What’s within our power that will deliver a little pick-me-up during these difficult times? Our Dev team is hard at work on a bunch of really nice improvements and we thought maybe it was time to break our rule about feature previews. Sure, we’ve let drip the occasional big idea but it was always about one particular feature. A veritable grab bag? Never did it - before now…
Here’s a look at what we’ve got planned for July. Well, the end of July. Well, the end-of-July-but-we-reserve-the-right-to-change-the-release-date. But right now - end of July!
New Player license activation options
Sexy sounding name? No, but the feature sure is. It starts with the idea that our licensing approach for Player is old fashioned: grab a (virtual) keyboard and type in a User ID / Password, a license key, or a credential key. Not only are all of these approaches dependent on having a keyboard, they’re not very scalable. We’ve come up with three new ways to license Player - two of which are keyboard-free - and they should all make Player licensing, particularly at scale, a whole lot easier.
- Enter an activation code into your License Dashboard
Player will display an eight-digit activation code when launched. Open your Intuiface account on a mobile device, enter the eight-digit code - and Player is licensed! - Scan QR code
Player will also display a QR code when launched. Scan this code using your mobile phone, log into your Intuiface account if necessary - and Player is licensed! - Batch license any number of Players
Create a csv file containing a list of Player devices, each row containing a unique device ID and associated information like Player tags and nickname. Import the file into your Intuiface account - and all Players are licensed!
Using Player tags for conditional triggers
You all know conditional triggers, right? Right??? It’s the ability to have a trigger that only runs if one or more conditions are met. Well now one of your conditions can be about the presence of particular Player tags, ensuring triggers only run if the experience is on a device associated with particular Players. (A cool example would be to use the Share and Deploy console to add specific Player tags when you want your experience to do something special, like advertise sale items.) With our July update, you’ll be able to access Player tags in your running experiences and use them to create a very powerful set of new trigger conditions.
Modernize approach to website display on tablets
On all Player devices but Windows, we’ve decided to reproduce the approach taken on tablets, which is to open a dedicated browser instance rather than use an embedded browser. (You’ve seen this every time you click a URL in a tweet or Facebook post.) Not only does this mirror the approach taken by today’s devices, it has the bonus of eliminating a long-time limitation of Intuiface Player which is the inability to display website domains that embed other website domains. This “cross origin” request will now be supported, meaning you will no longer be limited to which websites you’d like to show in Player.
Updated Video Asset on Windows
I could write for hours on this topic but, needless to say, expect some really good improvements on Windows for video playback, including the elimination of some long-time bugs that had proven to be hard to fix. We’ll be sure to list out the details once the update ships.
Adopting more recent version of Chromium used by Intuiface
There’s a ton of testing that has to happen when updating the version of the Chromium web rendering engine used by the Web Browser Asset and the HTML Frame Asset. For example, we have to be very careful about regressions; it’s not only about testing improvements. The good news is we are just about ready to ship our next update, jumping Chromium to a much more recent version, giving us the benefits of enhancement - like better 4k video performance, or no-glitch pdf rendering - without any hassle in even the oldest Intuiface experience. This will be a welcome bump!
It’s nice to have something to look forward to, right? Hope you like what you’ve seen! Of course, we’re still hard at work on very major updates to our platform, but we’re thrilled to be able to deliver these improvements in the meantime.
