Jay Ashworth
Well-Known Member
Some more ostensibly cogent thoughts (again, specific to scripted theatre (and maybe music)):
* Whoever is Master -- the Stage Manager, usually -- needs to be able to navigate their *own* script independently from sending a Next Page command to everyone else
* Next/Prev Page probably really ought to always be (implemented as) GoToPage N, from Master to Clients
* Clients need to keep and queue GoToPage N commands, even if they're paused
* Everyone's display should probably show the global current page number, even if that's also in the PDF image, and even if they're paused (possibly also the page number they're actually paused at, separately)
* Rehearsal requires more control, and more use of the control, than performances. You get out later, too.
* To make user-lookahead easier, I would always like to run all PDFs as 2-page spreads, but with the current page *always* on the left, whether even or odd; the script would appear to slide horizontally as the pages turn. Sheet music players might prefer a 2-page turn, or only seeing a single page; that's pretty well plumbed design by now, I suspect.
* What the FAA calls RAIM -- Receiver Autonomous Integrity Monitoring -- seems useful: the Master sends a packet no less often than once a second, and each client shows some color coded indication that's green if they've seen a packet in the last 2 seconds or less, yellow to maybe 4-5 seconds, or red past that point, so you know as quickly as possible that you've fallen off, and have to change pages manually (a possible and useful fallback, since each client has the entire PDF file locally).
After that, the use cases and features of interest start to get into annotation (SM can see every department's markup with toggle buttons, each department only sees their own, users can make notes both local and global) and other things that, being mostly content-oriented, dive much more deeply into the PDF file content than this navigation stuff does.
[ And in case you're wondering, yes, I've been a systems analyst/designer for 35 years or so.
]
* Whoever is Master -- the Stage Manager, usually -- needs to be able to navigate their *own* script independently from sending a Next Page command to everyone else
* Next/Prev Page probably really ought to always be (implemented as) GoToPage N, from Master to Clients
* Clients need to keep and queue GoToPage N commands, even if they're paused
* Everyone's display should probably show the global current page number, even if that's also in the PDF image, and even if they're paused (possibly also the page number they're actually paused at, separately)
* Rehearsal requires more control, and more use of the control, than performances. You get out later, too.
* To make user-lookahead easier, I would always like to run all PDFs as 2-page spreads, but with the current page *always* on the left, whether even or odd; the script would appear to slide horizontally as the pages turn. Sheet music players might prefer a 2-page turn, or only seeing a single page; that's pretty well plumbed design by now, I suspect.
* What the FAA calls RAIM -- Receiver Autonomous Integrity Monitoring -- seems useful: the Master sends a packet no less often than once a second, and each client shows some color coded indication that's green if they've seen a packet in the last 2 seconds or less, yellow to maybe 4-5 seconds, or red past that point, so you know as quickly as possible that you've fallen off, and have to change pages manually (a possible and useful fallback, since each client has the entire PDF file locally).
After that, the use cases and features of interest start to get into annotation (SM can see every department's markup with toggle buttons, each department only sees their own, users can make notes both local and global) and other things that, being mostly content-oriented, dive much more deeply into the PDF file content than this navigation stuff does.
[ And in case you're wondering, yes, I've been a systems analyst/designer for 35 years or so.
]
