For some shows, I have a need to send theatre-style ‘Cue Light’ ‘notifications’ to a Music Director (non-IEM-wearing) on stage to tell them they are clear to start a show or need to hold for a problem. While there’s many hardware Cue Light solutions, it would be nice to integrate that into the little 7" tablet I’m giving them with Ableset. As suggested by Leo, I’ve been using Notify OSC commands to pop up some text messages, but these grey out and pretty much obscure the rest of the Ableset display, and are of a duration that you have to determine when programming them. Especially for a ‘go for show’ notification, my MDs find it worrying that it might still be obscuring the Ableset display when they press play on the track. I’m thinking an alternative notification style that just pops up a nice thick bar or block of bright colour, in the space immediately above the Song Name text but not obscuring anything would be good to have. Ideally, it would have an OSC Command to display it (with an argument for Colour) - typically manually triggered from off-stage. There would then be a separate OSC command that would clear it - which could either be manually triggered or programmed into an OSC track as appropriate.
Hey @njrsound,
Thank you for your request!
I’ve recently released a beta version of AbleSet that supports this. You can see a screenshot of it here: AbleSet 2.8.0-beta.4 - #2 by leolabs
And here’s a link to the latest beta if you’d like to give it a try: AbleSet 2.8.0-beta.11
Let me know if this works for you and if you have any ideas for improving this. I’m looking forward to your reply!
Hi Leo, thanks for the reply. My understanding of the Popover that you suggest is that it’s a formatting thing you can set in the Setlist for a particular ‘cue’. What I’m asking for is something that would be triggered by MIDI (from the playback operator’s controller - through the Midi Mapping section of Ableset) at any time in the show, which would display a colored bar or block (like a big ‘LED’ GUI element) somewhere on the Performance View screen as seen on the on-stage Tablets. Exactly the same as if you triggered a text notification - but without hiding the rest of the Performance View display information, and able to be toggled on and off rather than a fixed display time. In Theater shows, this is typically a little box with two coloured lights on it - operated by the Stage Manager from off-stage, that needs it’s own cable.
Hey @njrsound, that’s just one of the features I mentioned in the linked post. Below that I’ve added a screenshot of the cue light feature:
You can activate these cue lights using OSC, but for now, they always have a timeout. To set a cue light, send the OSC command /notify/cue all 10000 green. This will show a green cue light on all devices for 10 seconds (10,000 ms). To clear the cue light on all devices, send the OSC command /notify/cue/clear all.
For now, if you don’t want the cue light to automatically disappear, you could set a very long timeout. I’ll add an option to disable the timeout completely in the next beta version.
Does this work for your use case? 
Hi Leo, That works fine for me thank you. Somehow I had missed that being added into the 2.8 beta. Maybe for display on smaller tablets (my normal on-stage tablets are 7" but occasionally for TV work they want something smaller to hide like a smaller phone) the Cue ‘frame’ or ‘border’ could be a bit thicker to be easily seen - maybe this could be a CSS Style thing in the future - if it isn’t already?