I have been using graphite to collect metrics and display on graphs
My question is how are people displaying these on wall mounted screens?
Can see anywhere where people talk about how this is done
Those people usually display the dashboard using e.g. a browser in fullscreen mode. A software for this purpose might be gdash.
We have Graphite on Wallboards all around the office and in most cases people are just loading it up in a browser, but others have created custom html pages to load the graph images.
The folks at Atlassian have presented/posted on Wallboards a bunch. Here is a pretty good slide deck on Wallboards:
http://www.slideshare.net/GoAtlassian/ltds3-information-radiators
It boils down to:
Large display
Easy to understand (at a glance)
Always relevant
Easy to update
Aesthetically pleasing
For getting Graphite to display, it is as easy as leaving a browser open and leveraging tabs (and a tab revolver plugin - e.g. Revolver Tabs Chrome Ext) with some saved dashboard graphs. This has worked for me in the past:
You can geek out on how you run it (e.g. we used a Raspberry Pi, which you can see in the picture above) and keep it running. Here is Atlassian again using an AppleTv: https://blogs.atlassian.com/2011/10/using_an_appletv_as_a_build_monitor/
Have fun!
Related
I've been trying to work on a proof of concept (POC) where I can embed a UE4 project into an existing application (in my case NativeScript) but this could just as easily apply to Kotlin or ReactNative.
In the proof of concept I've been able to run the projects on my iPhone launching from UE4 pretty easily by following the Blueprint and C++ tutorials for the FPS. However the next stage of my POC requires that I embed the FPS into an existing NativeScript application, this application will manage the root menu, chat, and store aspects of the platform in the POC.
The struggle I'm running into is that I cannot find how to interact with the xcode project generated from the blueprint tutorial and the C++ tutorial generates a xcode project that i'm unsure where the actual root is that I need to wrap.
Has anyone seen a project doing this before and if so are there any blogs or guidance that you can point me to? I've been Googling and looking around for a couple weeks and have hit a dead end. I found a feedback post here from April of 2020, that was referring to a post in January 2020 that talked about how Unity has a way to embed into other applications additionally a question from 2014 here. But other than that it's a dead end.
A slightly different approach
Disclaimer: I'm not an UE4 developer. Guilty as charged for seeing an unanswered bounty too big to ignore. So I started thinking and looking - and I've found something that could be bent to your needs. Enters pixelstreaming.
Pixelstreaming is a beta feature that is primarily designed to allow for embedding the game into a browser. This opens a two way communication between a server where the GPU heavy computations happen and a browser where the player can interact with the content - the mouseclick & other events are sent back to the server. Apparently it allows some additional neat stuff, however that is not relevant for the question at hand.
Since you want to embedd the Unreal application into your NativeScript tool(menu of some kind if I understood correctly), you could make your application a from two separate parts:
One part would run the server.
The second part would handle the overlay via the pixelstreaming.
This reduces the issue of embedding the UE4 into an application to the(possibly easier) issue of embedding a browser into your application. (Or if your application is browser based - voila, problem solved.)
If you don't want to handle the remote communication, just have the server-side run on the localhost.(With the nice sideeffect of saving bandwidth.)
Alternatively, if you are feeling adventurous, you could go and write your own WebRTC support on the application side to bypass the need for the browser alltogether. It might not be worth the effort though.
Side note: The first of the links you provided is a feature request which hints at the unfortunate fact that UE4 doesn't support embedding. This is further enforced by the fact that one of the people there says somethig along the lines "Unity can to this, it would be nice if UE4 could as well."
Yet a different approach:
You could embedd and use a virtual display to insert the UE4 part into your controller - you would be basically tricking UE4 into thinking that the desired display device is a canvas inside your application.
This thread suggests a similar approach:
In general, the way to connect two libraries like this would be through a platform dependent window handle, e.g. a HWND under Windows. Check the UE api if you find any way to bind the render target to a HWND. Then you could create a wxWindow in wxWidgets and tell UE to render into that window. That would be a first step.
I'm not sure if anything I've listed will be of much help but hey, at least I tried :-). Good luck with your game.
At the same time, the author suggests to:
Reverse the problem:
Using the UE4 slate framework and online subsystem. You would use the former to create the menus you need directly in the UE4 and then use the latter to link to the logic you want to have outside of the UE4. However that is not what you asked for so I'm listing it only for the completeness sake.
TLDR: How could I sync the display of two web pages in browsers on separate computers?
