Widgets – We’ve been mentioning them, and this is where it starts

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As some of you may know we have been developing the idea of Widgets for use within Signagelive over recent months. However, progress came to a halt as we prepared for the recent Signagelive platform release, as we wanted the whole development team to work on getting that release right.

You will be pleased to know that the development of the Widget concept has now restarted and is progressing well.

As a development team we are going to start putting together a number of Widgets. Not only so we have some samples, but we also need to understand the best practices for producing these and what is achievable on each of the different platforms we support (PC, SMIL, SSSP, LG and Chrome OS).

As a brief summary of what we see as a Widget, is that it is a collection of files, which collectively  make an HTML5 Web Page, which can then display content that can include; a static image on a background, a piece of data, or a collection of data. The resulting Widget can be displayed as static content or can include animations.

The reason this is different to just displaying a website on a Signagelive player, is that you can set a number of preferences for a Widget that can include, but is not limited to  colours, font size or an API key for authentication. The configuration of Widget preferences will be available to the User within Signagelive. These Widget preferences can be set on a Network wide basis, or on a Playlist Media Asset instance, so you could have different preferences in different Playlists for the same Widget.

Think of a Widget as a section of a Website/Layout in our terms.

Here is an example list of some of the Widgets that we plan to include in Signagelive at launch. All Widgets can be displayed , full screen or in a zone on a layout:Widget Graphics Image

  • Clocks – Analogue and Digital (ability to change the colour, background, and for digital show as 12 or 24 hour)
  • Date – Change the font colour, background, the format of the date
  • Twitter – Set the query for the selection of tweets to be shown, background and colour customisation
  • Weather – Show the current weather for the location entered against a Player or a specified location
  • Weather – Show a 3 or 5 Day weather forecast for the location entered against a Player or a specified location