EloView® Feature Release: Kiosk Browser Upgrade

The EloView product team is excited to announce an improvement to the Kiosk Browser within EloView which powers your “webapps”. This enhancement fixes a number of hard to fix, intermittent issues and was made available yesterday (April 25, 2017) within your portal account. Upgrading your kiosk browser requires an action by you, so if you do not take any action, all you webapps will continue to perform the way they did previously.

Over time, we have received many requests around for the kiosk browser. So, we are including a “EloView Kiosk Browser Basics” section at the bottom of this update.

What updates are being made?

• Fixed an issue where, in certain cases, home page timeout did not work. At the end of the set time, the browser either stayed on the same page or went to a blank (white) page.
• Fixed an issue where, in certain cases, kiosk browser was deleting cookies even when the “delete user data” option was unchecked.
• On large format displays, fixed an issue where clicking on the attract content brought up the kiosk browser (main app) but took a significant amount of time to load the page, resulting in a white screen.
• On large format displays, fixed an issue where in some cases the attract loop only worked once and did not work again.

EloView Kiosk Browser Basics
Webapps powered by the included kiosk browser are very popular with customers. This seemingly easy to use feature is quite complex under the hood, as a large web implementations and content types need to be supported. Webapps support many settings, accessed by clicking the webapps in your content library.

• Your choice of browser engine: (a) Native Android webview or (b) Crosswalk, which is based on Google Chromium. Many of our customers use Crosswalk because it provides better performance, more video codec support and HTML5 features like WebGL, WebRTC, IndexedDB, Web Sockets, CSS3. We further optimized Crosswalk for running continuous display devices.
• Hide or show a Navigation Bar (with home, back, forward buttons) for easy navigation on the site.
• Hide or show a page loading Progress Bar.
• Set a home page timeout to return the browser to home page if the device is inactive for a set amount of time.
• Clear user data and cookies at timeout.
• Append a field (one of several device properties, such as device name or location) to the base URL, so each device can have a unique URL.

You can have as many web-apps in you content library as you want – each with its individual settings. However, all webapps within one account use the same kiosk browser binary. This “base” copy of the kiosk browser is created when the account is first created. Sometimes, if this copy needs an update, there are two ways to do this.

• Elo can upgrade the copy in your account from the back end – with specific performance tune-ups, custom settings or fixes.
• Elo releases an update to the browser application to all customers via an “upgrade” button in webapps settings. More details on this below.

Method of Distribution and Timing

• This update is available now. Click on any webapp to access its settings, then click the upgrade button within the webapps.
• Note - once you do click an upgrade, all webapps in your account will be upgraded.
• No changes will occur to your webapps unless you click upgrade. If you are not seeing any performance concerns on webapps, you do not need this update.
• Any tests should be done on a separate EloView account – for details please contact EloView Support.

Thanks!
EloView Product Team