CQC, being Windows based, has a very powerful Windows based touch screen client, the Interface Viewer. It animates touch screens created in our Interface Editor tool. In order to support non-Windows clients we created our RIVA architecture. This works sort of like the X-Windows system in Unix or RDP in Windows, in that the actual IV is running on the CQC server still, but the drawing commands are vectored to the client, and the client sends the server user input information.
Previously two third parties had created RIVA clients for iOS and Android. But, as generally in the case, in the fullness of time, they drifted away and we were left without a good non-Windows solution.
So we have created a new WebRIVA client that runs in a browser, and therefore should be portable, at least to modern browsers. As with all such remoting client schemes, there are some shortcomings, similar to those in RDP. It's very difficult to support things like gestured driven smooth scrolling, so RIVA clients currently don't do that. But, otherwise they allow you to access your CQC user interfaces on non-Windows platforms quite nicely.
A big advantage now is that we control both sides of the equation, so improvements can be made quickly, whereas it was very difficult to make any significant changes before when it required the coordination of third parties. So even just in this first implementation we've made some nice improvements, and more can come in the future.
Here is a little quick and dirty first demo of the new client:
https://youtu.be/0eCT0sLGX74
The interfaces you see in the demo are nothing special. They are just the ones that we can auto-generate for you. But they were also created using our interface designer tool. The auto-generation system just reads those in, updates them based on room configuration you provide, and spits them back up with the updated information. You can create just as nice looking interfaces yourself for your own custom requirements.
