Somehow today (I can't for the life of me figure out how) I ended up on Barenada's excellent web site which chronicles the development of his CCF. (Incidentally, Barenada, yes... it was cooincidence that our first CCF's shared similar home panels! {smile}) One of the things he mentions is that the Device menu can function as an ad-hoc "Back" button.

Here's how:
1 From the DEVICE side of ProntoEdit, a button jumps to another panel. That panel is located in the MACRO side.

2 After using the panel on the MACRO side, tap the DEVICE menu and you return to whatever panel you jumped from in step 1.

SO... that's nifty and all, but we all know darned well that if a button isn't clearly labeled, nobody will use it. And then it occurred to me:

Eigeny Oulianov's ImgRep utility lets you EDIT the built-in user interface.

So, after organizing your CCF so that the steps above apply, you can then edit the graphic for the DEVICE menu to be a "BACK" button. Then, to moderately idiot-proof the thing, replace the MACRO menu graphic with a blank white rectangle.

Now, when you jump to the MACRO side, your BACK button appears. Use it, the button vanishes, you're back at the panel you jumped from, and there's no visible sign of a button there to tempt people to touch it.

This concept could (at the expense of great effort) be extended much farther. If ALL the jumps in your CCF were designed to be interwoven between the MACRO and DEVICE sides, you could theoretically create a robust BACK button that worked from any panel.

Of course, it would always be limited to only one jump back, but with a cleverly designed CCF, it wouldn't matter. Here's why:

Use the "Back" button icon you created to replace the DEVICE menu as a Back button elsewhere in your CCF. Any CCF that uses a "Tree structure" can already simulate a Back button to about three layers of heirarchy (check out my first grayscale CCF to see this in action). If such a CCF uses the same BACK icon, but the location on the screen is slightly different, at least the visual familiarity of the icon will guide the user in what to do.

Yep, it would be tons of work. I'm considering adding the feature to my own CCF at home, but not to my new EasyTheater CCF. I love the idea, but I don't want to force someone to alter the firmware of their Pronto just to use my CCF.

Thanks,
Dale