I’ve a bunch of (very) old iPads which I’m thinking about repurposing as digital noticeboards in our church. They run old versions of iOS/iPadOS but could easily be secured to a wall and would be more visually impactful than paper signage and - ideally - could be remotely updated to highlight new events.
Has anyone done this?
I’m thinking
a) guided access to lock down the ipad
b) an app of some sort to display either a slideshow or customised web page. I’ve tried a published Google Slide, but it doesn’t work with the couple of kiosk apps I’ve tried.
Sounds like fun. I made some web apps for our kids years ago that served from our router. Add to Home Screen makes them fullscreen. Another option might be to run a Keynote slideshow or similar on a loop.
If you want to explore the apps for this, look for specialized apps and systems for “digital signage”.
There are a wide range from open source to very expensive proprietary solutions and they provide different capabilities, but they share the functionality of having the display screens (iPads, cheap Android tablets, TVs, etc.) pull their content from a server so they are easy to update remotely/centrally.
I think Status Board’s lack of success can be boiled down to a few things.
First, we had hoped to find a sweet spot between consumer and pro users, but the market for Status Board turned out to be almost entirely pro, which limits potential sales on iOS — as we’ve learned the hard way over the past couple of years, there’s not a lot of overlap right now between “pro” and “iOS”. Second, pro users are more likely to want a larger number of integrations with new services and data sources, something that’s hard to provide with limited revenue, which left the app “close but not quite” for many users. Finally, in the pro/corporate universe, we were simply on the wrong end of the overall “want a status board” budget: companies would buy a $3,000 display for our $10 app. Hmm, maybe we should’ve gone into production on LCD displays instead…
Seems like a shared album in the Photos app would be easy to update and would be perfect for this kind of use case.
One benefit of this is that screenshots or exports from Keynote or other apps can all be easily shared to a shared album. Any device set to loop-play that shared album will get the new shared photos without any manual intervention.
Actually, no, editing to say, the shared albums will auto update with new photos but in a quick test I don’t see the new photos automatically being added into a looping slideshow. So it might be necessary to restart the slideshow every so often to get new photos added in.
Heh, it was just HTML/CSS/JS served using the built-in web server on our router from a flash drive. I had a look and I still have the files from about ten years ago. They were designed for my kids to learn to tell the time and develop some independence. If you tap/click on the clock, it plays my voice. There was a clock (“when the big hand is pointing straight up it’s something o’clock…”), name of today (“It’s Thursday”) and weather (“Today the weather will be cool”) etc. I’ve put the clock one here to give you an idea: https://learningtime.glitch.me