Live feedback on your screens' status

One thing that's important when you're running a network of screens, and very important when you're trying to setup new screens, is having up to date status information. To help keep you up to date on the status of your screens, we've updated the CODA control website to automatically update to reflect when screens move between being offline and online, and when they're updated to show new content.

In the CODA control website, we indicate the state of a screen by its icon: if it's green and contains a tick, then the screen is online and connected to our servers; if it's grey and contains a power symbol then the screen is online and not showing content; and if it's red and contains a cross the screen is not connected to our servers and its state is thus known.

Previously, if you wanted to get an update on a screen's status you needed to refresh the page to cause all the display status icons to reload. Now however, our server will automatically push that information to your web browser, keeping you up to date at all times. This is particularly useful when installing CODApods remotely to know whether they have called home or not yet. It also means that if someone else has assigned content to a screen, your interface updates to reflect that change.

Just one note on reaction times. For most things, the update should be fairly instantaneous, with the exception of CODApods going offline. Due to networks being fickle things, we don't want to react too quickly, when all that's happened is that a packet got lost somewhere, and the connection will be back up in an instant. To prevent your displays flickering on and off in that case, the server waits for about 40 seconds before declaring the screen offline; only after that timeout period, if it screen doesn't reconnect, will the server update any watching browsers.

Unfortunately, whilst we try to support most features in all browsers, this facility does not work older versions of Internet Explorer, which limit the number of connections you can have open to a server. It does work however with Internet Explorer 8, and recent versions of Firefox, Safari, and Chrome.