Communication without complication

On the right-hand side of many of the CODA pages, there are 'shortcut boxes' which can be a very quick way to achieve certain common tasks. It's worth getting to know them as they can save a lot of time.

On the information page for a display, for example, you'll find the 'Source search' box.

Type in a few letters and CODA will search through the names, tags, and descriptions of your sources to find the ones that match. Simply clicking on one of the names will assign it to that display; much quicker than using the 'Edit display details' link at the bottom of the page.

There's a similar 'Add a source' box on an album page...

Mac OS X includes a wonderful feature called PDF Services, which lets you create a PDF and send it to a folder or to some other process using a button in the File > Print dialog. It's available from almost every application that can print.

So we can create a PDF Service which takes the print output from an application and creates a ZIP file full of PNG images, one per page, ready for you to upload to CODA as an album, all with just a click or two. You can quickly create a slideshow on a CODA display from whichever application you prefer; Powerpoint, Keynote, Word, Aperture... the choice is yours.

Here's how to set it up.

One easy way to create content for your CODA system is to use a presentation application such as Powerpoint, Keynote, or OpenOffice Impress. Before too long we hope to support many of these formats directly, but in the meantime you can use their 'Save as images' features.

Google Calendars are a great way to put timetable information, company appointments, meeting-room bookings etc onto a CODA screen. Here's how to do it:

Photocasts are a way of distributing images using RSS feeds. They are typically used by photo-sharing sites such as Flickr; you can subscribe to a friend's feed using CODA and you will see a selection of their most-recently-posted images which will update over time as they post new ones.