We’ve recently started trialling a large 55" kiosk touch screen which runs a native Android install. I’ve installed the Xibo client on it and it runs well (using an existing Xibo 1.7.8 server). As our first big test with it, we’re planning on running some surveys on it for public users to be able to fill in on the touch screen. The surveys are simply a layout with a single web page region.
The issue - If I have the Xibo action bar hidden (preferred solution), the onscreen Android menu at the bottom auto-hides as well. For people to use touch, they in effect have to tap one to wake up the Android menu then tap again to make their selections. The timeout for this is ~3 seconds, which isn’t enough time for people to read the survey question and respond… hence having to double tap whenever they make their first choice.
If I leave the Xibo action bar visible (not ideal), the Android menu bar stays up and the touch interface works fine.
We have little control over the Android environment to make any changes there, but I was wondering if there was somewhere in Xibo that I could change a setting to allow the Android menu bar to stay active…
Could you please tell us how exactly those layouts of your work there with touch please?
With action bar hidden, I don’t think we can control how long the android navigation bar is active unfortunately - do your users have to press one of the buttons on the navigation bar?
I’m sure that fully implemented Interactive Signage would help you as well, but that is scheduled to be implemented in 1.9 series - no set date for that as of yet.
In terms of how the layouts work with touch, I’ve just got a basic HTML page showing as a Webpage item in a single region on the page. Using touch on the screen allows me to interact with it as a normal web page. I’m not sure if that is supposed to work that way or not… but in effect it’s just like viewing the page in the browser but this way it is centrally managed by Xibo and removes all the extra functionality the browser has (which is what I’m after). This way, I don’t need to worry about people going to other websites and the like as there’s no address bar.
The four large tiles on the page each link to a different Survey Monkey survey, with all the questions being multiple choice allowing for quick and easy selection and submission. Once the survey is submitted, SurveyMonkey redirects back to the original page.
The users don’t need to press or use the navigation bar at all, but it seems that it needs to be present for the touch interface to work.
Hopefully that makes sense. If it’s easier, I can take a video of it in operation.
OK I can imagine how does that work now, thank you.
I don’t have a sensible way to test that now, but from what you’re saying it requires one ‘tap’ (which shows the navigation bar as well) and then another tap on the link and then answer to survey etc.
I guess how long the navigation bar stays on the screen might be hardware dependant ie set in android settings perhaps.
I don’t think the duration specified in display profile affects that, I mean it does when the Xibo first starts, but after the action bar is hidden, when you click on the screen, the navigation bar won’t stay on screen for the specified duration - although you could try increasing the duration there and see if that changes anything.
Alternatively you could try to use one of the Android kiosk application (kiosk browser lockdown or similar), perhaps that would be suitable as well (I haven’t tested it).
Spot on with the usage - if the nav bar isn’t showing, I need to tap once to bring it up then while it is showing I can use it as normal.
I did have a look through the Android settings but couldn’t see anything relating to the timeout of the bar…
I’ll take a look at the kiosk apps that are around and see what I can find. That’ll do for this instance, but long term I’d like to try manage it through Xibo.
If that’s the case, with the double tap / click to actually interact with the screen, we will certainly look into improving that along with the full interactive signage implementation (or before if possible).
Excellent. Well, if you need someone to test it, feel free to let me know.
In regards to my current issue, I took a look at the Android Kiosk Browser Lockdown app and it appears that it’ll do what we need. We’ll just need to swap between applications in future when we want it to be a standalone display vs interactive, but that’s fine.
