Platform

Features and Benefits

Multiple presentation options

Mercury Desktop’s core allows for a product to present its content in a variety of ways, such as: screensavers, windows, sidebars, toolbars, notifications, and more.

Cross platform

While Windows will continue to dominate the business world, other platforms such as Mac OS X are becoming increasingly more common in home environments, where many consumers want to run these applications, as well as creative agencies, whose designers are critical to creating the sponsorship and display ad artwork needed to monetize the products. In addition, Linux support will also allow for future expansion into areas such as digital cable set-top boxes.

Semi-connected

Mercury Desktop is designed to function whether or not your computer is connected to the internet. New content obviously can only be downloaded when the user is connected, but the product isn’t disabled or unusable when users are not connected. Because of the sophisticated caching system, the product works and looks essentially the same regardless of connectivity and simply waits until the next connection to download new content. Publishing criteria such as expiration dates for content also work in a disconnected state. More than being user-friendly to disconnected users, future applications could allow content creators the flexibility of off-line content, such as movie trailers or book excerpts, catering to the mobile user.

Partial downloads

Most content downloads silently in the background, which makes for a friendlier and more non-disruptive user experience. However, larger downloads such as video clips may get interrupted with the close of the laptop or a disconnected network device. Instead of having to start over, Mercury Desktop is smart enough to resume downloading the content where it left off. Additionally, if a new version of the video is published while the client is in the middle of downloading a previous version, Mercury Desktop is smart enough to abort the previous download and begin the new one to minimize unnecessary downloading, which reduces application serving costs and desktop client resources.

Completely dynamic UI

The actual graphical pieces of the user interface are treated as any other type of content, making it very easy to push out new designs and new features to the UI using the same dependable content infrastructure the rest of the product content uses.

Intelligent caching

Storing content on the user’s desktop can be complicated. In addition to being respectful of how much hard drive space to use, the application must also take into account content publishing considerations, such as how long the content should be available to the user interface, and whether or not to keep the content on disk after it is no longer needed so it can be used in the future without having to be re-downloaded. These situations can all be managed with configurable options supported in Mercury Desktop’s caching system.

Content encryption

Mercury Desktop (and Mercury Flow) can optionally encrypt content to protect it from unauthorized duplication or reuse, allowing copyrighted content to be displayed in a secure manner and allowing other intellectual property to be protected against misuse.

Standard networking approach

Where possible, Mercury Desktop utilizes standard protocols for speaking with Mercury Flow’s servers. This allows standard networking equipment like firewalls to run our desktop applications without special firewall rules, allowing for a broader audience and happier IT departments.

Proxy server support

In an effort to allow Mercury Desktop to run in as many corporate environments as possible, it supports many proxy servers including authenticating proxy servers. While there are exceptions, Mercury Desktop works within existing proxy protocols in most common environments.

Self-updating

In addition to being able to update content as well as visual elements, the core engine can actually update itself just as easily. As we produce new versions of the engine with new features or other optimizations, we can silently push them out to users so they get the benefit of the new version without the hassle of re-downloading the entire application.

Comprehensive usage tracking

The Mercury Desktop Client excels at collecting and reporting usage data. While by default it collects common usage statistics such as launches, clicks, and run duration, individual products can also track custom usage that is unique to that product. Individual features and sections can be tracked so as best to learn which parts of the application are popular and which ones are not. And using the aforementioned semi-connected technology, the tracking systems work even when offline. The collected data simply queues up and then gets sent to the server later upon re-connect. All of this data gets loaded into our Data Warehouse for full analysis.

Skinning engine

When building a product for a league, like the NFL, NHL or NCAA, the feature set from team to team is frequently the same, but the “skin” (the logos, fonts, colors, etc...) will be unique. Knowing this was a common need in the sports world, we designed our architecture to support easy skinning of a product. Once the initial product is developed, rolling out new teams is as easy as rounding up the official logos, fonts and colors, and creating the skin files. This is critical to both productivity and costs.

Localization engine

The NHL will be the first of our clients to utilize this new feature that makes multilingual support possible.