Alrighty Then!

I develop the Digital Signage frontend for my partners at infomax. They normally do complete projects from planning (electric wiring, network …), hardware (ruggedized LCD panel-pc’s in all sizes from 15″ to 60″) to software and integration. But they also wanted to open up a new line of software-only solutions. So i used an AIR version of their frontend – lying around my desktop for some time now – and made it ready for internet-installation and license management.

MaSSOnAIR was born

The software can be downloaded and installed from a website by using Adobe’s AIR install batch (from flash 9.0.60 on) or can be installed separately as runtime and AIR-app. The install page transparently gets the latest available version from my AIR application repository also used for updating all my applications.

The app requests a license from my cake/amf-php-based license management and stores it in AIR’s Encrypted Local Store for safety reasons. On first start, the user is presented by a license-tag available as a 8-digit hex code or a 2-d data matrix code. The user now can then enter the tag-code in the licensing system or upload a photo showing the display and the 2d-code. The display gets registered and can be attached to a information-stream available in infomax’ online max-manager CMS. By using the 2-d matrix-code multiple systems can be licensed by letting a technician make a digital photo of the set-up display (which can also be used for documentation purposes).

The server-software decodes the 2d-code in the above image without a problem.

As a last step a file-system-cache was added to harden the system against network losses. See next article for details.

In short, MassOnAIR features:

• internet installation
• online-licensing (supporting a photo based licensing for multiple displays)
• online-content management
• video capability
• caching for offline capability and to reduce traffic

Prepare to see a demo soon.

And, once again inquiries welcome.