Digital Signage is not only about hardware, like screens or player PCs and software, but mostly about content! Presenting the latest news or weather information catches interest and helps to make your digital signage system more vivid!

Another great idea for integrating live content is showing posts and feeds from social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or YouTube. You may either want to show your own tweets and posts or up-to-date information that is related to certain hash tags, topics or social media accounts.

Especially for events or exhibitions, displaying live data from social media channels on your digital signage screens is a great idea that motivates users to contribute and to interact!

Therefore, we are very excited to announce that we now have found a partner who is offering a powerful social media wall solution that can easily be integrated into FrontFace for Public Displays.

Social Wall allows you to show content from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Pinterest in a highly customizable way.

Here is how to get your own social wall up and running with FrontFace for Public Displays within minutes:

Sign up for a free trial account at socialwall.com.au. Next, select the social media channels that you would like to show. You also need to specify the size of the social wall in pixels. If you have a full HD screen that is mounted in landscape format and use the “Full Page” page layout for your FrontFace for Public Displays playlist page, the correct values are 1920 for height and 1080 for width. Another important setting is the number of columns that your wall should have. A value of “3” is a good choice but it depends on your personal preference. In order to make the wall scroll automatically in the FrontFace you should tick the “Yes” option for the “Auto Scroll” setting and make sure that the “Pause Scrolling On Mouse Hover” in not enabled.

Now you can configure each social media channel and enter either accounts from which you would like to pull information or specific keywords/hashtags. There is also a backlist feature that allows you to specify words to filter the content that is shown (e.g. your competitors names or other undesirable things).

Once you saved your settings, you can obtain the URL of the wall from the “General” tab.

If you do not have a copy of FrontFace for Public Displays yet, please download the free, fully functional trial version from the mirabyte Website.

In the Display Assistant application of FrontFace for Public Displays, create a new playlist page or use an existing one and add a content element of type “Website”. Finally, you just need to paste in the URL of your social wall and you are ready to go. Run the playlist preview so see how your wall looks like.

By the way: If you statically display the playlist page that shows the social wall, you might want it to update from time to time. For this purpose, you can define a reload interval in the “Website” settings dialog in the Display Assistant that will trigger a refresh after the given period of time.

The digital signage software FrontFace for Public Displays offers different ways how to control which playlists are shown on the screen: By using so called timers, you can schedule when a playlist is supposed to be shown on the screen. Also recurrence patterns (e.g. every day at 5 pm) can be defined.

The other method of controlling playlists is using events. In order to start a playlist when an event fires, you first need to set up an event source. The “Calendar” event source plugin which is already included with FrontFace provides a simple calendar that you can use to manage appointments. Once an appointment becomes due, the event fires and the associated playlist is started on the screen. There are also other event source plugins available that can be used to integrate external Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Domino (Notes) calendars as event sources.

Generally speaking, you can integrate anything that produces events as event source, e.g. triggers from 3^rd party systems, sensors (e.g. a photoelectric barrier), and many more. With the free FrontFace Plugin SDK you can easily implement your own event source plugins or let someone with programming skills do this for you.

The Remote Control Plugin and the Calendar Plugin are configured as event sources in the Display Assistant

The recently released event source plugin “Remote Control” for FrontFace now offers a new way to easily start playlists on demand. The “Remote Control Plugin” works hand in hand with the “Remote Control App”, a little Windows application that is optimized for use on tablet PCs but which can also be used on any regular PC.

The Remote Control App allows you to start playlists on FrontFace player PCs with a single click from any PC or tablet remotely. Furthermore, the app also allows stopping playlists and to make onscreen text notification appear on demand.

An onscreen text notification displayed by the FrontFace player application

Similarly to the “Calendar” event source plugins, the Remote Control App also supports text placeholders that can be filled with “live” content. A typical use case is a reception desk where the Remote Control App is installed on the reception PC. The desk clerk can then make personalized welcome messages appear on the large screen controlled by FrontFace with a single click. In combination with the “Calendar” event source plugin you can welcome visitors both with pre-scheduled welcome messages as well as with ad hoc welcome messages where the name of the visitor is entered manually at the point of time when it is actually needed!

