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CQC 1.4 Beta available

A very late beta of CQC 1.4 is available if anyone wants to play with it. By very late I mean it's basically about ready to ship so it's only a beta in name. It's really very solid and has been through a number of internal betas and within the existing user community.

The major new goodies in this release are:

Media Management - The biggest ticket item in this release is CQC's first steps into the media management world. Our driver architecture has been extended to support 'media drivers'. This allows CQC to provide browsing of media repositories and control of media renderers, and to coordinate them into a coherent media system.

Graphical Interface Features. - CQC's user interface designer/viewer system has been extensively improved in this release. Interface widgets were added to support the new media management features, to allow you to view cover art, to browse media categories and cover art. The 'action system' was extended to include the interface widgets themselves, allowing you to create very dynamic interfaces without any programming. The new toolbar widget is a very convenient way to provide access to more buttons than you have physical space for. And a new simple animation widget allows you to easily represent the active states of devices under control.

Elk M1 Support. - A new driver is available for the Elk M1 and M1 Gold automation panels. It supports both the serial and Ethernet based connections. The M1 is a very popular automation panel that is very reasonably priced.

Escient Fireball Support. - The first media repository device supported in our new media architecture is the Escient Fireball, which is a single zone, media repository and renderer for CDs and DVDs. You can browse the Escient cover art database and control it during playback.

J.River Disk Repository Support. - J.River Media Center 11's disk based media repository is now supported as a CQC media repository, so you can browse the repository via category and cover art and invoke a renderer to play selected media.

Zoom Player Support. - Zoom Player is now supported as a media renderer, and is a very powerful combination with a file-based media repository like J.River above, with CQC providing the coordination.

Undo in Interface Designer. - The user interface designer tool now supports Undo, which allows you to safely experiment or to recover from accidental changes.

Z-Wave Driver Improvements. - The Z-Wave driver was vastly improved in this release, and now is very quick and very reliable. Z-Wave automation via CQC now shows what Z-Wave is capable of.

JPEG Support. - You can now import JPEG images into CQC for use in interfaces, in addition to the already supported PNG and bitmap formats.

The web site is being reworked for the new version. It's not completed yet, and it's not fully polished, but it is here:

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There is a new 'Quick Tutorial' now, which is online instead of being in a separate Word document like the old one. It's the fastest way to evaluate CQC. Use the Learn tab, and then select the Quick Tutorial link and you can step through it. It will take you through a hands on installation and configuration of CQC. It will only be able to skim the surface in that short a time, but it will give you a good feel for what CQC is and does, what tools it provides, and so forth. We'd love to get some more feedback before we go live on the 5th.

------------------------------------- Dean Roddey Chairman/CTO, Charmed Quark Systems

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Dean Roddey
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I've got most of the docs updated now for 1.4, in the offline version of the web site (to be swapped in on the 5th when 1.4 goes live.)

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Under the Learn tab, the Quick Tutorial is now pretty nice, though it could always have more in it. And the Using CQC section is now reasonably well done, though probably plenty of typos since I just finished it. These should give you a good feel for what CQC is and how it can be applied to your automation solution.

I'd also like to just briefly announce also that we'll be having a 25% off sale starting on Labor Day (the 5th) and running till the 19th. Note that all drivers for supported devices are in the base package, so there are no per-driver charges (plugins as they might be known in other systems.) There is just a base package and a small set of optional features. The license is a site license, so you license the CQC Master Server and you can run CQC on as many other clients as you want within your home network.

So, if you've been thinking about getting into the home automation area, or you are using an existing automation product and aren't feeling too happy with it, this would be the time to make a move and take advantage of the lower prices.

------------------------------------- Dean Roddey Chairman/CTO, Charmed Quark Systems

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Dean Roddey

Heck of a deal! I'll be buying. I've been impressed with the thought put into its design.

I will also continue to also use CyberHouse because it supports the hardware I have and still work fine. With the sentimental exception of a 12+ year-old spreadsheet called Wingz, I think it's the longest running software with GUI that I use.

(I'll email you separately about the hardware we spoke about long ago. Short story is that it has been superseded and probably isn't worth your while to mess with.)

Thanks ... Marc Marc_F_Hult

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Marc F Hult

Ok, it's officially out. Here's the announcement blurb that explains all the new stuff

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------------------------------------- Dean Roddey Chairman/CTO, Charmed Quark Systems

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Dean Roddey

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