What is Escape Portal Mode?


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The Escape browser can be used as a framework for displaying custom walled-garden or portal content. In that environment, there is no need to display the typical URL entry bar and the standard browser buttons such as Home, Goto, Back, Forward and Reload. Therefore, the Escape TV reference UI can enable a special "portal mode" which removes all the UI components and allows access to some special features. You are currently viewing these "How To..." pages in the portal mode of Escape.


ENTERING PORTAL MODE

The Escape TV reference UI can be toggled into portal mode by pressing the F3 button. This hotkey can be mapped to any other key event so that, for example, the user could access portal content by pressing a certain button on their remote control.


PORTAL START PAGE

Upon entering portal mode, Escape will attempt to load the initial portal page. By default, the Escape TV reference UI will load this set of "How To..." pages that you are currently viewing. Customizing this is simple - just edit the EscapeTVRefUI.properties file, found in the \lib\ui\tvrefuiresources.jar, to set the PORTAL_PAGE property to point to your new portal content.


FEATURES OF PORTAL MODE
In portal mode, the following features are enabled to ensure a better user experience with portal content:

  1. Display after load complete -- For browsing WWW web sites where content is usually large and requires time to load, it is important to incrementally display content as it is being loaded. However, portal content is generally smaller and requires less loading time. For this reason, in the Escape TV reference UI, the default behaviour in portal mode is to wait until the portal content is completely loaded and display the entire page at once.
  2. Portal progress bar -- If your portal content has particularly large pages to load and there is a time lag between pages, the portal progress bar may be the answer. By default, the Escape TV reference UI disables the portal progress bar, but it can be enabled by editing the EscapeTVRefUI.properties file. Simply set the PORTAL_METER property to the image to use. For more info please see the "How to...Customize the Escape TV Reference UI" section.
  3. Custom JavaScript objects -- By default, portal mode exposes some extra custom JavaScript objects. For example, to exit portal mode there is a JavaScript call that can be made, as described in the "How to...Leave Escape Portal Mode" section.

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