DesignStudio SDK: Beeep – A sound idea

Dear all,

As requested by Alex Cruickshank in his question How to make Design Studio play a sound I added a new SDK component called Audio to our community repository to bring some music to our dashboards.

So far it was only possible to inform dashboard users by visual notifications using the standard message box, popups or the SDK notification bar for instance. As of now you can appeal to one more human sense, which is the ear. To do so you need a simple audio file in a commonly used format like mp3 etc. You can have a look at all supported formats here.

As usual when adding a new feature to DesignStudio I searched the web for appealing open-source JS libraries solving the issue most gracefully. Howler.js, which is also used by big players like Google, NASA or Disney made the cut for me and is now hooked up with the new SDK component Audio. The library offers a big variety of options regarding playing and manipulating the source sound. So far I only exposed a minimum subset of options to get the component out there. Feel free to request enhancements if you need any or to fork our repository on GitHub.

Available Functions:

• Play a sound
• Stop Playing
• Applying volume to the sound
• Assigining exactly one sound file per Audio component and an
• Event which fires when the sound finishes playing

To be more specific on the type of component, it is a technical one. So you will not find it on the components tree. You need to add it on the outline like you do with the context menu.

Install/Update our SDK components as usual. If you are new to using SDK components find instructions on how to do this here.

Let me know what you think and what kind of music you play to your users 😉

Yours

Martin