Maavis

Facilitator shortcut keys

• Alt+Q quits maavis

How to add or change the content that appears on screens

In general Maavis screens are arranged into these 3 levels,

• Optional login if -login option is used
• Home – top level screen for choosing an activity
• Choosers – alow selection of an item or ‘album’ of items
• Players
  Each button on the home screen leads to a chooser [TODO diagram]
  The buttons on the choosers perform an action such as making a call or invoking media players with the selected media set (album).

The contents shown in each of the choosers is automatically created from the contents of folders under “My Documents” (or Documents in Vista). A sample is provided with Maavis and and can be found in My Documents → Maavis Media → Users. In each user folder there you will see a folder for each chooser. Hint: There is a shortcut to this folder called Maavis Media in the Mavis item in the Start Menu and optionally installed on your desktop. Folders may contain one or more of the following types of media – they must be the same in each folder

• Music – albums held in sub folders which contain collections of music
• Photos – albums held in sub folders which contain collections of photos
• Videos – videos
• Contacts – skype contacts who can be called
• Programs – programs to execute

The type of content is selected by the presence of an file with one of the following name files names _choosmusic, _choosephoto, _choosevideo, _choosecall, _chooseprogram. The name of the folder becomes the name of the button on the Maavis home page and each folder may contain an image file called Thumbnail which appears on the button.

Items that may appear in a folder

• Folders for choosers (in home folder) or albums (in choosers). Folder name becomes the label on the button for chooser or folder.
• An optional image file Thumbnail that becomes the image on the button for the folder (chooser or album). Most image formats can be used.
• Image files whose name is the label that appear on the button along with the image itself
• Media files used in a player. Most formats except Real are supported.
• An optional text file _items.ini which specifies the items in the folder. Each line is of the form * item = value * where value is optional. Item is the name of the item and is shown on the Maavis button label. If an image file of the same name as the item exists it is displayed on the button with the label. The order of the items on the Maavis screen follows the order of the lines in the file. Value depends on the folder the file appears in and may be a skype id, a program filename, a website address or the web address of a media item.
• A plain text file called links.txt that contains a list of online media, one per line (e.g see Photos → Events)

Videos, Music, Photos

These folders contain subfolders each of which is an album of media content. The audio player and video player play each of the media files in turn in a continuous loop. The audio player allows the user to select individual files to play and uses the media filenames for the button labels.

Contacts

This contain a file called items.text folder contains images that appear on contact buttons and the name of each file must be formated as

Info

This is not as easy to change as the above media in this release. Changes can be made but require some care and editing of a file.
You can use Windows notepad to edit the file

C:\ Program Files → Maavis → extension → chrome → content → maavis → chooseinfo.xul

and change the pairs of lines that look like

class=‘choice’ label=“Health information” accesskey=‘f’ action=“showPage|browser.xul,http://www.nhsdirect.nhs.uk/” />

being careful to only change the parts in bold to specify the text shown on the button and the website address. Hint: You should save the original file before making changes.

We realise this is less than idea and a simple media editor is a high priority for the next release of Maavis

How to change the start sound

If the Maavis Media folder contains an audio file called startsound it will be played when Maavis starts up (unless the -quickstart option is specified in the shortcut).

More advanced options

The TechnicalFacilitatorGuide provides details of more options such as user login and other desktop icon options.