Re: touchscreen kiosk updating and billing

We don't have the .dir files. The client has repeatedly asked for them (through me as the go between) and he has never provided them, citing copyright...which is his right, but certainly not good business on a project this small and simple.

He does very good work, but I have no way of knowing if he's fast, slow, good or cheap. He charges $100/hour which seems pretty standard in our part of the country.

I will say it took forever in the original programming to get the video section to work properly. We must've gone through about 7 or 8 versions before he could get it to display properly on the client's touchscreen/LCD combination. In his defense, he didn't have the exact hardware at his shop to test it on, but there was nothing unique or unusual about the client hardware, and once correctly programmed, it worked on just about any combination of monitors, including just displaying it on a pair of cheap LCD monitors for computer use. Keep in mind this is an entire informational kiosk with about 20 sections and each menu section has multiple options to call information. What's being updated is ONLY the video section, which is ONE menu page where you click on an icon to start the video, then can control it with standard play, pause, ff, rewind, stop buttons. That's it.

On your guestimate on time. Based on what you list, I would say it should take even less time. We do ALL the talking with the client and provide ALL the assets and explicit directions for the work. On the last update, he literally didn't have to spend ANY time discussing the changes outside of 2 or 3 emails, there were no phone calls, and no revisions as the first delivery of the update worked fine. Everything was extremely straightforward and we were that explicit and thorough in what we provided.

The controls for the videos don't change, the formats for the videos don't change, all we're doing is adding a couple of videos and changing the layout of the icons you touch to start the video. The video controls didn't even move, they're still at the bottom of the touchscreen menu. You just click the video you want to start, then control it with the player controls.

Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
www.videomi.com