Background:
I have developed a dashboard using MVC hosted on an IIS server that is used to display info on two large screen displays that are side-by-side. The server provides different layouts for each screen based on the URL. The layouts are created with reasonably pure Bootstrap 3 markup. Each screen is connected to an independent Google TV that loads the screen as the home page. The content is relatively static, so reloading the page every 10 minutes has been fine to this point.
Problem
I am considering a horizontally scrolling marquee (i.e. a ticker) at the bottom, but I would need it to span both screens.
Question
Is there a way to synchronize the displays reasonably accurately (i.e. better than 1s discrepancy) so that the text can slide from one screen to the other and not look too broken?
Note: I am primarily interested in methods that can be implemented from the MVC application, not by hacking the Google TVs or the browser, so that it remains broswer/machine agnostic.
I would recommend looking into SignalR. It uses web sockets for real-time two-way communication. You could leverage it by sending your marquee data to both screens simultaneously and then just have the second screen hold off on displaying the data for however many seconds it takes for text to cross the first screen. This would make it look like the text is scrolling across both screens.
Microsoft has some good tutorials for using SignalR for real-time communications on their website: https://www.asp.net/signalr/overview/getting-started/tutorial-getting-started-with-signalr.
Given the fact that you're using asp.NET, SignalIR might be the de facto solution for your needs (as pointed from user #sam2929). However, if you have direct access to the server, I would suggest you Socket.io (a popular library which makes working with WebSocket plain and easy) combined with IISNode, which is the same IIS extension they use on Windows Azure.
I'm using Google's Custom Search API to dynamically provide web search results. I very intensely searched the API's docs and could not find anything that states it grants you access to Google's site image previews, which happen to be stored as base64 encodes.
I want to be able to provide image previews for sites for each of the urls that the Google web search API returns. Keep in mind that I do not want these images to be thumbnails, but rather large images. My question is what is the best way to go about doing this, in terms of both efficiency and cost, in both the short and long term.
One option would be to crawl the web and generate and store the images myself. However this is way beyond my technical ability, and plus storing all of these images would be too expensive.
The other option would be to dynamically fetch the images right after Google's API returns the search results. However where/how I fetch the images is another question.
Would there be a low cost way of me generating the images myself? Or would the best solution be to use some sort of site thumbnailing service that does this for me? Would this be fast enough? Would it be too expensive? Would the service provide the image in the correct size for me? If not, how could I change the size of the image?
I'd really appreciate answers that are comprehensive and for any code examples to be in ruby using rails.
So as you pointed out in your question, there are two approaches that I can see to your issue:
Use an external service to render and host the images.
Render and host the images yourself.
I'm no expert in field, but my Googling has so far only returned services that allow you to generate thumbnails and not full-size screenshots (like the few mentioned here). If there are hosted services out there that will do this for you, I wasn't able to find them easily.
So, that leaves #2. For this, my first instinct was to look for a ruby library that could generate an image from a webpage, which quickly led me to IMGKit (there may be others, but this one looked clean and simple). With this library, you can easily pass in a URL and it will use the webkit engine to generate a screenshot of the page for you. From there, I would save it to wherever your assets are stored (like Amazon S3) using a file attachment gem like Paperclip or CarrierWave (railscast). Store your attachment with a field recording the original URL you passed to IMGKit from WSAPI (Web Search API) so that you can compare against it on subsequent searches and use the cached version instead of re-rendering the preview. You can also use the created_at field for your attachment model to throw in some "if older than x days, refresh the image" type logic. Lastly, I'd put this all in a background job using something like resque (railscast) so that the user isn't blocked when waiting for screenshots to render. Pass the array of returned URLs from WSAPI to background workers in resque that will generate the images via IMGKit--saving them to S3 via paperclip/carrierwave, basically. All of these projects are well-documented, and the Railscasts will walk you through the basics of the resque and carrierwave gems.
I haven't crunched the numbers, but you can against hosting the images yourself on S3 versus any other external provider of web thumbnail generation. Of course, doing it yourself gives you full control over how the image looks (quality, format, etc.), whereas most of the services I've come across only offer a small thumbnail, so there's something to be said for that. If you don't cache the images from previous searches, then your costs reduces even further, since you'll always be rendering the images on the fly. However I suspect that this won't scale very well, as you may end up paying a lot more for server power (for IMGKit and image processing) and bandwidth (for external requests to fetch the source HTML for IMGKit). I'd be sure to include some metrics in your project to attach some exact numbers to the kind of requests you're dealing with to help determine what the subsequent costs would be.
Anywho, that would be my high-level approach. I hope it helps some.
