the operator screen and the customer screen side by side.

Then you can duplicate fields onto this extended screen (which is only seen by the customer) and place the advertising logos etc on this screen. By duplicating the fields for the customer, you can make them different sizes/colours.

In my race systems, we use it so the riders (mountain bike races and triathlons mainly) can see their lap times and race positions as soon as they cross the finish line. I use a data projector as the second screen.