Videro is one of those silent-but-cool application suites you've probably never heard of, but you may see it being used every day. I met some of the Videro team at WWDC, and they were happy to demo a little of what the tools do: electronic signage and interactive kiosks. If you happen to need an animated in-store (or museum) display, fed from a server, easy to set up and deploy, complete with iPhone access to check on the servers (so they say), then Videro is an impressive tool.

To start, Videro has a composition tool that allows you to drag and drop your animations, complete with images, video and audio. In fact, Videro has extensive in-app tools for cropping, rotating and otherwise "fixing" your assets for display. But wait, there's more! This isn't just Keynote all gussied up. Videro is designed for business, and a server application makes sure mission-critical displays are functioning properly. There's solid asset management support both in the client and the server applications, making sure your displays never fire off with a dreaded "black box of nothing" where a product shot should be.

Videro mentioned an iPhone app in the video but I have been unable to locate it in the store and a search on their website revealed nothing. Still, it wouldn't be terribly difficult to provide some baseline stats via password-protected web app. We weren't able to get Wi-Fi at our location, so some features weren't visible and this might have been one of them.

Unfortunately Videro's site mentions nothing about price. In my experience that means we're talking about an expensive solution, and likely a custom one for the high-end customers. If you're looking for something simpler, don't miss Dave's excellent post about using Keynote and Dropbox to create an updating and easy presentation solution that would work in a pinch.

Yesterday I wrote about my love of the Mac mini. So dependable and unobtrusive, it's the Honda Civic of computers. In the post, I briefly described how we use Dropbox to send routinely-updated Keynote files to the mini. A few of you wrote to ask for details, so I decided to share that information here on the blog. We use two pieces of software: Dropbox and iCal.

Dropbox

Here's the setup. First, the Mac mini is connected to the projector in the Projection Room above the theater via DVI. Every day, it runs a slideshow before the orientation film. That slideshow contains sponsorship information, museum news, etc.

It's updated once a week or so by someone in the art department (we'll call her "Janie"). Janie's desk is a couple hundred yards and two buildings away from the Projection Room. The Keynote file lives in a Dropbox folder that both Janie's PC and the mini can access. Of course, we don't want Janie editing the slideshow while it's running before a room full of guests. That's where iCal comes in.

iCal

We stop showing the film at 4:00 PM and Janie arrives for the day at 9:00 AM, so we set up two repeating iCal events.

The first event launches the slideshow in the morning. Every weekday at 8:45 AM (doors open at 9:00), there's a repeating iCal event with an alarm set to open the slideshow where it lives in Dropbox. Note that the show has been set to run at launch and loop indefinitely in Keynote.

What about updating? Easy. We stop running the slideshow at 4:00 PM and Janie leaves for the day at 5:00 PM. A second repeating iCal event has an alarm that runs the following super-simple Applescript:

Tell application "Keynote"
quit
End tell

The script does just what you expect -- it kills Keynote. This runs at 4:05 PM each weekday, and frees Janie to spend 10 or 15 minutes updating the file from her PC just before she goes home. The next morning, the first iCal event re-launches the slideshow and the cycle repeats.

That's how two free pieces of software (iCal and Dropbox) combine with an inexpensive, consumer level one to create a simple and effective solution to a problem. Best of all, it doesn't require a computer science degree or even a week with a giant manual. The iCal events and script are invisible to Janie. All she knows is, "I open the folder on my PC, change the slideshow, hit Save and I'm done." Sure, we could have dumped it on a central server, set up some sort of FTP voodoo that would have given Janie a headache, etc. But why? If the simple solution works, use it.

If you try something similar, let me know how it goes. Thanks to everyone who asked about this.

I occasionally work with clients who need to have Macs set up as kiosks. That means that anyone can walk up and use the Mac to watch a video or access information, but they usually can't update anything on the Mac. Kiosks are especially useful when the user interface consists of a finger touching the screen. In my experience, touch screens are generally expensive and require that you send a Mac off to a vendor for installation.

Troll Touch now has user-installable touch screens for the 20" and 24" aluminum iMacs called SlipCOVERs. Priced at $699 (20") and $899 (24"), the SlipCOVERs come with touch screen drivers and calibration software. The video above shows a touch-enabled iMac in action -- I especially liked watching the demo dude playing Bejeweled using his finger instead of a mouse. Pull off the aluminum stand, lay that SlipCOVER iMac down on its back, and you've got a 24" iPod touch!

How many times have you found yourself out and about somewhere when 'the iTMS itch' strikes? You know, that catchy song playing over the mall speakers, or a kid's headphones at the airport blaring loud enough for you to jam along. But how are you supposed to scratch that itch if your computer and iTMS account are sitting at home?

Fortunately, 22Moo, an Australian hardware and software company, hopes to lend you a hand with the PodBuffet, an iTunes Kiosk they're developing that is powered by a Mac mini with a 15" touch-screen LCD and a "customised application for timed access to iTunes". Their press release doesn't reveal much more information, so we're assuming they're working out a method for allowing those itchin' for a fixin' to purchase music and load up their iPod on the go, without having to deal with any of that library-linking silliness. 22Moo's site isn't very forthcoming either, so here's hoping these kiosks don't join the ranks of countless other vaporware.

[via MacMinute]