New setup configuration page

infobeamer-fw · October 28, 2019, 4:29pm

New Setup Editor

A new preview version of the setup configuration editor is now available. But first a warning:

This is the very first version and there might be undiscovered bugs. As the editor is in charge of updating the configuration of a setup, a bug might result in unintended setup configuration changes when saving your configuration. For now, please use the editor only for setups where this isn’t a problem.

You can enable it by visiting your account page and selecting “Experimental: Use new setup configuration editor”:

When you now edit a setup, a few details have changed:

Drag & Drop for any list item

You can now drag/drop any item in a list-type option. This includes most playlists, like the one used in the HD image/video package. Just grab an item on the handle on its left side to move it around within its list:

New asset selector

Clicking on an exiting asset in your configuration or using the Add button for a list will now open a new asset chooser:

You can:

Search your assets
Select a single asset
If you used the Add button in a playlist: select multiple assets to append multiple assets to the playlist.

Right now the asset chooser is still pretty minimal and there are a few ideas that will be added in the future:

Selecting HEVC 4K videos (yes, we’re slowly getting there!)
Uploading new files right in the asset chooser.
Different views (thumbs/list/etc…)
Maybe more? Post your suggestions in the comments

List summary

Each list now has a summary text. For playlists, this includes to total duration of items added to the list. This makes it easier to created synced setups as you can now directly see the total duration of a playlist.

Duration mismatch warning

For a playlist, the system can now detect if the configuration duration for an asset matches the asset’s duration. This allows you to easily see differences that might result from switching an asset but forgetting to update the corresponding duration. Clicking on the orange clock button will update the duration to the asset’s duration:

Bigger thumbnails for assets

Just compare the before/after screenshot of editing an asset within the HD image/video player. The larger thumbnails should make it a lot easier to see what’s going on in your playlists.

Feedback very welcome

As mentioned at the very beginning of this post: This is the first release and there might still be issues. Your feedback will be very helpful in speeding up the process of switching over completely to this editor. If you find any problem or have a suggestion, feel free to post. Thanks!

johnniewalker.email · October 28, 2019, 7:49pm

Awesome work

Yes, being able to add assets from the asset chooser would be great, and the other suggestions should all improve usability.

johnniewalker.email · October 28, 2019, 8:01pm

I’ve just had a quick play around with this, I couldn’t resist, even with the warning!

Yes, it’s much easier to view assets and the drag n drop is great.

I also like how it’s possible to find the contents of a folder much easier, as having the file name visible means we no longer need to ‘hover’ over an item to see it’s filename.

It also seems much quicker to view the assets.

infobeamer-fw · October 28, 2019, 8:45pm

Thanks! By the way: Unless you save, just looking is perfectly safe. Uploading will be added, as that’s just too useful to skip

infobeamer-fw · October 29, 2019, 4:56pm

There’s now an Upload… button in the top right corner. It allows uploading right from the asset chooser.

Additionally, the same asset chooser can now be used by any package that uses a custom configuration interface. In other, less nerdy words: it can now be used by the scheduled player package for example. Support has already been added. So if you update the package, clicking on the Image, Video or HD Video button will now open the new asset chooser. This means you can now also upload while editing.

johnniewalker.email · October 29, 2019, 9:03pm

Love it!

johnniewalker.email · November 14, 2019, 6:53pm

Still loving the new interface, one thing that might be nice is a delete confirmation dialog when deleting assets from a playlist.

This request comes from members of my team who fear it’s too easy to accidentally delete a file from a playlist.
I did suggest that this could be annoying if there are multiple assets to remove from a playlist, I guess a ‘Remove Selected’ option could be a compromise, so when clicking on an individual asset a confirmation box pops up, but then it’s still possible to multi-select and delete multiple assets in one go.

infobeamer-fw · November 21, 2019, 9:13am

Thanks for the feedback. I’ll see what I can do. I agree that bulk deletion and maybe moving assets might be useful. I see how that can be added.

