Tuesday, April 11, 2017

Website Update

Notice of upcoming change: The kiosk movies currently offered on the SDO website are being discontinued. We are launching a replacement called SDO Dashboard. Support for the kiosk product will end on April 30, 2017. The kiosk movies will be available until May 31, 2017. We are encouraging people to use our new product.

The dashboard product is located at: https://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/data/dashboard/ and is available for testing and use. The new product is similar in that is displays a looping movie of the most recent browse images. However, we are utilizing html5 video technology instead of the javascript slideshow used in the kiosks. This allows you to build your display in a drag-and-drop environment rather than a static html reference.

We are moving to html5 to satisfy website security requirements and to provide a better product. Some users have reported a noticeable flicker with the current kiosk javascript slideshow. Although we were unable to reproduce this flaw, wet concluded that it could be caused by several reasons including browser idiosyncrasies. The javascript solution also had a small memory leak. This necessitated a periodic browser refresh. Our new solution solves these issues and we are excited for the transition.