Your mention of yellow jacket and cock pit and nitrate have me thinking your looking for something like these. Hopefully they show up.. im hotlinking from deviant art so they may not display here.











I like this stuff also but after years and years of trying to fit every aspect of a crestron system on to a TPMC-8X.. there just isnt space for it. Even with the additional space and higher resolution on the iPad i wont be moving outside of the 'boring' box. Instead i will use the additional space to eliminate page flips within a given device menu like i did with DirecTV above.

GUIFX has a very cool looking template called Lucas. I love the graphics and the colors. The problem IMO is that you cant really do anything with it. I think it would work fine for a small system but once you start adding sources and subsystems and features it gets so busy that it doesnt look beautiful anymore and you totally defeat the purpose of having such a cool looking interface.

The job im at has 16 sources so far and they still haven't decided on what media server to use. If they do 4 zones we end up with 20 AV icons. Even on the 15&17 panel there just isnt space to do anything other than a rectangular icon.

2 Major reasons why you dont see this sort of cool/3D design yet.

#1. Control system touchpanel displays suck. Crestron recently replaced between 10-15 of their models so its not as bad as it was. The TPMC-8X was ok but you didnt get decent graphics until you moved up to the 15 & 17" panels. Anything before the TPMC-8X didnt support transparent PNG and had fewer colors. Here is some touchpanel info.

ST-1550C 8 bit 256 colors
ST-1700C - TPS-2000 16 bit 64000 colors
TPMC-8X 16 bit 64000 colors
TPS-12 18 bit 256,000 colors
TPS-6X is 18 bit 256,000 colors
TPMC-17 24 bit 16,700,000 colors
V15 panel 24 bit 16,700,000 colors
iPad....not sure but it looks like its at least 16,700,000 colors


Before the iPad you were severely limited in terms of what was possible unless you were using the large wired touchpanels. Since the iPad will replace the TPMC-8X and will eventually wind up in-wall.. we are not limited anymore. Existing templates will look crisp and new templates will take advantage of the higher resolution panel.

Designers have worked within the narrow little box that control system panels forced them into. Every panel design you look at now is all about rectangles and efficiency.

#2. Space and flexibility. My templates have a status bar at the top, navigation menu at the bottom and the full width of the touch panel to display a device or source menu page. This layout allows me to do just about anything i need to. The company i work for has a vertical navigation menu on the left. This caused constant issues with trying to "skin" ARQ or KSCAPE so that it would fit. I always had plenty of height but never enough width. My goal is to get everything on one page. The only exception i make is with channel favorites. I will usually put those on a second page for DirecTV or Cable.