JonK · December 20, 2019, 6:58pm

In the new Configuration editor, when the asset name is longer that what can be displayed in the box, there is no way to see the complete name of the asset, as clicking either the asset icon or the asset name brings up the ‘Select image, video resource’ dialog.

In the old Configuration editor, clicking the asset icon brings up the Asset Information popup to show details of that asset.
Can the new Configuration editor do the same?

Of perhaps another way to solve this would be to show the current asset details within the new ‘Select image, video resource’ dialog, to be able to copy/paste that elsewhere.

Another feature suggestion would be for downloading assets from within the Configuration editor, without having to leave the setup to go into Assets, search/find that asset to download, and choose download.
If the details of a current asset in the playlist are shown somewhere within the Setup, adding a download button there would be helpful.

infobeamer-fw · December 21, 2019, 5:16pm

It can now. Click on the filename within the asset chooser. This will open a new dialog now showing details about the asset.

The above dialog also includes a download button allowing you to download the asset file.

JonK · December 23, 2019, 2:56pm

Nice. Thanks for that.

I now have another feature request:

When clicking on a current asset in the playlist and the asset chooser dialog opens, would there be a way to make the current asset just clicked appear on top of the chooser list?

If I just wanted to download the current asset (to compare before I upload its replacement with the same name), I have to look at spelling of the current filename and manually type that into search bar of the asset chooser to filter down to the current asset I just clicked.

If we have many assets with similar long filenames it’s not always clear which asset is the current one to download until I type in more of the filename.

For those long filenames that are hard to remember the spelling, I’m closing the chooser to go back and see more the current filename or open another tab in the browser to see that and in the other tab type more characters in the search bar of the chooser.

Perhaps a way to accomplish this would be to make the filename of the current asset just clicked auto appear in the search bar to auto filter to that asset, or a button/link in the chooser to ‘Show Current Asset’

Thanks,
Jon

infobeamer-fw · January 3, 2020, 1:47pm

The asset editing has been updated and is now more similar to how it previously worked in the old version:

Clicking on the asset’s thumbnail image (green area in the image below) will open an asset info dialog showing more information about the asset.
Clicking on the asset filename button (blue area in the image below) will open the new file selector dialog.

Additionally the handle for drag & dropping items within a list is now limited to the orange area. Previously the complete item area was usable for that, but it resulted in starting the drag/drop action accidentally, for example while clicking into an input dialog field. Marking the usable drag/drop handle explicitly using the dotted area should make that more clear.

JonK · January 6, 2020, 2:20pm

Fantastic. This helps a lot.

I also see when clicking the asset filename, that asset is highlighted with a green border in the asset chooser.

Maybe that was there before but I didn’t notice it if the image was way far down in the list of assets.

Having the current image highlighted with a green border works well when using the Scheduler player package as well.

One side affect I noticed is that when a change has been made and a ‘Save’ is pending, when clicking an asset thumbnail to open the Asset Info dialog, if the Download button is pressed it brings up the ‘Leave Site’ popup dialog to Leave or Cancel, as if I’m leaving the page.

Choosing ‘Leave’ still downloads the asset but the popup makes one think they are about to get out of the page.

infobeamer-fw · January 6, 2020, 2:59pm

That has been there since the first release of the new asset selector

Oh. Right. I guess the reason is that the download triggers a link click internally and the browser sees that as navigating away from the page. I can check if that can be done in any other way to avoid this warning.

infobeamer-fw · January 12, 2020, 3:57pm

This is now fixed by triggering the download in a new tab.

infobeamer-fw · January 12, 2020, 4:00pm

Another small improvement for those configuring video walls: The device option used in most video wall packages now shows a better dropdown menu when choosing a device:

The list if now split into devices assigned to the edited setup as well as devices assigned to other setups. The lists are also sorted by description now. Together this should make it a lot easier to manage device assignment.