Post 15 made on Thursday December 3, 1998 at 01:08
Jan van Ee
Historic Forum Post
George,
You appear to confuse Take Control's bitmaps with Pronto's templates. They are very different. I played a little bit with Take Control's software and as far as I can tell the 24 bitmaps you refer to are comparable to the symbols included in the Pronto font. The Pronto font contains 48 different symbols which are all accessible using the Pronto's on screen keyboard. When you label a button, device or macro group, you can mix one or more of these symbols with any of the available alpha numeric characters. All this can be done on the Pronto (no PC required).
A Pronto template defines the panels of a single device type (if I remember correctly the Pronto holds 17 different templates, each consisting of a number of panels). Each of these panels contains a number of buttons, some large, some small, some with a label (which can be changed), some without a label because we didn't have a function for them yet. You can assign each of these buttons your own label consisting of one or more of the aforementioned 48 symbols and any of the available alpha numeric characters. Take Control's 4 x 5 grid is comparable to a single Pronto template panel.
Macro groups exist to add structure to the Pronto's user interface. We wanted a separate place for macros to make a clear distinction between device oriented controls and task oriented controls, which is what macros are. Macro groups are essentially the same as devices, but the Pronto UI distinguishes the two by putting them in separate menus, and by only allowing the action lists attached to macro group buttons to be edited on the Pronto. This is why macro group buttons appear to be very different from device buttons, where in fact they are very much the same.
Again, I cannot comment on software yet, but to give you a feel for the flexibility of the Pronto: the layouts of all panels (macro group panels, 'real' device panels, template panels and home panels) including the used bitmaps are all defined in a Pronto configuration file which can be downloaded into a Pronto.