Screen shotting web pages reliably is extremely hard to pull off. The main problem is that all the current solutions (khtml2png, CutyCapt, Phantom.js etc) are all based around QT which provides access to an embedded Webkit library. However that webkit build is quite old and with HTML5 and CSS3, most of the effects either don't show, or render incorrectly.
One of my colleagues has used most, if not all, of the current technologies for generating screenshots of web pages for one of his personal projects. He has written an informative post about it here about how he now uses a SaaS solution instead of trying to maintain a solution himself.
The TLDR version; he now uses URL2PNG to do all his thumbnail and full size screenshots. It isn't free, but he says that it does the job for him. If you don't want to use them, they have a list of their competitors here.
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Stackoverflow User Luke wrote in this answer:
The boundaries between desktop and web
applications have really blurred.
Whilst once upon a time the nature of
developing for the web was totally
different to developing for the
desktop, nowadays you find the same
concepts [...] cropping up in both.
Since I am continually looking to improve my existing web applications, I'd like to know which common features of "classic" desktop applications do most web application miss?
For example, most desktop apps prompt the user to save unsaved data leaving a page or closing a window - a feature that many web applications miss. It could be that some feature aren't even necessary or are compensated in some other way. Maybe there are features which can't be implemented in (a classic) web application?
The thing you'll never be able to imitate in a web application is the low latency and instant feedback of a well written desktop app.
Even with the ajax techniques to load only parts of the pages, there usually is a noticeable delay in the response (or maybe it's just me and my narrowband). You're (for at least a few more years) just bound to the orders of magnitude of speed difference between network access and no network access.
The Undo button.
Right-click application-specific pop-up menus is the thing I've noticed most.
Usually right-clicking on a browser application will bring up the browser pop-up menu rather than an application-specific menu.
Keyboard support on most web applications is weak to non-existent. This is getting better than it used to be but you will still find plenty of mainstream sites that can't even get the tab order to work correctly. Most sites don't handle focus correctly and force users to use the mouse to activate even the simplest of data entry forms. You can usually forget about accelerator key support.
You can't pull the plug when the application hangs. (Yes, I'm serious)
For fairness is to mention, that desktop-applications miss a common feature of webapps: XSS (Cross-Site-Scripting). ;-)
Support for Big Files.
Integration with the client OS.
Support for special Input/Ouput Devices.
3D or anything else computationally intensive (specific to each users).
Advanced graphics: I've written a C program that draws a surface joining Bézier patches in a simple window and I had to tweak it in unimaginable ways to get it to draw in a decent time. I can't imagine that being ported to the web.
I mean, doing advanced graphics is not what every application needs, but if displaying nontrivial pictures is slow, then we shouldn't even talk about animations.
One Proper Macintosh menu bar support.
If you're a long-term Mac user, even with two large monitors, you have muscles that swoop to the top of the screen for actions, comfortable in the knowledge that the infinite depth effect will kick in and you can slide along that edge, picking from the menus.
No in-browser app can deliver that experience.
Two Command-keys, which is a side-effect of the menu bar not belonging to the app but goes a bit beyond that - good desktop apps have command-key shortcuts (accelerators to you Windows guys, I'm not just talking the Mnemonics which work with alt-key support). Great desktop apps show little reminders next to the buttons that have accelerators, when you hold down the appropriate modifier keys and wait a fraction of a second.
Three Smarter tables. There are a lot of apps where some kind of spreadsheet view works as a paradigm, including editing, sorting, resizing columns. I think I've seen some odd examples of partial support but a good table in a web app is still a bit of a dancing bear.
Four Used to be right-clicking but I'm finding more and more apps that do this properly, like Kerio's excellent webmail engine. It is still missing in enough web apps to be worth emphasizing.
Displaying application request/process status or messages on Taskbar or Status bar.
For the web, Javascript can be used to update text on status bar, but its not a common usage.
The usability benefits of standard GUI elements that look and behave uniformly across applications.
(Although this will surely change as web app developers adopt certain GUI elements and patterns that are considered best-practice, notably by eventually using the same libraries, e.g. for drag-and-drop.)
A common feature of "classic" desktop applications is the ability to work without an internet connection. I miss that in Web applications.
For example, MS word works without an internet connection, but you need to be connected if you want to use Google docs.
Of course, it does not matter if the application requires an internet connection anyway. For example, if its a feed reader, I have to connect to the internet, whether I use a desktop reader or an online reader.
Drag and drop from Finder/Explorer into the web app. And vice-versa.
The ComboBox is the most notable widget omission.
