Some upcoming CQC 1.4 teasers

Hey, just wanted to post some snaps to show off new stuff coming up in our CQC 1.4 release. This release is important because it plugs the last two really substantial holes in our feature set, e.g. media control and support for small hand held devices.

The media control stuff is a big one. It's all driver based, so we should be able to support most types of media repositories and rendering devices. We won't at first have any repository format of our own, we'll just work in terms of others. Down the line, perhaps 1.5, we'll provide our own ripping capabilities and our own repository, cover art lookup and the like. But for now, we'll support things like the Escient Fireball, J.River, MS Media Connect, Barix Exstreamer, etc...

Here are some snaps from a customer project being working on in conjunction with the 1.4 work. These interfaces aren't completed yet, but enough to show the important stuff. Keep in mind that the look and feel, as always, is arbitrary. CQC's interfaces have no look, you can design them however you want.

You can see here a lot of new stuff. The scrollable button bar at the bottom is new, and really helps with space constrained displays. You can put the most common stuff to the left and the less common to the right and scroll over to it when you need it. You can see the category browser, and under that the cover art browser. These interface widgets understand our new media driver architecture and can work with any media repository for which there's a driver. In this particular case, it's all working over an Escient Fireball.

The other big hole being plugged is the support for small, hand held devices. We are dealing with this with a new .Net based user interface viewer. It works just like the standard viewer (which is what is displaying the media interfaces in the previous examples), but it's written in CE.Net and therefore can run on things like PocketPCs, Smart Phones, and various CE.Net based tablets and touch panels.

These have a similar look to the previous examples, but that's just by chance. Mark, who is doing the .Net viewer, chose that particular look for his demo interfaces.

We have a 1.3.13 release coming up early next week, and in conjunction with that, we'll be putting out the first beta of the .Net interface viewer for folks to play around with and comment on, so that we can incorporate that feedback into the 1.4 release.

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

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Posted 5 years ago by Dean Roddey in General Home Automation

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