Don,

Can you buy a Yamaha reciever at Best Buy and expense it under your R&D budget?

Yamaha supports many discrete codes and if you can make it work, I am sure you will have defined the unique Yamaha characteristics.

-Dwayne

It may seem silly for a company to try to avoid buying a $300 receiver, but the reality is we cannot own every piece of gear that Total Remote ever has trouble with. That said, sometimes you can justify these things if there is more than one purpose served, and I think I found it. Total Remote may have a problem with a particular IR coding scheme, and from analyzing CCFs that users have sent I have discovered the Scientific Atlanta cables boxes and the Yamaha receivers use the same IR coding scheme. So, having found good cause to investigate further I think I can either buy or borrow the needed equipment.

However, just for reference, I would point out a logical fallacy and corresponding pratical reality; just because a particular manufacturer uses a particular IR coding system more than once does not mean their whole product line is compatible (Sony uses a minimum of 4 just for televisions last I checked). My analysis of SciAt cable box protocols has shown me that much; of 3 different cable boxes that all used the "same" protocol only ONE cable box worked. While the overall signal structure was the same, the exact bitpatterns and timings were not. My only hope of fixing it is that the 2 "bad" cable boxes had signals that were mistimed by about 4/10th of a millisecond, so maybe that is the fault. 4/10th of a millisecond is just about enough time for the last few pulses to conceivably be in the wrong "timeslot" to produce the right bitpattern. This would not occur with most signals I have dealt with, as they use considerably longer timing. That would explain why a Sony receiver works and a Yamaha doesn't.



Working on it.


--Don

Thanks Don,

You "imperial" enthusiasm for the pursuit of perfection and unwavering dedication to complete compatibility has convinced me to keep the TR retail package and ride out the learning curve.

-Dwayne
"The Prestigious Pronto Prontificator"

Wow! Can I put that on my business card?

Don Stratton
Senior Engineer, Promoter of Imperial Enthusiam.

It's right up there with Wile. E Coyote's "Super-genious". :)


Wow! Got that on a business card? ;)

I was almost silly enough to buy a common learning remote for my new office theater when I remembered an unused Omni Remote for my Handspring Visor Deluxe. This reminded me of theTotal Remote 1.0 demo for the PPC I'd tried some time ago.

With a new HK AVR 230, Tosh-ivo SDH400 and Delphi XM radio, I needed something more versatile and "future proof" so I investigated the latest TR demo and this forum.

After reading posts here and witnessing Don's dedication the decision to invest in TR was nothing less/more than simplicity.

I received the TR in the mail Wednesday and the basic functions work flawlessly. I look forward to customizing it over the weekend or whenever it starts to rain again (the weather is finally far too nice to be inside long).

Thanks for all the support Don. I look forward to tinkering with some custom skins and learning more about your refinements.

Hopefully, I'll also be able to provide a useful testing contribution or two. If you need any enthusiastic PPC-toting service/QA reps, I'd be obliged to assist.

If my other slick Griffin product, the PowerMate, is any indication of the coolness of Griffin, it sounds like it's a great place to work.

Thanks again! Cheers!

... and after all the fun and games, back to bussiness.

When is the next release of TotalRemote going to be released and does it contain any fixes for "my" repeat bug and RC5 bug?

Cheers, Magnus

Hi Don, In one of the previous posts it was mentioned that TR had problems with CCF files being edited after codes had been learnt by the program. There was some convoluted process to fix this that involved loading the file into prontoedit,tonto etc etc. Will this problem be addressed in the new release?

Since you may be new to these forums you won't have any idea how much your words mean to me. Total Remote and Griffin Technology has, DESERVEDLY, been raked over the coals for poor support and buggy software. Once I became aware of it (as well as to shame and humiliate a few of my co-workers in technical support and marketing) I broke my freaking back to "make it right". I took a large amount of abuse for quite a while, but it would appear my unflinching willingness to take the heat and work with the user community really paid off, because now Total Remote appears to be the odds-on favorite! Still, I clearly remember the days when people were calling me/us fraudulent criminals and scam artists, so when I see a glowing review like yours I get all squishy inside. :)



Please contact me at [email protected] and I will sign you up!


