What is new in iWall 4?

Display

• Color emojis can be displayed when running on Windows 10.
• Images from Instagram are now downloaded at 1080p that is the highest resolution available.
• A new flat_wide display theme is included for 16:9 screen format.

Moderation

• Messages can be approved or rejected remotely using the Telegram connection.
• The moderator can attach a picture to private replies and to messages posted to the display.
• Messages in the pending and moderated lists are preserved between application restarts.
• Avatar and attachment images can now be blocked when editing a message.
• New commands for approving or rejecting all pending messages.
• The notifications about pending messages now use the standard notification system of Windows 10, so you don’t need to install Growl for it to work.

Sessions

• Received messages are now stored in sessions that can be exported as HTML files including the message avatars and attachments.
• The Groups tab was replaced by the Sessions tab and a new “Send to all in this session” command in the Messages tab.

Polls

• You can specify a keyword for each voting option, and that is used to automatically generate voting instructions.

Connections

• The Twilio connection now uses a different method to get messages that can withstand the transient problems that were affecting Twilio servers.
• The emails got avatars. For each email address, iWall looks on Gravatar for an avatar picture.
• The Facebook connection was removed because with the new privacy “features” of Facebook almost nobody were allowed to send pictures to iWall using that connection. So long, and thanks for all the fish.

Just in time for the holidays, iWall 3.8 has arrived! What is new in this release? Let’s take a look:

• New projection themes
• Telegram connection
• MMS picture messages
• More theme settings

New projection themes

Bottom_line is the theme to use when you want to play videos without letting the messages take too much space on the screen. This theme is good for displaying text-oriented connections like SMS and Twitter, but may be not the best choice for displaying picture-oriented connections like Instagram or Facebook.

Grid_of_six is another theme oriented toward text messages that allows you to display six messages on the screen at the same time. It uses a smaller text size than other themes to make all that information fit on the same screen, so it is better suited for HD screens than for standard resolution projectors.

Sliding_cards is similar to the three_scrolling theme of the previous release, but with horizontal scrolling and more space for pictures. If you have been using the three_scrolling theme but wanted bigger pictures, this is the theme for you.

The projection themes from the previous release also have received some improvements:

• The animation of messages was optimized to use less CPU and to produce more predictable results when the first messages are displayed.
• The color of texts over the accent color backgrounds now automatically change to white or black to optimize legibility over the choosen accent color.
• The logo image on the just_one theme was relocated to the footer area to avoid the weird overlapping that occurs when a message have a big picture or a lot of text.
  

Telegram connection

A lot of you have been asking for Whatsapp support in iWall, but the problem is the guys at Whatsapp have no plans to let other developers connect their apps to Whatsapp, they are not friendly with developers that try it and even they punish users that use non-official apps to connect to Whatsapp. But there is an alternative that is faster, more open, more secure, more reliable and more friendly to developers… Telegram! So this release includes a new connection for iWall Max licenses that can receive texts, photos and stickers from the Telegram app running on Android, iOS or Windows Phone devices.

MMS picture messages

Another often requested feature for iWall is support for MMS picture messages. Starting with this release, the Twilio connection can receive MMS messages if the virtual number you are using is MMS-enabled. Right now only the virtual numbers from USA and Canada are MMS-enabled.

Projection theme settings

This release includes two new settings for projection themes:

• Text size allows you to change the zoom level of all texts displayed on the projection screen.
• Background color can be used to set a solid color for the projection window background instead of using a background image.

A new release of iWall is ready and comes with a completely new projection engine based on HTML5. This new engine uses the same technology that modern web pages, so any graphic designer with experience in designing web sites using HTML5 and CCS3 can use the same knowledge to create highly customized screen themes for iWall. Also new in this release:

• Profile pictures for messages received via Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
• Customizable profile picture for the moderator.
• Import and export features for screen themes using the standard ZIP file format.
• Remote projection over local networks using a web browser (only for iWall Max licenses).
• New projection themes with smooth animations and transitions.
• Better scaling of large pictures to fit the projection screen.

This release brings a new member to the iWall family. The new iWall Max is now available for the users looking for advanced features. This first release of iWall Max adds these features:

• Virtual numbers to send and receive SMS messages via Twilio. Long numbers are available in USA, UK and Canada, and short codes only in USA at this time.
• A new connection to receive pictures and descriptions from Instagram.
• Support for importing group members from CSV files to help migrate your previous SMS lists.

More advanced features are coming with the next release of iWall Max, but this release also brings something new to iWall Lite and iWall Pro:

• The Twitter connection now can show pictures sent with the official Twitter clients or trough the Twitter website.
• Improved projection layouts to help with portrait pictures that were not fitting in the screen.
• A new layout for the preferences tab that allow fast access to settings for each connection and service.

If you find any problem in this release, please report it to the help desk so it can be fixed quickly.

