In 1998 Barnes & Noble asked us to design and implement an application that would help them visually layout their store shelves in the bargain book section.
Book and shelf dimensions were scaled to the computer display to allow the user to easily see how the books would fit on the shelves, color coordinate book covers, visually see the pricing, etc. Once completed the user would print out the visual layout and textual list to be given out to the stores to facilitate the physical layout of the shelves.
B&N was able to save labor costs and optimize their planning process for in store holiday campaigns.
This was a fun project as it involved a lot of graphical programming. Both Visual C++ and MFC were used entirely to build the MDI application. All layouts were saved in binary format to the local disk. In order to provide the maximum graphical fidelity 2 21 inch CRTs were used side by side with an extended desktop.