Is there a digital signage application that can faithfully render a dynamic web page the way a browser does? I have tried a few vendors - NoviSign, Pickcel.com, etc. These are cloud-based solutions that offer access to an authoring tool (ran in a browser) that can upload your content to the vendor's servers. You then configure a media player which has the vendor's app installed (and connected to your digital TV display) to pull the content for display on the TV.
The issue I am running into is that when I tried a dynamic web page content on the media player application, the web page remains static on the TV screen (there are no problems with Powerpoint slideshows). It seems that the JavaScript behind the web page is not getting executed in the player. I tried looking hard for some configuration settings that's causing this but to no avail. The ideal media player application would be one that has an actual web browser built into it that can render any typical dynamic web page for display. Are you guys aware of any such offerings by any vendor in the market?
I finally found a signage product that addresses exactly the issues I posted here. If you have a need to display a dynamic web page faithfully (even one that requires a login) via a signage app, you can try https://screencloud.com/. They have a Dashboards widget that handles this requirement and is very easy to use. I'm not going to go into details here as you can easily google them. I looked long and hard to find this and hopefully somebody in the same situation will find this information useful.
Related
I've been reading through Google's Chromecast developer documentation and I can't seem to find any developer docs that discuss how to develop customizations for the Chromecast home screen, such as HTML overlays, etc.
There are Chromecast apps available that do show stuff on the Chromecast home screen, such as Dashboard Cast, https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rir.dashboardcast&hl=en.
Does anyone know what approaches can be used with the Receiver API to allow this?
You cannot customize the home screen (backdrop); users can change what sort of feeds (images) can be used to be shown there. You, as a developer, do not have control over that and if it seems that some developers have customized that, in reality they have not; they are running an app there (like any other chromecast app).
I managed to create a Chrome extension pretty easy and the main application is hosted on my server allowing me to provide updates to the app itself without having to update the whole extension. I like the idea and I just want to know if it's possible to create a similar extension for Firefox where the main application is hosted on a live server.
In creating my Chrome extension, I followed a tutorial. The code for Chrome is included on the linked page.
It's possible to create a simple extension that loads a web app either in a panel or a tab. You should read up on the Addon SDK documentation, including the panel, tabs and getting started docs.
There is nothing wrong with this, as the web app would not have direct access to internal Firefox APIs. If you read the Addon guidelines closely that #makyen links to above, none of it covers this implementation detail. In their defence, they seem to have misinterpreted what you want to do. It looks to me like you just want to integrate / launch your web app from the browser UI?
Web application:
After finding the tutorial (please provide a link next time) I surmise you are referring to in your question, I suspect that what you are actually attempting to convey is different than how I initially interpreted your question. I have edited the question to make this more clear to people reading it in the future.
That tutorial is explaining how to place a link to a web application into the Chrome user interface. Such is, to a large extent, just a bookmark that is able to be placed within other areas of the user interface than the bookmarks bar.
If that is what you are wanting to do, then, yes, you can easily do so in Firefox. Given that the extension is not running external content in the security context of an extension (you are effectively just navigating to and displaying a website), then that should be fine as a Firefox extension. Note that you need to be sure that you are not granting elevated permissions when you launch the web application.
If running a web application is what you are wanting to do, then I suggest you might want to use different semantics to refer to what you are doing. The above is not a "Firefox extension app hosted on server". Saying it that way strongly implies that you are hosting the actual extension code on your own server. The rest of your question implies that the extension dynamically loads external code and runs it. I would suggest that you refer to it as something like: a web application that is launched (navigated to) by a Firefox extension allowing the web application to be started from an icon in the toolbar.
Extension running web sourced code:
However, if what you are wanting to do is have external content running as a Firefox extension, then implementing that functionality is a large security hole for anyone installing the extension. Even assuming that your intentions are totally benign, there is a huge security hole for anyone who is intercepting your traffic, or gains control of your server to inject code into Firefox that runs at the level of an extension (i.e. the malware can have full control of the browser and then of the computer).
Yes, it is currently possible for you to write this for Firefox.
However, given that the extension pulls code from something not packaged within the extension, the extension will never be permitted to be hosted on AMO.
In addition, the plan is that later this year there will be mandatory signing of Firefox extensions through Mozilla. I doubt that an extension like this will be permitted at that time.
You can read a set of Add-on guidelines on MDN.
i am building a new web site using asp.net mvc3 web application ,, and i found some free HTML5 templates in the web which i can add to my _layout view in my mvc3 web application. i read that HTML5 is able to automatically adapt to the screen size of any devices .