A new release of iWall is available for download. Major changes in this release are:

• Twitter authorization method was updated to OAuth as required by the new Twitter policies. If you are using iWall with Twitter please upgrade to this release before May 7th to avoid connection problems when Twitter shuts off its API 1.0.

• The Watched Folder feature now adds pictures to the Player playlist instead of showing them as messages.

Four years ago iWall started as a Text-to-Screen tool designed around SMS messages. At those times most people used to have feature phones and Internet on the mobile was rare. Today, smart-phones are everywhere and being connected to social networks on the mobile is becoming increasingly common.

iWall evolved through the years to accommodate these new emerging channels of mobile interaction and added new connections for Email, Twitter and Facebook. Anyway, SMS messages remained the core of the product and the new Internet based connections were added as secondary channels not intended to be used alone without the SMS connection.

The good news are that starting with iWall 3.4 the Email, Twitter and Facebook connections become first class citizens and the new licensing engine included in this release allows you to use your iWall Pro license without a 3G modem if you don’t need the SMS connection.

Besides the changes in the licensing engine, this release also includes improvements based on the user community feedback and fixes a few annoying bugs:

Connections

• Each connection now have a little handy icon in the status bar that allows you to see which connections are alive and which ones are disabled or broken.

• A bug was fixed in the Twitter connection that was causing 100% CPU usage sometimes when the connection was dropped.

Moderation

• Messages from the moderator are now processed also by the Polls, Groups and History tabs. This allows you to easily test if the voting and group subscriptions are working as expected and to have a record of all your messages.

• The Moderation tab now shows new status icons for the messages that contain requests handled by the Polls or the Groups tab that were not sent to the projection screen.

Polls

• A bug was fixed in the Poll tab that was causing the Voting method to not take effect until you edit the poll options.

Projection Engines

• The last message shown is cleared after a pause when using the Single style for the Messages layer in a layout with the Repeat slider set to zero.

• A pause between messages was added to vertical scrolling layouts to improve the readability when several messages arrive at once.

• In the Flash and FreeFrame projection engines, a bug was fixed that was causing the messages to lose their arrival order when the Repeat slider setting was not zero.

• A new button was added in the Projection section of the Preferences tab that can be used to open again the projection window without changing the projection settings or restarting the program.

Major changes in this release are:

• A new Status field is included in the history files, so you can separate published messages from rejected messages when editing the exported CSV file with your spreadsheet software.
• The old Bluetooth connection was replaced with a more generic Auto Import feature that automatically imports as messages the pictures copied to a watched folder.
• A problem with non-standard dates in received emails was fixed.
• The Flash engine now includes a workaround to avoid a bug in Resolume that affects the rendering of system fonts.
• A bug that was freezing the FLV/MP4 video playback when the play list contained a single video was fixed in the Flash engine.

A maintenance release for iWall 3.2 was published today. It fixes some small problems and updates the Twitter feature to comply with the new SSL requirement for accessing the Twitter servers. http://www.iwall.com.ar/downloads/iwall-install-3.2.exe

A new version of iWall is available for download! It includes cool new features like the Facebook connection and lots of improvements to existing features. Try it out, you will like it :) Download iWall

What is new in this release:

Connections

• Facebook connection for receiving texts and pictures posted on your Facebook wall and publish them on the projection screen.
• Support for sending out emails using SMTP.
• Unlimited length for incoming and outgoing SMS messages using concatenated messages.

Moderation

• Mark feature to highlight messages containing certain words or phrases.
• Names also can be edited now when editing a message.

Polls

• Export button for creating a CSV file with the poll results.
• Voting method option to easily change the votes format without modifying the keywords.
• Option to allow multiple votes from the same address.
• Option to enable or disable the publishing of the voting messages on the projection screen.

Groups

• Clear and Retry buttons to manage the message sending queue.
• Customizable response to STOP requests.
• Automatic selection of the best encoding for outgoing SMS messages.
• Export button to create a CSV file containing the group members data.
• Option to enable or disable the publishing of the subscription and unsubscription requests.

Layout

• Independent updates for each layer in the screen layout for faster layout editing and live changes.
• Button for restoring the standard layouts.

History

• Table view for messages history with support for sorting by any column.
• Export day button to create a CSV file with the messages in the history.

Names

• Customizable welcome message containing the default assigned alias and the instructions on how to change it.
• Button to clear all the names stored in the system.

Automatic word filter

• Reject action for messages containing filtered words.
• Names are also screened for filtered words now.

Major changes in this release are:

• New support for real-time Email-to-Screen that shows received texts and pictures just seconds after being sent.
• Improved image handling including auto-rotation based on Exif info and automatic horizontal or vertical layout switching based on the aspect ratio.
• Support for pending messages notifications using Growl (http://www.growlforwindows.com​/) when iWall is running in the background.
• Customizable prefixes for choosing screen names and for private messages.
• Support for hardware acceleration when playing H.264 videos.
• New GSM modem engine for better compatibility with more devices.

You can get it from the download page.