We have become increasingly frustrated with IntuiFace here at the Greensboro Science Center. We have 20 iPad licenses, 1 windows computer license, and 1 composer.
We love composer, it is easy to use and fun to design experiences with. And we have never had any trouble with the one experience we have running on the Windows machine.
However the iPad experiences have never worked well. We have abided by the guidelines for designing for iPads, we have taken advice from IntuiLab staff after we posted on this forum, and yet we STILL cannot get them to operate with any acceptable level of reliability.
All of the iPads constantly crash (sometimes after touching the screen for the first time). Or the videos freeze. Oftentimes the videos will play once, but when you go to a page and then back to the video, it will be permanently frozen. We are set on utilizing video and it seems that Intuiface player on iPads just cannot handle it. We know this isn’t the iPad, because it can run a similar experience WITHOUT THESE PROBLEMS on iBooks (including running the exact same videos all day long). Also when we run these experiences on Composer’s player they always work perfectly fine. But as soon as they are on an iPad they become completely unusable.
We have also tried about 5 different versions of iOS with the player, but to no avail. Can someone please help us with this? Otherwise will be soon be in the market for new software… Is there anyone successfully running iPad experiences with video where it doesn’t crash or freeze dozens of times a day? Thanks for your time, any help would be appreciated…
Hi, Ron. I just got an email from Wil and responded directly. Bottom line - as I told Wil - I have never known Development to leave unaddressed a problem that is reproduced in-house. The latest ticket I see from your organization is dated back in early April. At that time, we could not reproduce the issue. If you continued to have problems, I wish you hadn’t waited to tell us! Please reengage with Support immediately. I can promise a quick turn-around.
Side note: Just today, literally, we released Version 5.4.2 of Player for iPad. I have no clue if it’ll help but be sure to try it as you reengage with Support.
We will definitely try the new version (5.4.2) but 5.4.1 seemed to make no noticeable difference at all. We would still love to know if anyone is running experiences on iPads WITH VIDEOS that aren’t crashing or freezing. Because we have tried about 500 different possible combinations…
If anyone is we would love to see their experience or at least know their specs…
So we have implemented 5.4.2 on our iPads with some success. Some videos that were inexplicably freezing are no longer freezing. There is still some crashing but we have found that significantly reducing video resolution and quality helps with that (although doesn’t seem to solve it altogether)…
If anyone else is successfully running experiences with videos without any crashing or freezing on an iPad, we would love to hear more about your specs… Thanks!
So my optimism about 5.4.2 may have been premature. 3 of the 6 iPads with 5.4.2 had videos that froze today, even though I have down-res’ed all the videos and significantly reduced their quality (on one experience that froze, for example, I reduced the quality of the videos from 2gb total to 350mb total, and it still froze…)
On the other hand there is a different experience of ours, running on the same model iPad, with the same iOS, the same version of intuiface, but with WAY larger files and a lot more pages, and it has NOT frozen or crashed since the update to 5.4.2… Can anyone explain this? One of the reasons this is frustrating is because it seems to be random… The three experiences that froze today are SIGNIFICANTLY smaller than the experiences which did not freeze and are running smoothly on multiple iPads…
I’d like to upload one of these experiences so you guys at Intuilab can take a look. How do I do that again? No one has responded to this except Geoff… Is there a tech person that can respond please???
Hi, Ron. This is a user community so although monitored by IntuiLab, it’s intended for user-to-user communication. To appearances, other users either haven’t experienced your issues or have no insight to share.
For a conversation with Technical Support, please open a ticket as I recommended. Again, if they can reproduce it, they can fix it. Nothing is worse than random issues but let’s get Support back in the loop. You can either open a new ticket or continue with an existing.
Thanks Geoff. I opened a new ticket. I appreciate your help.
We’d still love to hear from any users if you are running videos on an experience on an iPad, that ISN’T crashing or freezing on a daily basis. Thanks!
The issue was fixed thanks to @rsettle which shared both XPs and reproducible scenarios on the support: http://support.intuilab.com.
A 5.4.3 version for tablet is on its way to fix this issue (a memory leak in the tablet GPU…)
So here are the results from implementing 5.4.3. We updated 8 iPads to this new version last Friday, and we let them run through the long weekend, and 7 out of the 8 were running just fine when I came in to check on them this morning. This is a HUGE improvement over the last version of IntuiFace Player for us and our iPads. Thank you so much Christophe and Geoff and everyone in development at IntuiLab.
Before this update we would have to restart each iPad multiple times a day, and now 7 out of 8 ran for multiple days without needing any maintenance whatsoever. Awesome. The one iPad that DID need restarting was completely frozen (not just video like before, but buttons and links too, so this could be an unrelated issue).
Again thanks so much for working with us guys. I’ll still work on getting you some pictures of our kiosks in action…