iPlus Version 5.5
Kiosk homepage
The kiosk homepage is a single ASP page containing channels read from a local MS Access database, which is distributed to each kiosk on a nightly basis. The channels are all represented by chunky buttons, which, when touched, change to a highlighted state for about half a second, before navigating the user to their selected channel. The channels are all assigned to the kiosk databases via the iPlus Channel Wizard.
The four small channels at the bottom, above the black menu bar that is always present at the foot of the screen, contain different channels depending upon the network. Mapping, Weather/BBC News and Freemail (a free email, moviemail and electronic postcard service) are always present in fixed positions. There is also a scrolling headline ticker at the top of the page, which contains headlines promoting various iPlus services, such as Nights Out, the Worktrain jobs service or competitions.
The menu bar at the foot of the screen always has the same six submenu category buttons on it (What's On, Local, Travel, Jobs, Fun and Help). If the user touches any of these buttons, a submenu drawer page rises up the screen. The effect is achieved via a flash movie that simulates the rising of the drawer. Once the movie has finished playing, the submenu channels and adverts are made visible using JavaScript.
Each submenu drawer can contain a maximum of twelve channels. By using an algorithm I would dynamically load a different set of buttons, depending upon whether there were up to four, eight or twelve channels required. If the drawer was displaying four buttons, for example, and another channel was added, the buttons would automatically resize so that eight could be displayed.
iPlus Channel Wizard
The channel wizard is an ASP.NET 1.1 web application, written in C#, that vastly simplifies the task of updating the channels on each kiosk network. It allows the network administrator to easily select the channels and adverts required on each network's homepage and submenu pages, and assign headlines for the ticker.
The wizard interface consists of two frames, the top one containing a dropdown list of council networks and a help buttton that launches a popup window, and the bottom one containing a tabstrip with six tabs for the various actions that need to be completed. These include: setting the focus for the network (council or transport), selecting the channels for the frontscreen and submenu drawers, choosing the ticker headlines or creating new ones, and publishing the changes to the network.
Each tab contains one or more custom controls, ranging from simple controls such as the Network Focus control containing a pair of checkboxes and a button control, to the more complex, such as the Front Screen and Front Screen Container controls that contains a number of dropdown lists and image controls, as well as another set of tabs if the network has both council and transport focused iPlus Points. Once the focus of the network has been set, the other controls update their displays accordingly.
Once the channels have been selected and saved back to the database, the Preview control is used to check that everything is in order and then update the network at the touch of a button. If, for any reason, certain kiosks cannot be updated because they have a communication failure or other hardware/software related issue, then it is possible to select a checkbox and cause the kiosk(s) to be ignored.