Surface Applications are created and edited with the Surface Editor application.

There are several types of Surface Applications used in Qmatic Orchestra: Touch screens, Media Displays, Positional Displays and Tickets. There are three variants of Touch screens on units with ticket printers, that is TP Touch/Intro 8 printers, Intro 17 and Vision kiosks. Media and Positional Displays are for Main displays and Information displays and the like. Tickets are, simply, for the tickets printed by the ticket printers.

In an Orchestra installation there can be hundreds of touch screens, in many branches, in many regions. Each region, or even Branch, may have its own requirements on layouts, themes, look and feel and offered services.

Several TP Touch/Intro 8 printers can use the same Surface Application. In this case, they would all have the same layout (buttons and images) and would be managed in one and the same place.

A Qmatic device with a touch screen has a web browser that displays the content of a web page, or a web application, that is a Surface Application. Since the Surface Application is a web application, the only limitation of what can be displayed on the screen is the limitation of the web browser in the unit.

One common Surface Application will display the ticket buttons that are installed at the branch in question. When a customer presses a button, a ticket is printed.

Other examples of Surface Applications are screens where the customer might have to register or identify her/himself, either using a magnetic card, a bar code or by entering data or PIN-codes in an HTML form on the screen.

Orchestra has several web services available that a Surface Application can use. A typical example of such a web service is printing tickets. These web services are documented in Qmatic Web Services Developer’s Guide.

A set of Web Widgets is also available for Surface applications. These widgets can perform almost anything that can be done with a web application. The installed widgets do things like display the called ticket number and a list of called tickets. These widgets are designed to be easy to configure. They are also relatively easy to create; this is documented in Qmatic Web Widgets Developer’s Guide.

All Surface Applications must be configured in Orchestra.

Each device with a touch screen must be configured to connect to Orchestra with its unique unit ID (unitId) as a parameter. For Vision, Intro 17 and TP Touch/Intro 8 this configuration is made on the settings page for the device in question. A generic touch device must be setup to connect with Orchestra with the unitID as an HTML parameter.

All unit IDs are automatically generated in Orchestra, but a unit ID can be re-configured, as long as it is unique.