Hi all

We program for Crestron and occasionally RTI and have been looking for some really nice front ends for our panels. We came across Custom Code Crafters. Has anyone heard of them? Their designs are really modern and fresh and we are looking to purchase one of their bundles - Glide Prime. I was just wondering if anyone else has purchased from them. The GUIs look great, but are they worth the money?

Many thanks

C3 templates are fine, although a bit limited. If you want the best of the best, check out www.blackmancustoms.com.

Noel Blackman is one of the most talented graphical guys out there. Also, 39CentStamp's work is also fantastic (www.guijaboard.com).

Both guys are extremely user friendly, go out of their way and are super-talented. They have a great sense of what installers need in terms of graphical development and content.

Total Control Remotes

My other user name is 39CentStamp (mentioned above). Lack of free time and Crestron switching to Core3/Smart Graphics has pushed me out of the GUI business for now.

Thanks for the mention :)

Aaron from NTDesigns has some current Crestron stuff out too. http://www.ntdesignsonline.com/

+1 Fantastic stuff.

Awesome. This is good to know. Making GUIs is a total pain. I was just getting the hang of it when Smart Graphics came along.

Just looked through the site and love what they have! I'll bet a lot of people look at the price and think, 'whoa...', but if you've ever tried to create that stuff from scratch...oh hell yes...worth every penny, IMO...

And SG makes it so much easier!! I love SG.

Do people actually use the layouts? I bought it just for the graphics and then my own layouts.

I have been building full Smart Graphic templates over the past few weeks based on my Aleera templates, which are available for RTI, Leviton / Bitwise and ProControl.

All of those templates use standard PNG images in specific resolutions, whereas the Crestron versions take advantage of fully scalable 9-Slice images with icon overlays.

You can stretch and resize any button while keeping the corner radii the same, and you can also swap out or remove any icon on any button using a drop down list, or simply importing them from external folders.

Creating my own full theme and building all of the pages is a huge undertaking, but it is coming along nicely. Nobody currently has a full set of templates with all of the pages pre-made and a complete set of matching icons.

There are a couple of themes available, but you still have to build it all yourself for most of the panel resolutions.

All I have right now is a teaser screenshot of an iPad page on my website: [Link: blackmancustoms.com]

I am choosing the most popular Crestron touch panels (along with iPad and iPhone) for now, and I can add others in to the package as time goes on as a free update.

Learning how to create an compile my own themes in Studio with no instruction was probably the hardest thing (graphically) I have ever done. A short 14 hours of trial and error later, and I had my first scalable 2 state button in VtPro-e. After that, it became much easier as I understood all of the steps and group assignments needed to do basically anything.

It started to flow much faster, so I could build my entire library, one button and image at a time.

Looks great. A couple/few? years ago i sort of gave up thinking "i will just wait until everyone is using studio". That hasn't happened yet. I really need to get on it for our company UI.

Hey Mac, ..it's been a long time. Just for the record.... Studio is TERRIBLE, but the only way to create your own themes / smart graphics.

There are so many steps to import a graphic and turn it into an actual button, I took about a week off from the Crestron templates, and completely forgot how to do it correctly.

NTDesigns and Smart Graphics make it much easier.

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NTDesigns website went dark a few months ago. Haven't heard from Aaron in a long time. Left him a couple VMs.