Text Crawl Alternatives

A number of people have requested a way to make RSS feed text crawl on Brightsign units. As RokuLyndon reports, the hardware is not up to the task and attempts to make it work were not successful. I understand that it might take a fair bit of processing power to smoothly scroll text without stuttering. I'm hoping there is an alternative. Currently, there are two choices for text: Static and Animated. The static option is relentlessly boring, but the animated option is almost unusable because unless you dedicate space for multiple lines of text the entire line disappears as soon as the cursor reaches the right margin. The right-most word only remains on the screen for a tiny fraction of a second. I'm thinking that there might be two alternatives to how the current animated option works. The first alternative would be nothing more than a small delay when the cursor reaches the right margin so viewers have time to read the line before it vanishes. This should not tax the video driver in any way. The other alternative would be to offer a transition effect each time the text line fills up. Much like we have transition effects for images, maybe when an RSS text line fills up it could fade out or window shade off to the left. Once the zone is empty the next line of text would animate into place. Clearly, this second option would tax the video driver more than the first option (and require more development) but it probably would not be nearly as CPU-intensive as trying to make a full CNN-like crawl. I hope these ideas can be considered. RokuLyndon likes to see consensus-building for feature requests so if you lurkers like these ideas, please speak up. Thanks. Michael Keen Director of IT Southern Vermont College