[Solved] Display duration, user set

General Discussions
1

Is there any developer setting which will let the user change the display duration, other than play/pause in the HUD? I have a customer very unhappy at not being able to control this, but I don’t think I can help him.

2

iScreensaver is not really set up for that - it’s really set up more as a “author is in charge” type of environment.

However, there may be some ways to get this working using some tricks:

  • build a few variations on the screensaver? One with 5 second delays, one with 10 second delays, and another with 20 seconds? then the customer could switch based on their mood.

  • Build repeating sequences of identical images with different timings. Then, the end user can use the HUD picker to popup a full-screen window showing all the image thumbnails, and quickly navigate to the sequence speed they want.

Example: Suppose there are 20 images

  • In designer, select the 20 images as a group, and set their delay on the Behavior tab (e.g. “5 seconds”)
  • In designer, duplicate these 20 images (Edit/Duplicate). Now, for this set of 20 images, set a longer delay (e.g. 10 seconds)
  • repeat with a longer delay (e.g. 30 seconds)

Now, when the user runs the screensaver, and they have the HUD enabled, they can switch fairly easily - hit the Enter key (pops up the thumbnail chooser which shows all images. They can then use the arrow keys to navigate to the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd set of images depending on their preference regarding timing.

This is not perfect: at the end of the sequence, it will keep playing and go into the next sequence with a different timing. You could make this less of an issue if you make long sequences (e.g. take the 20 items, and duplicate them 50 times so there are 1000 items per set). The screensaver will still eventually hit the end of the sequence, but with 1000 items this will take a while (1000 items at 30 seconds per image = about 8.3 hours).

As long as the images are the same size/compression settings, iScreensaver is smart enough to not duplicate the image data. It only stores the playback sequence command data which is quite small, so the overall screensaver size remains compact.

3

Thanks. This backs up my explanation I’ve given to my customer. I’ll see if he wants to try one of your suggestions.

Best!