Signagelive – under the hood

Firstly, let me introduce myself, my name is Marc Benson and I am the lead developer of the Signagelive platform. It’s not often as developers we get to take our head out of the code and communicate our thoughts about features directly to our users so this is quite an exciting opportunity for me. I’m hoping this will be a regular feature, so please check back to the blog (and look for my posts) for pre-release details on updates to Signagelive and general thoughts/discussions around the more technical elements of Signagelive and digital signage – remember this is straight from the horse’s mouth!!

If you have any comments/questions/topic requests please leave a comment at the end of this post.

The eagle eyed Signagelive user among you will have noticed that a new release went live a few weeks ago (30th June to be precise), let me take this opportunity to give you an overview of 3 of the new features (and sorry for such a long post!!). Should you require any further information please refer to the Signagelive user manual, or contact support@remotemedia.co.uk.

So let’s dive straight in:

1. Widgets

As you know Signagelive is a Web 2.0 apication using the latest technologies, one of these innovations are widgets, you may have seen similar implementations if you use Windows Vista, Mac OS X or iGoogle. A widget is a lightweight, single purpose/function apication that comements the environment you are using, such as a calculator in the Vista Sidebar. We currently have four widgets available for use in Signagelive:

• Analogue Clock

• Digital ‘Flip’ Clock

• Localised Weather

• Vertical Rss Scroller

They are available within the layout designer and can be used by simy dragging and dropping onto your layout. Each widget is customisable so that you can change background colours, font colours, font size so it is able to comement to your layout.

Naturally we are looking to expand the number of widgets that are available over the coming months, so if you have any that you would like included we would be happy to hear from you, please leave a comment at the end of the post, or drop us an email at support@Signagelive.com.

2. Impression Logging

An impression is a complete ayback of a media asset for either the time specified in the playlist or its complete duration, in the case of a movie/flash file.

There are four modes of impression logging:

The impression logging mode is managed on a single device basis, within the ‘Reporting’ tab (renamed the ‘Log Files’ tab). There is also a summary of the last seven days of logging.

Within the Reporting section there are three impression reports:

3. Reporting

A new first class menu item has been added to Signagelive → Reporting. It has two sub menus ‘Standard’ and ‘Custom’. Standard contains all of the free reports, and custom will contain any reports specific to a user that they have paid extra for – please contact Sales or support if you have a requirement you wish to discuss.

Hopefully all of the reports are self exanatory, they mainly re-present data already available within Signagelive but in a print friendly format, however there are some additions.

When a report is selected you will be shown a options dialog, (if available) you can select various filter options such as media asset, device etc and/or a date range.

None of the filter options are required, those that are selected will be appended to the report population criteria and logically ‘ANDed’ (give me a shout if you don’t know the imication if this). It is also possible to sort reports by the pre configured ‘Sort Orders’.

When viewing a report, there is a Print icon in the top left that will allow the user to print the page.

In some cases the standard reports may not be able to displplay all of the data returned (limitation of the html delivery), so the user will be told to export the data and download a CSV file. They can do this by selecting the ‘Export’ button from the Report Options dialog, and then click the link of the export file to download it.

Thanks for taking the timeout, as mentioned above please check back to the blog for further updates and information on features. Please leave a comment (even just to splay hi – we don’t get out much being locking a dark room cutting code!!) as I would love to hear your feedback on Signagelive and how we as a development team can improve it for you.