I'm playing with a T4 and checking out the browser.

Some of our toys are decent for us to mess around with, but not ready for prime time (client calls re:why is this not working) so wondered what your take is on this.

Would you just show it and say it's kind of a toy, or would you sell it as a real feature??

Appreciate feedback.

The ONLY thing I use the web interface for on the T4 is programming, and to voew Escient CD server library.

You can use it as a browser, but its slow and has slow refresh.......

This paired with an ON-Q signal extender worked great in a large house I did, but when they picked internet................it was slow like the turtles on the commercial.....

You know the Slowski's....................


CI

I would put a couple of windows with local weather conditions, maybe some traffic cams, movie times or something but that is about it. I would not sell it as a browser period, it does not support Flash and a few other things so I think a client would quickly become disappointed and regardless of the functionality of everything else.

All most verbatim of cma's post.

The Escient thing is pretty good.... but everynow and then it takes a very long time for the page to load. I get a white screen.... and eventually the page will load (usually). This happens once or twice every few days.

Anyone else notice this?

They could do a much better job of this interface imo. I use the fireball/rti method.... and it is functional... but as a web designer in my previous life, I can think of many ways that this could be better done.

Its probably not a priority for them.... but as an RTI user, its a big one for us.

I noticed on one of my theater T4s that it seemed as though the wireless internet was choking up the commands for short periods of time. i.e. I would press the volume up for the Anthem and nothing would happen, until..wait 4 seconds..... ramp to damn near full output!! I tried troubleshooting this but could not make heads nor tails of the situation. The status LED on the 433 would react as normal, but the codes sometimes would arrive late, but in their entirety (sp), including macros. I turned the wireless browser off and it has worked fine for months now.
????? "Like...W T F mate?"

would o urecommend using a t4 for escient control.

i have a job where there would only be an escient. would the t4 be the best bet or use the free standing 15" panel from escient?

The T4/RK3/K4 work great as a browser if you do the following things:

1. For the T4 get a good AP and place it as close to the device as you can. The range on this is very poor.

2. Do NOT use standard formatted web pages. These are built for must must faster processors and will kill the machine. Keep in mind this thing is running the same class of processor as a cell phone so use cell phone pages. There are tons to be found. Go to http://www.pdaportal.com. Keep in mind you will probably have to manipulate the URLs a bit to optimize them to go exactly to the page you want. http://www.noaa.gov has some text only pages that can be used to load weather. I actually have RADAR maps running on RK3s that work great but I am only pulling the image for the animated gif and it's very small.

3. We have a standard package we include with our RK3/K4/T4 configs that include local weather forecasts, news, sports and finance and it is decent for getting quick summaries of data. It fast, clean, looks great and is very impressive to show off to a customer. It really takes the system to the next level and it's a great value add.

4. Disable all the browser naviagation and only display single pages at a time with limited hyperlinks. Direct the user to specific information that is small and light weight. Do not set this thing up a generic WEB Browser.

5. Another really cool thing to do is add a page on your company web site that is formatted to a PDA size screen. With some help from you web folks you can setup a URL in the from [Link: companyname.com]. When they pull up the page you can have a button to schedule a service call or contact a sales person and have your web page send you an email. It's a nice touch and shows you are serious about customer service.

vpcodep,

I like the company web page idea. Would you mind posting/sending a link?

Thanks,

Rob

Running with the imbeded weather window on a customers T4. I have one object containing a radar image and one object contaning written local weather. Both on the same page. However, I'm seeing that one of the two windows does not go away once I access that page no matter what page I access from then on out. I have to Turn the T4 off and back on to get it to go away. Anybody have this happen? Oh and I just upgraged my Firmawre.

I run into that as well. RTI told me that they knew about this and designed it to work that way because they didn't want people using multiple object on a page. Sounds like a bug to me.

What I would recommend is a bank of buttons that just toss up different pages directly as needed.

What I did for the radar map was put a URL with a reference to the .gif file and put a fixed button on the top of the page that said "Eastern Radar" or something like that. I will try to post configs in the next day or so and update this thread.

Not the change the subject but has anyone tried the HTTP request object. It doesn't appear to be sending the TCP request. I wrote a small web server in VB to test and could never get anything to work with it. Never got an answer back on this from RTI.

Tripped over the one object for page thing a while ago too.

Ended up having a list of pages down the left side like...

Local Weather (A Text based Yahoo wap link)
US Radar (Link to an animated Gif only)
Local Radar (Zoomed in from link above)
Local Doplar (Jpeg from local weather station)

As they click each button the screen jumps to the page that has the required object.

Putting an Escient window in a T4 now. The RTI fellers told me to put 'server name here'\RTI. Whats the resolution of Escient's lil RTI web interface (not the pda one)? pixels x pixels
Just don't wanna have to change it later. I'm lazy.