The FrontFace Remote Control App with two pre-configured buttons that can start playlists

The Remote Control App is so simple and intuitive to use that anyone can use it- even without prior training! Simply click on one of the previously defined buttons to start the desired action on the player PC (e.g. start off a playlist). Furthermore, you also execute different maintenance actions, e.g. shutting down the player PC remotely.

Just give it a try and see how easy this is! The Remote Control Plugin is available for download as free trial version. The package includes a detailed manual as well as the Remote Control App.

The latest maintenance update of FrontFace for Public Displays, the software solution for professional digital signage applications, again offers a lot of new features and helpful improvements. Here is an overview of the most important changes:

• Significant performance improvements of the Display Assistant when dealing with projects that are stored on a network folder
• New overlay layouts for even more design options
• A new version of the Clock plugin that now also supports “timer” and “countdown” mode
• Publishing to a single player PC that is registered within a player PC group is now supported
• The publication protocol is now more readable and supports an abbreviated and a verbose mode
• The selection dialog for plugins in the Display Assistant has been improved and now also shows the version number of the plugins in use
• Searching for updates and new versions (online) has been added as a new feature within the Display Assistant
• The onscreen notification feature has completely been redesigned (CAUTION: If you are currently using the onscreen notification plugin, please contact mirabyte technical support before installing this update!)
• Playlists that only have one single page that use a hot folder which contains a single video, XPS or PDF file can now also loop infinitely
• Various minor improvements, optimizations and bug fixes in the Display Assistant and the FrontFace Player Application

For existing customers that are eligible of getting free updates and support, this update can be downloaded for free. Prospects may download the full-functional free trial version!

For more information, screenshots, plugins (extensions) and video tutorials, please visit the FrontFace for Public Displays Webpage.

The digital signage software FrontFace for Public Displays comes with a powerful, built-in browser engine that allows the seamless integration of Web pages into FrontFace playlists. The Web browser of FrontFace is based on Chromium and supports apart from HTML5 and CSS3 also JavaScript and even plugin technologies like Flash or Silverlight.

But there may be some rare cases where the integrated browser engine does not or only partially support specific but yet required Web features like special ActiveX controls for Web cams, etc.

In order to still be able to integrate these Web pages into your FrontFace playlists, you can now use the new Internet Explorer Web Browser plugin!

This plugin allows the integration of Web pages into FrontFace playlists using the Internet Explorer browser engine. It renders Web pages exactly the way as the Internet Explorer does and supports all features that are supported by the IE.

The plugin is available for free (currently as beta version, since it is still being enhanced with new features). You can download it in the download area of the FrontFace for Public Displays product Web page (click on “Show all available plugins…”). A PDF manual is also included.

The new version 3.6.5 of our professional digital signage software “FrontFace for Public Displays” is now available. This version again brings a lot of new features and improvements that we would like to share with you!

These are the most important changes of version 3.6.5:

• Availability of custom color values across the entire project
  If you define any custom color values in the Display Assistant (e.g. for texts, news ticker or backgrounds) these are now available persistently in the entire project and can easily be reused. This is very useful if you have custom colors defined for your corporate identity and need to access them frequently.
• Custom screen resolutions for the preview feature
  Custom screen resolutions for the preview feature can now also be saved persistently within the project for quick access and more convenience.
• Improved onscreen warning messages in case of errors and problems on the player PC
  In case of any problems or errors, the FrontFace player application can now (optionally) display a small notification popup that helps you to easily diagnose any problems on the screen.
• Web pages may now also have a transparent background
  Web pages can now also be integrated with a transparent background color. In combination with the “Overlay” page layouts, this new feature opens up a huge range of new, creative design possibilities to you!
• Placeholders can now be used also in the news ticker
  The placeholder feature that is already known from text elements in playlists, can now also be used with the news ticker bar. You can e.g. use the news ticker for a personalized welcome message for visitors while the rest of the screen can still be used for your regular content.
• Plaintext files are now supported as data source for the news ticker
  The news ticker can be fed with custom text that is entered in the Display Assistant or by integrating a RSS news feed. Now, also plain text files (TXT) can be integrated as an alternative to RSS feeds which allows you to easily update the ticker content without having to re-publish your project using the Display Assistant.
• Integration of AV sources (Web cams, video grabbers) is now possible without a separate plugin
  AV sources such as Web cams or video grabber cards can now also be integrated without using an extra plugin. Only when you plan to integrate live TV channels, you still require the extra Live TV plugin.
• Improved user interface for the Calendar event source plugin
  The user interface of the Calendar event source plugin has been improved for even more convenience. Please make sure that you update your existing projects with the latest version of this plugin using the Display Assistant to take advantage of the new features!
• Enhanced and reworked user manual
  The user manual has been improved and some new sections with valuable tips and tricks have been added.

