4 ms·

Any employee in my office could use this app to quickly sell merchandise and products on a convention showfloor. It may not be free and similar services may be

by ja2ke 18y ago

Any employee in my office could use this app to quickly sell merchandise and products on a convention showfloor. It may not be free and similar services may be offered elsewhere, but this still looks very quick and friendly. People here have suggested leaving paypal or authorize.net open on their iPhone, which I can only assume means "in a Mobile Safari window," which, in reality, means "you will be re-loading the full page multiple times over your Edge connection every time you wish to make a transaction." That's already a shot in the head for that method being anything resembling realistically efficient, in my opinion. This app may not be perfect, and doesn't seem particularly tuned to hackers (based on the response here), but it seems like a fairly simple front-end you could distribute to a small team at a trade show, convention, or fair, and not really have to think twice about it beyond that, which is a huge plus.

callmeed 18y ago
"That's already a shot in the head for that method being anything resembling realistically efficient, in my opinion." I'm not sure. I've been thinking about this too for convention sales. If you've already got an online checkout form, why not just update it to detect the iPhone and render using an appropriate stylesheet? If you have to mix two billing/merchant systems (because you have to use authorize.net for this), that's even more inefficient, IMO.
- ja2ke 18y ago
  I was almost entirely referring to mobile Safari's tendency to cache nothing ever. With an app like this, everything but the actual transaction data is stored locally, and the time you'd save from that could easily be the difference between accepting credit cards being worth it, or a too much of a hassle. Both in terms of potential consistency and responsiveness (no screen zooming in and out to enter data in a form field, for instance), and speed (no having to worry about having to wait between states other than actual card processing), having this software running locally as a native app instead of an optimized site, I think, have very tangible benefits given where this app would most likely be used. Man, wrote more than I meant to there. Whoops!

by ja2ke 18y ago

callmeed 18y ago

"That's already a shot in the head for that method being anything resembling realistically efficient, in my opinion." I'm not sure. I've been thinking about this too for convention sales. If you've already got an online checkout form, why not just update it to detect the iPhone and render using an appropriate stylesheet? If you have to mix two billing/merchant systems (because you have to use authorize.net for this), that's even more inefficient, IMO.

ja2ke 18y ago
I was almost entirely referring to mobile Safari's tendency to cache nothing ever. With an app like this, everything but the actual transaction data is stored locally, and the time you'd save from that could easily be the difference between accepting credit cards being worth it, or a too much of a hassle. Both in terms of potential consistency and responsiveness (no screen zooming in and out to enter data in a form field, for instance), and speed (no having to worry about having to wait between states other than actual card processing), having this software running locally as a native app instead of an optimized site, I think, have very tangible benefits given where this app would most likely be used. Man, wrote more than I meant to there. Whoops!