So does this mean that incase i use HTML5 inside my layout view , then my web site can be accessed using different mobile devices and the layout of my web site will automatically adapt to the screen size of the mobile devices?
BR
Not so simple. You need to contend with
Big variety of mobile devices. Some support HTML5, some partially support it and some don't support it at all.
Even if a mobile device does support HTML5, a mobile screen is a lot smaller than a desktop so it may not be able to rearrange the view properly.
How a user interacts with a mobile web app is quite different to a desktop web app, so even if it did rearrange the view properly the user experience could be crap.
A mobile user may be connecting over a low bandwidth connection. What size are your web pages, and are they suitable for distribution over 2g, 2.5g or 3g ?
Well, no, not always. HTML 5 is a very broad term and there are many devices. There is no real guarantee that something you write in any version of HTML 5 will show up as you want it in every browser except via testing it and experience from testing.
That said, I think you are referring to CSS media queries, which are not really related to ASP.NET MVC 3 or HTML 5. From the caniuse site here, you can get an idea of which browsers support media queries.
If you use CSS 3 media queries properly, and the browsers which you are targeting support the feature, then the answer to your question will be yes.
Nothing works automatically but I'd give it a guarded "maybe". The MVC3 sites I've developed work well on iPhone, iPad, Android and Windows Phone. For example link
Still needs to be valid HTML5, so I'd suggest using a validator though.
Screen size adaptation isn't a particular feature of HTML5 per se, it's a feature of a competent fluid design with HTML and CSS.
They should work out of the box on mobile devices (in the original iPhone demo, Steve Jobs showed how the iPhone did a good job of rendering existing websites), but there won’t be any automatic adaptation to screen size beyond what HTML already provides.
As far as HTML goes, <meta name="viewport"> can go a long way towards helping your site’s layout on Mobile WebKit-based devices (which is all iPhones, and I believe all Android devices). See e.g.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Mobile/Viewport_meta_tag
http://developer.apple.com/library/IOs/#documentation/AppleApplications/Reference/SafariWebContent/UsingtheViewport/UsingtheViewport.html.
I’d like to create a script which automatically pins an Office Mobile bookmarked location. This would require bookmarking a specific URL within the Office Mobile app, and then pinning the location as a tile.
Can anyone comment on whether or not this is possible, and if there’s dev documentation on this topic?
I don't think you can pin other applications, but perhaps you could create a secondary tile of your application using ShellTile and have it open a URL pointing at the document you want pinned.
This question is part user experience, part engineering.
I am trying to find a nice, clean way to have a user communicate with my web page while they are on another web page. I have web services that will accept HTTP POST/GET, so AJAX and other asynchronous niceties are welcome - don't worry about the details of their communication, they can easily be modified to fit a solution.
The problem I'm running into lies within the user interaction. Ex., say the user is viewing a web page and they want to send my system the web site's URL. I would like it if they could do it while still looking at that page, and without too many "crazy clicks" - currently they have to go back over to my page and enter the information (as you can imagine this has tested horribly).
I have ruled out browser tool bars (easy to do in FF, but a lot of my users use IE) and local applications (they won't want to install Java or Adobe Air apps).
Have you ever solved a problem like this before, or do you have an idea of how I could solve it? Should I be looking at separate solutions for FF and IE (ex., a tool bar for FF and something else for IE)? Don't worry about Safari and Chrome, though a solution that supports them too would be nifty.
Thanks.
p.s. The user would have an account on my system already.
Have you thought about something like the Digg Bar?
Users can access it through a bookmarklet, or you can do a url prefix like http://yoursite.com/<other_site_url>. When users click links, the bar stays active.
What if you wrote a system tray application. Something similar to Pixel Ruler
This could sit in their tray, and it would know you're website. That would eliminate browser toolbars, and could conceivably work on several browsers. You could probably even set it up as an install if they visit your website.
Then you could expose a webservice on your site that this control would pass back info to (like the user's name, current website, etc)
I don't know about the details of your application, but the only solution I can imagine is that you have a page split into two frames, with your toolbar at the top. stumbleupon.com does this, but it makes sense because they're providing the web content.
Simply, your users would have to visit your site before they could do their own browsing. Is that reasonable for your project? That sounds like it could be a user experience disaster of its own. Also, if most of your users are using IE, I'm going to assume that they're not the most web savvy users out there.