I am considering a project in which workstations, connected to a central server display various content under the control of a central timeline.
Requirements are that the kiosks could have various compositions of monitor and an extended desktop. This screen space would be use to display images, movies or various mosaics of images and movies.
For example, a machine with 3x3 monitors might be configured to display video in the lowest right four screens, a title on the top three videos and whatnot elsewhere.
I am figuring out how to create the viewer. I think that sticking to web technologies I know well would be good and using JavaScript for the timeline engine sounds easy.
As for codecs and video drivers I think I would stick with Chrome, Css3 and Html5, I think I can require Chrome and Windows 7.
There are a few concerns, though.
Will there be performance problems considering video split on different monitors on an extended desktop?
Will it be pixel predictable to size and stack divs so that images fit inside a physical monitor or monitor group?
Thank you all.
A great solution for this is Adobe AIR. You are already talking about HTML, might as well check that out.
The nice thing is that AIR provides facilities for kiosks. Check out this link:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/articles/flex_kiosk.html
Just replace everything there that says Flex with HTML/Javascript. The platform functionality is available to both technologies.
As for stretching a browser or AIR app across multiple screens, I believe you would have to manually position the window yourself. I.e., if you maximize an app window on a multi-monitor setup, it expands to the size of the monitor only, not the entire viewable area. You likely will have to manually position/resize in Javascript.
As for using Chrome as a client, see this thread:
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=12bde481a208c4ca&hl=en
It doesn't look like Chrome supports a kiosk mode.
Browser shouldn't be a problem at all. Just remember the architecture - you'll need a server somewhere and each kiosk will be a client. Just set up a port/url for your app and there you go. Chrome has some features that allow you to prevent users from exiting the app. I forget the specifics, I believe it involves incognito mode and something
Company I work for does something a lot like this. We make 'apps' that run on iPad and another touch screen device called MSI (btw - one of the advantages here is the freedom of using different client platforms), but not in the typical Objective-C way. Theres a server with a LAMP stack and the client uses the browser.
Will there be performance problems considering video split on different monitors on an extended desktop?
I think more than multiple monitors what you really have is multiple clients. This is interactive to some degree right?
Will it be pixel predictable to size and stack divs so that images fit inside a physical monitor or monitor group?
Yes. I don't really do artsy design and display details so I can't comment on specifics. But I don't think this is too hard - especially if all the clients are similar. Majority of this would be dictated by CSS.
EDIT - took a look a what we do on chrome. between running on start up, using kiosk mode and incognito (both can be runtime flags) and the regular F11 kind of full screen, you should be pretty much there
Will there be performance problems considering video split on different monitors on an extended desktop?
IMHO screen space does take a little toll on your video processing. You will need a relatively good video card to support such huge amount of displays. I am a user of dual screen on ATI Radeon HD 5750 (1GB), and I can do intense gaming on my main screen while read news and be on twitter on my other screen.
Will it be pixel predictable to size and stack divs so that images fit inside a physical monitor or monitor group?
DIVs can be easily styled and positioned using CSS. You can define the number of pixels for both width and height. And if you do your storyboarding and layout design, everything should fit in your window.
However the trouble for you is that I assume you're stretching the browser window across the 3x3 screen. I recommend you to instead have one browser window per display.
I've tried that Chrome can full screen on each display without exiting-full-screen-mode on the others.
Related
I have website which is having layout issues on certain devices which I believe I've tracked down to high res displays which also have the display scaling in windows 10 set to 200%. (not 200% in the browser, but in the display settings in the Windows Control Panel)
The problem is I don't have a device which can duplicate the resolution of these devices, which is 2736 x 1824 (it's a MS Surface Pro). Oh yeah, this only happen with Edge...
I know of sites which have VMs which will run different browsers for testing purposes, but I don't know of any which allow you to choose your resolution. Without going out and getting a hold of this specific machine, how else can I debug this issue?
You could create a custom device in the developer console, and simply display it at whatever scale actually fits on your screen. For instance, create a custom device with that particular resolution, then in the developer console on Chrome you can view it scaled down 50% (if your own resolution is 1920x1080) so that the whole thing is visible.
Turned out none of the emulation/scaling options in the dev console would emulate what was really happening. I ended up remoting into the customer's computer so I could do my own debugging on there and resolved the issue.
Seems like Edge v 44 was computing some CSS calc function for a div height incorrectly (off by 1 or 2 pixels) which was making some divs push out and mess up the layout.
The fix was to tweak the CSS so the calculation wasn't required.
