Notes
Offline-first, because the mast does not care about your event
What offline-first actually requires in event control software: local writes, original times preserved, and references reconciled after sync.
Details
- Last revised
- 12/02/2026
- Reading time
- 6 min
- Cost
- Free, no email required
Most software claims to work offline and means it will not crash. In a control room that is not the same thing.
Three things that must survive a dead connection
- The write. It goes to the device first, always, and is never lost.
- The time. The entry keeps the time it was actually made, not the time it eventually synchronised.
- The reference. An entry written offline gets a provisional reference which is reconciled to the final sequential number afterwards, on screen, without anyone retyping anything.
Conflicts
Two controllers editing around each other during an outage will produce conflicts. We resolve them as amendments rather than by choosing a winner, because losing one controller's account silently is worse than showing both.
What we do not claim
Realtime dashboards need a network. A wall board on a device with no signal shows the last known state and says so. Pretending otherwise would be the dangerous version.
Read next
Or see it running
Vantra Control Room does all of this as a by-product of the shift, rather than as a document written afterwards.