Just a notice to everyone using iPads and Kiosker (Pro).
If you haven’t noticed, the App was updated.
While it provides a slightly modified menu system - one of the big changes for me is the ability to use a website for the screensaver.
I am using my old DakBoard (free) account as my screensaver (which consists of a calendar view) vs. the Clock, which has been my standard now for a while.
If you haven’t tried it out…
Once you are in the menu system, select screensaver, press and hold on the existing screensaver, then on mode select “Website”
I am beta testing kiosker. It is a nice app but does lack some of the nice HA features that Fully Kiosk possesses.
The most important feature for me is to remotely address the tablet and change screens. I use this a lot with my Fully Kiosk and windows based touchscreens. So I can switch screens based on events and timing - for example put up a sleep screen when the house goes to bed.
They have indicated that they plan to add this capability - through a cloud service. I did suggest to them to look into implementing this both through cloud and local. I understand cloud is probably good for their professional kiosk customers and probably provides ongoing revenue opportunities. But for HA this is overkill when you want to tell a tablet in your home to load a different Sharptools screen.
Incidentally I also use Dakboard - only for their slideshow capability. I pay for their service so I can set up multiple slide shows and enclose them in Sharptools dashboards. This is on the wish list - Google Photos integration - but seems not to be at the top of everyone’s list!
We recently cutover to a new approach for realtime data and one of the things I was thinking about using it for is the ability to push actions down to ‘viewing’ devices.
There’s a feature request for it here, but it hasn’t picked up much interest from the community:
As you may be alluding to, having a photos integration plus the ability to dynamically change which dashboards a ‘viewing’ device is displaying would let you keep everything in SharpTools without needing a separate Kiosk App or Screensaver Site.
Kiosker came back to me and proposed using mqtt. That would be fine with me as I have an mqtt server running but that is one more hop for most folks. So something native would be very nice.
If you tackle either I would be happy to test. I think I am out of votes so may need to redistribute some of them!