For more information, please visit the FrontFace for Public Displays product Website!

The latest version 3.6.0 of our professional, but yet easy-to-use digital signage software “FrontFace for Public Displays“ is now available and comes with a great new feature: Event-controlled scheduling of playlists! This new feature is perfectly suited to implement applications such as digital welcome boards.

Event-controlled Scheduling of Playlists:
Apart from the common, timer-based scheduling feature of FrontFace for Public Displays, a new way of controlling playlists has been added with this release: Event-controlled playlists. Anything that is able to raise events (e.g. sensors or external systems like an Exchange calendar*) can be used to start playlists for a specified timespan. The event-based scheduling works hand-in-hand with the traditional, timer-based scheduling of playlists so that when a playlist is started by an event for a given timespan, the player application can later on “fall back” to the previously running playlist that has been started by a timer-based schedule. This makes event-based scheduling a perfect choice for implementing digital signage applications like short news breaks, notices, call-ups or ad hoc information inserts.

“Calendar” Event Source Plugin for Appointment-controlled Playlists with Placeholder Support:
By using so called “Event Source Plugins”, external systems that raise events can be easily integrated into the FrontFace software. By default we include the new “Calendar” event source plugin which adds a calendar to the Display Assistant that you can use to manage appointments. These appointments can then trigger a playlist of your choice once they become due. It is also possible to set the value of placeholder texts used in your playlists by an appointment in the calendar. So you can really easily implement e.g. a digital welcome board that welcomes visitors at your company’s site with a personalized welcome message! While the normal, timer-based scheduling is used to show playlists with general information during the time when no visitors are expected, the event-based scheduling pops up the personalized welcome message every time an appointment of the internal calendar is due. Further event source plugins will be released shortly on our Website for facilitating many other interesting use cases!

Plugin SDK is now available Free of Charge:
The FrontFace Plugin SDK allows developers to implement their own, custom functionality which can then be hosted in FrontFace for Public Displays or FrontFace for Touch Kiosks. By using the Microsoft .NET 4 Framework and the WPF technology, plugins can be developed in programming languages such as C# or VB.NET. Apart from normal plugins that can be used to integrate external data sources or systems into playlists or kiosk applications, the SDK now also provides the necessary interfaces to implement custom event source plugins so that you can also control playlist scheduling from external systems. The FrontFace Plugin SDK is now available free of charge and can be used both this trial version and the full version of any FrontFace product.

Other new Features and Enhancements in this Release:

• Page shortcuts are now being checked for duplicates in the Display Assistant. A page shortcut allows calling up a certain page (also if marked as hidden) of a playlist when a specific key on the keyboard is pressed.
• The overall usability of the scheduling in the Display Assistant has been improved.
• Interacting with the Web browser engine of FrontFace by mouse, keyboard or touch now works in all cases as expected.
• The overall compatibility of the built-in PDF viewer has been improved further.
• Placeholders (for text elements) can now be used in playlists that are either scheduled by a timer or by an event.
• The user manual of FrontFace for Public Displays has been reworked and now also includes a section that explains how to implement a “digital welcome board”.
• The logging and tracing functionality of the FrontFace Player Application has been enhanced to simplify debugging in case of a technical problem.

*) An event source plugin that allows the integration of Microsoft Exchange calendars will be available shortly as a separate download on our Website. It is not included in the default setup package of FrontFace.

A fully-functional, free demo version of FrontFace for Public Displays is available for download on our Website. The update to this new version is free of charge for all customers that have a valid updates & support period for their licens!. The update can also be downloaded on the product Website.