Touchscreen Kiosk (Developer & Graphic Designer)

This application is designed to allow employee access to emergency preparedness and response documentation. The app can be run directly from a standard desktop or from a standalone touchscreen unit located directly in hazardous work environments. The application uses a local Access database to store searchable document text and document attributes. The interface provides document search capabilities by allowing the user to use an optional onscreen keyboard. The kiosk has a theme engine that uses xml skin files to allow customer’s to easily re-theme and re-brand the interface. Control size and location can also be configured. I implemented custom GDI painting routines that allows the usage of transparent PNG images for a delicious alpha blended layering effect. In addition to the advanced GDI painting, I created skinable labels and buttons that are capable of auto scaling font sizes to fit oversize text strings. This was important due to the fact that there is no control over how long translated text will be in other languages. The controls will even wrap text in an attempt to prevent text from being clipped at the edge of the control.

Atalasoft PDF rasterizer was used in conjunction with custom page caching to load PDF pages with a background thread. This allows users to immediately view the first page of the document while the rest of the document was loaded. I also create an export routine that exported the kiosk documents from a document share and information from a SQL server database into a Access database. The finishing touch was to add a language menu start page that renders each available language in is actual language characters.