Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Shared media dashboard concept demo


I extended the shared media dashboard a little as illustrated in the (very ad hoc) video above. It now loads collections of 7 web pages from up to 9 notecards and also allows text substitution, i.e. you can add a line in the format sub,YYY,health to the notecard and all subsequent lines with YYY will substitute health in its place. This may be useful where you you want to display a collection of URLs with a common parameter.

As per usual, if you have the right permissions, you can also set screen URLs using drag-and-drop from the web browser favicon. Moreover, the screens will report back in chat on their current URL in a format suitable for copy/pasting into a notecard.

The screens are now contained in a follower for use on open spaces such as the giant TB genome. The follower, in addition to the Display and Report options already described, also has an Open&Shut toggle that shows/hides the screens. Additionally, it stores up to 9 landmarks and the follower acts as a teleporter when one is selected, bringing up the teleport map and then deleting itself when the avatar has moved on (at present it only auto-deletes after landmark-based teleporting).

I'm sure people will come up with more imaginative and elegant uses for shared media but for me this is an interesting starting point that hightlights both the potential and the limitations of this new feature. In particular, I'm interested in seeing how the concept scales as I do see major differences in page-loading at times. There are, of course, prim count and permissions issues as well.

2 comments:

Glen said...

Slick. Is it available?

Peter Miller said...

Thanks for that.

I haven't figured out the perms yet though that shouldn't be a major issue. There's also the problem of what security settings to use on the shared media, whitelisting, etc. I'm inclined to rely on the user for that so it might not be suitable for unsupported n00bs. Apart from that and it all being a bit beta-ish, I guess there's no reason not to distribute. I'll try to get the rest done over the weekend.

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