So I've just gotten my app to work on IE10/WP8 (demo here), and one thing I've noticed is that both scrolling and transitioning between carousel cards are reasonably sluggish on Windows Phone. Specifically, it takes like half a second for the screen to catch up to my finger. I'd say it's at about 80% of the responsiveness than I get from Android and iPhone, which both have pretty much perfect responsiveness. For reference, here are the devices I'm testing with:
iPhone 4
Android Kyocera Rise
WP8 Nokia Lumia 920
Desktop PC (Windows 8)
So among the phones, my Windows Phone is easily the most powerful, so it likely isn't just a hardware consideration. I've found this sluggishness in fastbook (http://fb.html5isready.com) as well. However, the sluggishness on either app does not exist on my Windows 8 PC.
Is there a particular consideration that needs to be taken with this part of performance in WP8? I've done quite a lot of work optimizing overall performance on the app (destroying/recycling all unused DOM elements, event delegation, etc) and the rest of the app runs quite well. So I'm not sure where I should go from here.
Thanks in advance!
How are you serving those large images? Have you tried using sencha.io to serve them? You can also use the yahoo tool smush.it to crush images further without loss of quality.
Another question: are you using CSS shadows and effects? These can have a noticeable performance hit sometimes...
Also the custom font, how are you implementing that? Google fonts work well, or are you implementing it another way?
:-)
Im currently working on a mobile web app and am wondering if I should use individual images or continue with using image sprites like I would for my desktop site? Im just worried about the increased file size from combining all the images and how this could have an effect on the load time of my pages?
Kyle
I don't see anything wrong with using a sprite set, just bear in mind that if you target the app for iPhones, they will only cache files under 25kB in size. So, if your image grows too much, it would, paradoxically, be a better idea to split it into separate images. This will account for more HTTP requests on the first run of the app - but will not generate the additional HTTP request continuously with each subsequent page load, saving both your and the iPhone user's bandwidth :). Oh, same applies for JavaScript and CSS files :).
Sprites work just fine on the vast majority of phones (barring older Nokia Series 40, BlackBerry pre v. 6.0 and any legacy devices (anything without a full HTML 4.01 browser).
What you should be aware of is that if you are using a flexible/responsive layout with primarily flexible units, it can be very hard to properly position the sprites while retaining the flexibility in the layout.
I recently put together a website exclusively using a computer with a wide screen monitor. Later, When opening the same pages online using a computer with a smaller sized monitor, I suddenly noticed that all the div positions are completely out of place. My question is how to use the widescreen monitor to continue to develop my webpages without messing up div positions for views on regular sized monitors?
Re replies:
Thanks for the advice guys. I agree that the design of the page should be flexible enough to accommodate most browser window sizes. However, when u are working with a widescreen monitor and not paying attention it is easy to overcompensate div placements and element sizes. My next question is on how to be sure of regular browser window dimensions and how to force my browser window into that size?
Thanks Cyrena for giving me directions with the development tools. I do use them and check across browsers. But My problem here was working exclusively on a widescreen monitor with the browser maximized. I don't want to make the same mistake, so I need to figure out how to resize my browser window with the right dimensions.
Two basic approaches off the top of my head:
Resize your browser to be the width of your minumum supported desktop/browser size.
Set desktop preferences to be different sizes (like profiles) and switch between them during testing phase.
The truth is that a really good looking site will never work on all browser configurations. Choose a bar and work against that.
Don't maximize your browser window? Just shrink it horizontally a bit?
But any website that has such a high dependence on the shape of your display is poorly designed. It should fit to any size display that's bigger than some minimum (no use spending extra effort to make it fit on a 100x100 pixel screen)
If you use IE's Developer Tools, you can resize the window to see what it would look like at different resolutions.
Check it out in:
Tools > Developer Tools > Tools menu > Resize.
You will also want to make sure you are testing your website on other browser / OS combinations at the very least.
What HTML APIs are available for touch screen devices (e.g. tablet PCs)? I notice that GMail's iPad interface (and other mobile interfaces) doesn't scroll down in a normal web browser (pretending to be an iPad via a user-agent hack). How can one access this API on a PC?
I have a school full of tablet PCs that aren't wonderful in tablet mode due to lack of application support, but there looks to be an increasing number of web-based apps that will fill this gap.
In most cases, the webapps are using touch-based javascript events (touch, touchstart, touchend) which (for obvious reasons) are not implemented on Desktop browsers.
Check out PPK's compatibility table for details: http://quirksmode.org/mobile/tableTouch.html.
He also has a demo which shows the touch events in use: http://quirksmode.org/m/tests/scrollayer.html. There's a link on that page for a "variant" that works on desktop browsers. That's the one you need.
You can use, as you've already stated, UserAgent, to present content laid out specifically for certain devices.
For each, device, you'll have to read its documentation on how to write HTML in order to make the device behave as you want.
For example, here's how you would do it for an iPhone/iPodTouch. Here's for iPad. Similarly, depending on the device you have, you will be able to find proper documentation.
There is an awesome open database that can help you get device information based on user agent. It's called WURFL.