Choosing the right platform:

At Onley Group, we have a team of programmers with expertise of different languages and platforms. Unlike other software companies who tend to provide just one language, we are able to pick the platform to best address your situation.

Very often, one platform and one language is not enough. There are many situations where a problem can be solved really well by taking the best bits from multiple programming languages and expertly stitching them together. Often, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and at Onley Group we can do this.

The Importance of the User Interface:

It's not just about the stuff under the hood. We understand that your regular employee does not have working knowledge of how relational databases work, nor how server-side executes can deliver dynamic web pages, etc. What your employee wants to do is get their job done cleanly, effectively, with minimal hassle. That's why we have a large user-interface team.

Our user-interface team specialise in perfecting the join between all the technology and the person at the end of it. Just as our programmers are experts at stitching together one language to another, our user-interface team specialise in the join between the software and the user. They focus on designing really simple, intuitive graphical user interfaces that are logical, stable, helpful and forgiving of user errors

Examples of multiplatform solutions:

Cross-device streaming:

Imagine this: its a Saturday, you are watching your favourite talk show broadcast earlier in the week. You are watching this at home on a desktop computer. You need to go out to run an errand in town. You hit 'pause', grab your smartphone and head to your car. You connect your phone to your car radio (via FM transmitter / bluetooth or good old wire), and load up the broadcaster's app. You are presented with a search box and also a picture of the show you were just watching with a big "resume" button. You click "resume", and the programme continues from where you left off, enabling you to listen to the rest as you drive despite having changed devices.

This was a project for Onley Group commissioned by a broadcaster. It involved interfacing Linux servers to Python, PHP (+ AJAX) and Flash. This all had to cope with a wide variety of web browsers and screen resolutions.

Self-checkout:

2009 was the rise of the supermarket self-checkout. Increasing sales per hour and decreasing employees required from one-per-till to one per 6 checkouts. The devices on the markets were cumbersome, frequently crashed, and eye-wateringly expensive.

Onley Group slashed the cost of these devices by converting the humble entry-level office PC into a smart sales point. We interfaced card readers, barcode scanners, digital weighing scales, touchscreens, heat printers with Linux as a client and central server, MySQL database, some smart graphics and a bit of Python to create a fleet of slick and reliable self-checkouts. The devices could prevent shoplifting attempts, capture valuable purchasing data and were easily upgradable to include RFid tagged products. The devices underwent self-quality control tests, and ran self-diagnostics ensuring they quickly returned to a working state in the event of a crash.

If you have a situation that you think requires multiple components, contact us to discuss how we can help you solve your problem.