1.4.007 and some updates

I am officially out of ideas on interesting banner art. This is supposed to be you loving zmNinja updates.

It’s been a while since I gave an update on what’s coming up. I just released 1.4.007 that hopefully has a few useful updates for you:

(Full CHANGELOG)

Better control of montage scaling

If I am not mistaken, the zmNinja montage screen is probably the most used screen in the app and control of scaling the monitor sizes is important. This has also been one of the key pain points of zmNinja — the library I use (packery) seems to have a mind of it’s own and often lays out monitors not exactly like we’d want.

First, to help on the scaling of monitors with “+” and “-” buttons, zmNinja now support fractional scaling. Simply put, go to Developer settings, can change your montage resize factor to 0.2(%) or even lower. So far, I’ve only supported integers. Basically, the reason I did not support fractions was that I had to pre-create CSS classes for each scale and it was not possible to support infinite classes for infinite fractions. Well, I changed that code to do dynamic CSS computation and what that now means for you is when you increase or decrease monitor size in montage, you have better control.

More Real Estate

Next up, I’ve often received inputs that people want to see more on their montage, and if there was only a way to remove the footer bar, like this:

Well ok, you pixel nuts (said in a loving way, promise).

Back to developer options:

And you now have:

Booyah. You’re welcome

But back to spaces and flow

And then there is this:

frustrated person icon credit:http://clipart-library.com/clipart/frustrated-cliparts_5.htm

When you have several monitors and you twist and tweak the montage settings, you are sometimes just not able to eliminate empty spaces to the right. When you try, the monitor goes to the next row. Actually, now with fractional scaling support (see first feature above), you should be able to control this better, but how about an automatic option?

You don’t need rogain anymore. Don’t pull your hair out because of zmNinja

Now, if you tap on the “grid” button icon on the top right you will be asked how many columns you want. Let’s say you say “3”. (Oh, BTW in previous versions this button had a different icon and actually just “compacted the monitors” better. That has now moved to the grey button bar and is highlighted in yellow above)

So, back to the main story, you said “3”

Boom! Flush resizing. No white spaces. Save your scalp.

ZM Groups

Finally, I now support ZM Groups. Note that this needs ZM Master as of May 2020 (Or you could try replacing your GroupsController.php file). Adding this support required an extension to the API /groups/associations.json

If your ZM supports that API, you’ll see a folder icon like the image below and this will populate a list of ZM groups and you can switch between them.

Note: ZM Groups is different from zmNinja montage profiles. They are handled differently. Once you select one or more ZM groups, you can save that as a local montage profile (and resize/move monitors as needed).

Event Playback Skip (+-10s)

And finally, if you are using video store (mp4, not JPEG), you can now skip back and forward by 10s as well.