Hi all you Pronto experts...

I am trying to get a totally transparent button to work. So far it won't...

I want to be able to tap the upper left hand corner of the home page screen to turn my room lights off via my x10 system when my wife and I are heading to bed. I don't want a graphic there to obsure the home page background.

Here is what I did...

I inserted a button and positioned it at the upper left hand corner of my home page.

I then opened the properties for the button and in the appearance tab for the unpressed and the pressed state I changed the graphic to a 60x60 transparent graphic. So far so good. The button box is defined but you can't see it except for when you click on it in PPENG.

I then assigned an action to the button to link to my x10 lights off IR command.

Again so far so good.

Now I download the PCF into my TSU7500 and the button does not work. There is no response or action what so ever.

Evidently a button has to have a visible element to be a real button in the pronto.

Is this correct?

Is there a way to get a transparent button to execute an action if pressed?

I do know that I can cut-out a square from my home page background, and then define it as a button. When placing it back onto the background in the same place it effectively appear that there is no button there when actually there is, and I know that this would work. But using a transparent button would be so much easier if it can be done.

Thanks

Chuck

Yes. The button can be 99% transparent but not 100%. Search the forum. Go back at least one year. You should find an answer to your problem.

THANKS mtgriff...

I got it to work...

I use Photoshop Elements and created a 50x50 pixel transparent square as the background.

I then created a duplicate layer and filled it with a color that closely matched the color of my home page background (as I understand this process it really makes no difference what color it is). I then set the opacity for the layer at 1% effectively making it invisible. I saved this as a transparent PNG file.

I inserted the 50x50 graphic (transparent with 1% opacity) into the gallery of PPENG.

I inserted a button onto my home page, then changed it's appearance for the pressed and unpressed graphic to my new 50x50 graphic creating a transparent button. I assigned it an action and - it works great! You cannot see it what so ever and it executes perfectly when touched.

Thanks for the insight.

I did do a search (which I should have done in the first place) to help me uncover the answer.

Chuck

I'm not a Photoshop guru. It sounds like you did what I've read here before. Glad you got it to work.

You should be able to this without any special software,
just use the "Prt Scr" button on your keyboard
and Windows Paint.


a) Open the configuration file with the pronto editor.
b) Open the Home Page.
c) Press the "Prt Scr" button on your keyboard.
d) Open Windows Paint (mspaint.exe)
e) press and hold "Ctrl" and "V" together.
f) Press and hold "Ctrl" and "A" together. (this may not be necessary since Select-All may already be active after paste)
g) Using the mouse, move the entire Home page image to the upper left-hand corner.
h) Now, Un-select all.
i) Using the mouse again, click the lower right-hand corner of the entire captured image and drag towards the upper left hand corner to crop.
j) click "File" and "Save As" "filename.bmp"
k) Go back to the Pronto editor and "Insert" "filename.bmp" into the button.
l) Select "No Transparency" since the button looks exactly the same as the background.

That's it.

Make sure to add some kind of action to it like a "beep" or a "delay"
to that new button, or it will look funny.

Chuck,

For future reference, the process for creating transparent buttons is also covered in F1 Help from the Pronto Pro Edit NG software. I can't recall if they cover Photoshop but for sure they cover Paintshop Pro.

End of Line

That is not a solution as you have turned the entire screen into a single button, which is not what was asked for.

The approach of using Print Screen is not recommended as you don't get exactly what you started with when you use Print Screen.

That is why you "crop" the entire print screen image to
a small area down to maybe 38x38 pixels.

The crop zone would only contain the upper-left corner of the
home page. In other words, you would save only a small
area of the captured image, not the whole screen.

The reason you would rather use a transparent button than one made with a screen capture is because you can move the transparent button. The print screen button would be stuck in one place. The only way to move it would be to take another screen capture and start over.

End of Line

Although your solution will work. Consider the following. Using your approach, you are setting the Top-Left corner of the image to be transparent. Now, let's say that you want to change the background color of the page where this button is. What you will see once the background color is changed are "jaggies" around the edge where the old color was "aliased" around the edges. The only acceptable "visual" solution is that when you change the page background, you must also change all images in the buttons on that page as the "jaggies" will be the old color and not the new color.

Better solution: Use an image editor (other than MSPaint) to create a rectangular white button that you then adjust the opacity of the layer to 1% (which will not be visible on the remote but will still be pressable). Export the PNG image and use "Image Transparency" instead of Top-Left corner transparency. With this button, you can put it over any image. If you want pressed/unpressed state, you must then build the actual image as another layer into your 1% opaque button.

FYI, the TSU9600 editor does not support Top-Left Corner transparency so that may be something you want to consider if you plan on moving any graphics over (although you will be sizing them up 200% in each direction).