Hello all,

I just wanted to let you know that the FedEx truck dropped off the 9600 and extender which I won in the design contest. Thanks to all who voted, it was fun and I learned a lot about Pronto programming in a short amount of time.

The remote itself is nothing less than spectacular, the fit and finish is superb and the screen is the best I have ever seen on a sub 8.4" touch panel. Color is absolutely accurate as well.

A special thanks goes out to Daniel for putting everything together. I will probably see you at CEDIA in September as I will be an instructors aid this year, I will be there every day of the show. Also, how's your back doing? Mine miraculously got better without any help, it used to take me 20 seconds just to stand up strait sometimes.

OK, now for the technical stuff. Once I loaded the disc into a non Vista computer and hooked up the USB to the remote, everything went smooth and perfect. I decided to load my contest entry called Aura to the remote to see what it actually looked like.

The first thing I noticed was the color depth was reduced to what appears to be 64k , which is fine except in the places I used a very slight gradient. I tend to use them a lot in my desings. It stepped them pretty heavily where you could easily see the next area that was averaged out to the nearest available color.

The odd part was that buttons that work fine on the emulator don't work at all on the remote itself, some of my buttons are simply a border with a transparent center and text. Others are completely transparent with text only. The touch screen ignores the text all together when using the stylus or my finger, on those buttons the only way I could get them to page jump was by carefully hitting the edge with the stylus.

The "System Off" button on Simplify doesnt work at all on the remote but it does in the emulator. A lot of the buttons on the Aura design have a lattice style fill which you can make out if you get close to the remote screen. I didnt realize how small that would look on a 640 by 480 screen that is only 3.7" diagonal.

There are problems with those buttons as well, it's hit or miss with the stylus because they are only about 75 percent filled with a checkerboard array of pixels. Of course the emulator worked like a charm and left the color depth as is so I had no idea these problems would come up on the actual remote.

I apologize to anybody who may have downloaded the files to use thier personal or customer remotes as you probably ran into the same problems. I will fix and submit both files so they work perfectly, it's a quick fix and I can do it in a relatively short amount of time. It appears I can add an overlay to the problem buttons and re-import them. I see now that any .png buttons need to be completely filled in with at least one percent transparency of any color to work properly. AMX uses a similar method called "active touch" which ignores the transparent areas of a graphic. The difference is you can change it to what's called a "bounding box" which now uses any area within the border of the graphic, even it's completely clear.

When I finish them and they are on the files page, I will update this post to let everyone know they are available for download. They will both get a 2.0 designation added to the file name.

Thanks again everybody.

Noel Blackman


Update: Simplify is already fixed and working perfectly. Aura will take a bit more time as there are lots of buttons to fix.

Also, there was a whole folder of extra backgrounds for Aura that was sent with my submission but didnt make it into the downloadable file, those will be added as well.

I documented this bug during the TSU9600 beta test which has yet to be resolved. While a 1% opacity is required for a given area of a button to be clickable completely transparent areas of buttons are clickable in the Simulator. They should not be. In fact, at one point completely transparent areas of buttons were clickable in the remote as well. There was also a problem at one point with the fully transparent area of panel placed over top of a button preventing access to said button in the remote and Simulator. Thankfully things got fixed on the remote end prior to release. A bit disappointed that the Simulator has yet to be fixed as well. After all, the Simulator is supposed to Simulate the behavior of the remote. Least that's my thinking anyway.

That explains it. Thanks for the info. I've decided to make all new buttons for Aura That look just like the old ones, except they are not location specific. While I'm at it, this is a great time to add anything that you guys may want to see on the template.

Thanks Lowpro.

See the below taken from the FAQ.

How to generate optimal graphics quality?
The screen of the control panel provides 32 intensity levels of red, 64 levels of green, and 32 levels of blue. This means that smooth single-hue gradients might appear blocked when displayed on the control panel. This can be avoided by using multi-hue gradients, or by using dithering filters when preparing the artwork for a control panel configuration file.