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Why Do Companies Still Use Microsoft Windows For Displays?

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Re: Why Do Companies Still Use Microsoft Windows For Displays?

#111

Post by w0rd-driven »

Ahh something I can speak to directly.

At my current gig, we use SiteKiosk which locks windows down tight. It uses the IE WebBrowser control via ActiveX/COM/.Net/however the hell it works. Its basically IE but slightly shittier due to there not being a 1:1 between it and IE proper. SiteKiosk has some pretty powerful digital signage features you don't really get from a Windows Embedded scenario. One feature of 8.1 I was looking forward to was "kiosk mode" but with WinRT being blocked from talking to localhost, except through a hack (yes, fuck you Microsoft) it was stillborn for my tastes.

.NET apps are ClickOnce or xbap, which is basically pre-Silverlight. This is the suckiest part. SiteKiosk can run normal applications and Silverlight with no problems but it took SL 5 to get proper COM support and it isn't terribly easy to make your normal .NET library "just work" so that wrapper for a card dispenser isn't as easy to leverage. Due to the low number of these apps (2), we haven't bothered migrating away from shitty xbap.

The largest amount of applications use typical wamp running a lightweight PHP framework and sometimes MySQL as localhost. Some are completely or partially Flash driven applications as well.

SiteKiosk and leveraging IE lets us focus on perfecting the experience though I've become complacent. IE development is just too slow now and testing in Chrome with superior dev tools are absolutely essential. The problem there is we can easily paint ourselves into a Chrome-only corner if we aren't careful.

Leveraging the POS equipment like barcode readers, card dispensers, or printers are the only thing the web proper isn't really suited for unfortunately. This may be where Windows has much more leverage due to their driver model. Most equipment we interfaced with had a .NET library or simple instructions of use with P/Invoke. I saw very little (<1%) that had anything to do with Linux and in typical fashion wasn't something to simply use via something like PHP or Ruby/Rails. Maybe we chose Windows friendly vendors, though, so take this with a grain of salt.

Re: Why Do Companies Still Use Microsoft Windows For Displays?

#112

Post by rockin »

Just because some people don't know what they are doing, doesn't mean you can't run windows to drive displays.

I founded a company 9years ago that did just that and let me tell you, that we prided ourselves with never having had something like this happen!! And we deployed over 100.000 such devices!

Besides, the $15 for a windows license are irrelevant if you look at the project cost.

It also made sense from a technology point of view... .NET is great for UI heavy stuff, there is not a single media format that's not supported on windows and you get great drivers for all the hardware that's out there!

Microsoft also helps you with distribution/promotion of your solution.

And like others already mentioned...it was also easier to sell windows based systems to corporations because it was the defacto standard!

The problem with the digital signage industry is, that the barrier of entrance seems to be low and therefore everybody tries to put together his own little crapy solution. That's why the whole market is fucked up and that's also why I sold my company as soon as I could.

Re: Why Do Companies Still Use Microsoft Windows For Displays?

#113

Post by w0rd-driven »

terhechte wrote: post #56
jsingleton wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one ever got fired for buying Microsoft (or IBM) :) A lot of professional grade display screens also come with a built in computer running embedded Windows. Although for web based signs a Raspberry Pi works really well: https://shutdownscanner.com/Blog/Posts/Raspberry-Pi-Digital-...

I found that there's a great gap or schism between common digital signage projects. On the one hand you have solutions that just want to display 5 pictures or a simple website (current dish of the day, bus tables, train schedules, current news) and on the other hand you have high profile vendors that want (multiple) absolutely stutter free HD content (with huge bitrates because so much is going on in their animations…

We've had someone put a graphically intensive Flash application on Atom processors. Their reasoning was lower heat output and very small footprint. There are newer i5's that are maybe twice as big that absolutely blow these things away.

Customers want cheap and I don't blame them but it took a second iteration of the shitty Atom line, one with a proper GFX card from Nvidia to have this display in any usable capacity. Atom/Netbook is absolutely not the way to go for Flash content. I would wager the Pi would be roughly identical unless you could leverage a beefy GFX card.

If you weren't using Flash, you could practically use anything. HTML5/CSS3 animations have come quite a distance but its definitely not 1:1 still.

Re: Why Do Companies Still Use Microsoft Windows For Displays?

#114

Post by MarcScott »

radicalbyte wrote: post #7

The total cost of using Windows is (probably) lower than using Linux. These displays are often custom work - building something like that is a couple of days work for a WPF or Flash (/Air) developer. The vast majority of those use Windows. And I've not even touched on the administration costs.. To be honest I'm more concerned when I see ATMs running Windows 98; at least these advertising displays can't do any real da…

It freaked me out when an ATM BSODed on me. Its happen when I've used a Tesco self-service checkout as well.

Re: Why Do Companies Still Use Microsoft Windows For Displays?

#116

Post by terhechte »

ams6110 wrote: post #105
terhechte wrote: post #21

I've worked for quite some time in the digital display industry, at a company which has a very feature rich, Mac OS X based digital signage solution [1] with high profile customers such as Mercedes-Benz, or Disney. Since the company is small, it is easy to be part of all steps of the process, including marketing and sales. I learned a lot about B2B buying behaviour while I worked for this company. We oftentimes ran i…

Where I work they have a few gratuitous large-screen displays that in reality just suck up electricity while presenting slides about how "green" our IT organization is. They use Mac Minis, with full-screen Chrome to run the slideshow, and I often see error messages on these (though typically from having dropped the wifi connection and not from an OS panic or other real error).

I can tell from experience that having a really solid error free digital signage solution takes up a lot of time, because you really want to care about every tiny detail that could go wrong. One example is sudden lack of network connectivity while displaying a website:

- One solution is to just display an error page (bad!)

- Another solution is to display a cached version of the page. Sounds great until you have to display stocks.

- The proper solution is to display a cached version, except for time critical data where you either go to the next piece of content, and if that's impossible, display the customer logo or some default fallback content.

This and thousands of other small configurations are what make up a good digital signage solution. The default web browser, being made for user interaction, doesn't cover it, obviously.

Re: Why Do Companies Still Use Microsoft Windows For Displays?

#117

Post by terhechte »

camus2 wrote: post #107
terhechte wrote: post #21

I've worked for quite some time in the digital display industry, at a company which has a very feature rich, Mac OS X based digital signage solution [1] with high profile customers such as Mercedes-Benz, or Disney. Since the company is small, it is easy to be part of all steps of the process, including marketing and sales. I learned a lot about B2B buying behaviour while I worked for this company. We oftentimes ran i…

Hi , what technology do you use ? Flash,Java or something else?

The solution is written as a native Mac OS X Objective-C app, and can render all kinds of content (images, videos, html, flash, quartz composer, texts, tickers, etc). These can be mixed and combined and layered in any possible way. It is a pretty powerful solution.

Here's a really, really, old demo of the software:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSvHp1LL4Po

That was 4 years ago, and it is running on rather old hardware.

Re: Why Do Companies Still Use Microsoft Windows For Displays?

#118

Post by pessimizer »

Spearchucker wrote: post #106
ams6110 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lightweight local web server is not going to be any more complicated than a stand-alone program that does the same thing.

The web site you build does the same thing that the standalone app does. The web site is hosted by the web server. That's an added piece of software to maintain and configure, over and above the web site itself.

The web server is going to be fine. It's usually gone through a lot more testing than your display. Displays are trivially and commonly implemented as fullscreen webapps.

It's the browser javascript that I would worry about; responsiveness is always a battle.

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