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Original thread:
Post 2 made on Monday October 11, 2004 at 18:09
Don Stratton
Long Time Member
Joined:
Posts:
December 2002
190
On 10/09/04 23:44 ET, flipper2000 said...
I just got the trial of total remote and pretty
positive I will be buying it. Very cool. I have
a few questions (some to Don others general).

1. Do you ever plan on making an editor for the
skins and or offering more skins in the future?

I had plans for it before we ever released v1.0. Unfortunately, we simply could not justify spending development time on it. Griffin makes lots of stuff that works under Windows, but we are first and foremost a "Mac company" so we have far fewer resources for Windows programming than we do Mac programming, and those Windows programmers spend all their time working on updates to older products or writing software for products still in development. Anyone who is familiar with our current skin format knows it is non-trivial (read: hella hard) to work with, and trying to make a desktop app that can handle irregular buttons shapes while stamping them all down in the right spot relative to each other proved tricky.

I will be happy to shower any programmer who wants to make a skin editor with all the Griffin swag they want!

2. Have you considered making skins via xsl or
something instead of a single graphics file so
that you could create customized elements and
then put them together differently instead of
a single big file regardless of the change?

Not when development started in 2001. In time this kind of approach became more obvious, but it does add a TREMENDOUS level of complexity for our humble PPC programmers. I don't see this happening anytime soon.

3. Does anybody have any idea where I might find
a ccf or total remote configuration file for use
with a sony STR-DE825

Have you checked to see if any of your hardware remotes offers "universal remote" capability that may include Sony codes that would work for you? Then you could learn what you need.

4. Can ccf files be incorprated into the macros
within the standard skins (I am guessing no here)
or is there any potential of that happening in
the future?

No, and it never even occured to me. Why would this be beneficial? I find that most users of CCFs are happy to stay in CCF mode, and would like to see me quit wasting time on native mode. The people who use native mode have no use or patience for CCFs, so they encourage me to quit wasting time on CCF mode. I have never heard of a user who wanted BOTH.

5. Is there anywhere that people share their custom
skins for total remote?

As with the half-a-million great ideas I had for Total Remote before it came out, this was defacto killed by the lack of cooperation from the marketing department (who rule the web site), and the people above them in the company are far more concerned about the products that make us millions of dollars a month. Not to give away my sales figures, but Total Remote does not make a million dollars in a month. Not even CLOSE. While I would like to see more support in our organization for Total Remote, I do not in any way disagree with the decision to prioritize a million dollar product with a substantially-less-than million dollar product. It is just harsh economic reality.

Please, feel free to complain to the higher-ups at Griffin and tell them you want a place to exchange skins and device files. This should take all of a DAY to implement, but I cannot get it done. I am sure that if enough users complain about this it will finally get done.

6. Is it possible and how to have a press and
hold for a button? It gets a bit annoying to hit
volume up 10 times or more etc...

We are working on this for v3.0. The only workaround I know of is to make a macro that increments the volume several steps at a time (Volume +10, Volume -10 for example). This is far from satisfactory, and as I said we are working on something functional for v3.0.


--Don


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