On the web, lack of desktop features such as popup dialogues is actually a boon, making for a simpler interaction experience. Think also of the autosave draft feature of Gmail vs. the desktop convention of prompting the user to save.
So consider carefully before trying to reconstruct that desktop feature in your web app.
Decent help. Seems to always be an afterthought, if it's even implemented...
Desktop integration (may change if we get online desktops)
Offline use (does exist but it is early days)
(Reliable) Responsiveness
Reliability generally (somewhat debatable as there are pros and cons - e.g. your data is probably better backed up online, however security generally is less in your control with an online app, and if the network connection fails an online app tends to freeze or fail horribly.)
Blue Screen of Death
A task-specific UI with no extra controls. A web app, in addition to all the controls of the web app, also has back, next, bookmarks, etc buttons. You end up with an extra inch-high set of buttons that don't directly support the task at hand.
This isn't necessarily a programming feature, but the audience of an application will be different. For a web application you are cutting out a complete segment of your audience (those with slow or no internet access). While this is a relatively low number, it is a difference between a desktop application and a web application.
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What do you use to capture webpages, diagram/pictures and code snippets for later reference?
Evernote http://www.evernote.com and delicious http://www.delicious.com
Evernote
Notepad2's clipboard feature (Notepad2.exe /c as a link in Launchy)
Windows Clippings or PrintKey
Firefox extension Page Saver
Delicious
Microsoft OneNote.
I just have an emacs instance running on my home machine, under screen. Whereever I am (and have network) I can connect to it remotely. I stick all useful urls, birthday present ideas, future dates, code snippets, ideas for docs etcetc in there.
I rarely have doodles/diagrams I need to capture, I tend to draw them in ascii in my file if needed.
I must admit I'm a bit stuck if I have no network/wifi somewhere, but that's rarely the case.
I find google notebook is very good for drive by code snippeting and google bookmarks especially as when used with the google toolbar, for web pages.
The benefit of these tools are that they are available from any pc on the web, though a good use of semantic organisation using labels is recommended.
Here's my response to a similar question:
The combination of OneNote with a tablet PC is awesome! I was a bit of a skeptic at first. I used the trial version and then forgot about it. A year later I had an unruly collection of files, project related emails, notebooks and scraps of paper all scattered throughout my life. I went back to OneNote and all my problems went away. Some highlights:
Everything is searchable. The character recognition is good enough that my chicken-scratch meeting notes can be searched. Text within images is searchable.
OneNote syncs with Outlook so finding meeting notes is a breeze.
I now embed all files into OneNote - pdfs, spreadsheets, word docs, images, web clippings.
OneNote is constantly saving all changes so, combined with a scheduled automated backup, everything is in one place and is safe.
There are some built-in collaboration tools I have yet to try but that look useful.
It is SO worth the price. It allows you to get started on a project and avoid all that time spent deciding how to organize things.
Zotero, is a nice plugin for Firefox.
SnagIt
captures everything you could want, and lets you annotate it.
I prefer to use the good old url for delicious
Apart from that i use the Scrapbook extension in firefox when i want to save something on the disk. It's possible to tag the page, edit it and remove those stupids ads before saving it.
I also have a Wiki on a stick that i carry around on a usbkey for code snippets that should go to other clients when i'm travelling around
Mostly, my code snippets are embedded into projects i carry on the same usb key, which allows me to demonstrate some technologies right off to the client and get his advice based on a demonstration, not a listing of code...
For screen shots, I use a mix between ScrapBook and ScreenGrab. They are both firefox plugins that are pretty amazing when you need to get a screenshot of a page for editing. Works great for consulting.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/427
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1146
Delicious Bookmarks extension for Firefox
It's a little primitive, but I've been using tiddlywiki (self-contained, single-file wiki) http://www.tiddlywiki.com/ which works good for basic text and markup. I combine it with a plugin to sync it with Outlook's notes (http://syncoutlooknotes.tiddlyspot.com/#SyncOutlookNotes) so that I can then sync it to my blackberry using the standard outlook-blackberry sync mechanism. This has the significant advantage that I can look at my notes and even write new notes when I'm out and about, away from my laptop, or just don't feel like lugging the laptop around to a meeting that I don't really need it for.
I'd prefer using something more advanced like Onenote, but being able to take my notes with my in the little blackberry has turned out to be a significant advantage.
Google Notebook is very convenient tool. You can clip and save any parts of web pages without leaving your browser tab. The Notebook plug-in automatically saves them as separate notes in your notebooks and keep the links back to the original web pages. You can organize your clippings later by moving them between your notebooks and/or tagging them. Very good for code snippets and references.