It can be... interesting. ;)


Well Magnus, I regret to inform you that we will never be able to make it work right for you. Give up now.

JUST KIDDING!!!! :)

Due to the fiscal reality that Total Remote is not a tremendous cash cow for, and due to the fact that even minor revisions tend to eat all our profit up, we are carefully budgeting the release dates. Right now we are on an approximate 90-day cycle, but the next release ought to be around 30 days early. We are GUTTING the IR protocol handler to greatly improve both reception and transmission of some IR protocols that we cannot "cleanly" support. Preliminary work (research) has been going on since just before the public release of v2.1.333 (mad shout-out to my beta testers!), and actual programming should begin on the 18th of this month, about 4 business days away. It should take at LEAST a week do develop, and quite a bit more to test (note to beta testers: get ready for late May!). In addition to the pretty damn critical IR protocol update we will be killing a few stupid errata, altering some functions to behave differently, and adding a few new tweaks.


No, we have decided we like this feature. We feel that the global obesity problem is something that everyone has to help with, and we are doing our part by making the user move around a lot more and click about a thousand times more than really necessary in an attempt at squeezing in a little exercise, cleverly disguised as a "bug".

JUST KIDDING AGAIN!!!! Man, I have had too much coffee this morning... ;)

Of course we intend to fix it. Thanks to the super-super-kind efforts of the author of Tonto we now know exactly what the problem is, and while he could easily accommodate us the CORRECT solution is for us to change our approach.

--Don

Since our marketing guy won't let me run polling software on our web site, I will ask my question here:

If Griffin were to hold a contest for Total Remote skin creation, and we offered several hundred bucks worth of Griffin products as prizes, would the user community be interested?


--Don

Of course not. Please refrain from all initiatives which increase the visibility of TR. And don't fix any features going by the name of "Bug".

JUST KIDDING!!

(I also had too much coffe this morning).

If that TR native skin, CCF or both

To be honest, I think most of the users purchasing your program are crosovers from the Pronto community who have already spent time (LOTS OF TIME) creating .ccf's or .pcf's or whatever for their Prontos. Like me, many of them are looking to capitalize on ALL of their hard work by porting the .ccf file into a FASTER, COLOR device that costs less than HALF the price of a TSU6000 or TSU7000. Personnaly I don't know why the developers for PDA remote software even bother to come up with their own "skins" and OS'. Just figure out a way to support the software files that already exist. I already know how to use the FREE Pronto/NEO editing programs and have tons of graphic files and utilites for support. I don't have the time to reinvent my "skins". Just market your device by selling a fast and painless way to "convert" or "import" the THOUSANDS of files from the THOUSANDS of users on this web site and you don't have to spend time creating a program that is works 18 ways to Sunday. Let me put it this way, IF Griffin created a software program that would convert a .ccf, .ncf, or .pcf. file to a PPC program that performed EXACTLY the same way on a PPC as it does on a Pronto (only faster and in color) then I would pay serious money for it (MORE than $29). Haven't companies learned from the Betamax versus VHS face-off, what about Microosft versus MAC? Pronto has become the defacto standard for affordable customizable touch screen remotes. Griffin, you have to decide if you want to be like Beta or VHS. Focus on supporting the pronto files and well established community that already exists and "they will beat a path" to your product. Trust me on this.

Hi Don,

I see your didication to push and develop this product. This is a good sign, but - and there is allways a but - I really doubt this software will ever evolve significantly , when you are planning only a week for coding. As I see it, there is much, much more to do than can be accomplished in such a short time.

Wilhelm


This message was edited by Wilhelm on 05/14/04 07:10.

Don did say "at LEAST a week" lets hope that he can achieve something worthwhile in this time. I guess it also depends on how many folks are working on the project for this week. How many people are in your development team Don or is this your baby?

Don't complain about even a weeks coding, it's more than we've seen from PDAWin in the last year.

Unless someone would like to tell me otherwise......

Anyhow, go for it Don!