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 Charmed Quark Systems, Ltd is proud to announce the release of Version 3.0 of their CQC product (the Charmed Quark Controller.) CQC is a comprehensive software based automation and media management product targeting the custom installation market. Being software based, CQC allows the installer to select from an enormous range of off the shelf hardware products to suit the type of installation, and it integrates seamlessly into, and fully exploits, the home network infrastructure. CQC allows the installer to create very powerful and interactive automation solutions in a purely point and click environment, no coding necessary.
Numerous improvements in the interface design system for version 3.0 allow the integrator to create far more interactive and intelligent graphical touch screen interfaces with far less effort than before. It also includes our new RIVA (Remote Interface Viewer Architecture) system, which allows third parties to implement extremely thin client software applications which can host our graphical touch screen interfaces, not limited to Windows based platforms.
For more information, visit our www.charmedquark.com, or our forum at http://www.charmedquark.com/vb_forum. A brief description of some of the new features:
Remote Viewer
The old 'Dot Net Viewer' has been replaced with a more flexible and open product called the Remote Viewer. This is a system in which the intelligence to manage graphical interfaces is hosted in the CQC servers, and the clients are very thin and light weight. The protocol is documented and should be reasonable to implement on most platforms. There are two versions of the protocol, one for more advanced clients, which is very much like an X-Windows system, in which the graphical commands are sent to the client which does the drawing. Another version, for simple devices, lets the server do all the drawing and the client just asks for snapshots of the areas of the screen that have changed.
This new viewer should allow CQC user interfaces to be deployed before long on Linux, Mac, iPhone, and other clients.
Interface System
Previously, the 'widgets', which are the graphical and interactive elements that are used to create CQC touch screen interfaces, could only be associated with device attributes (fields.) This has been changed so that most widgets that previously displayed data from fields can also be associated with variables, and most also now have 'static' versions which just maintain an internal value for whatever purpose desired. Variables have been much expanded to support data types and range limits, which allows for much more self-checking automation logic. These changes, and the various improvements too numerous to list here which came out of these changes, provide far more power in creating adaptive and dynamic interfaces.
Ability to do screen shot snaps directly within the Interface Viewer. You can re-associate widgets with a new field or variable at any time. Widgets in one overlay can reload a sibling overlay of their parent. Ability to have popups auto-timeout, or do other things on a periodic basis.
Media Related
Large and small cover art are now supported, so that you can have cover art optimized for browsing and for preview. A media type field is now part of the media database so that you can invoke appropriate players for different media types easily. Support for playlists in the File Tag media repository. Support for MyMovies as a media repository was added. You can re-associate media preview related widgets to different media repositories on the fly.
Miscellaneous
You can read/write scheduled event information via the action system now, so you can create interfaces to allow the user to modify event schedules. Support for HTML in sent e-mails. Ability to manually enter IR data when learning IR commands. Ability to paste in commands in any of the supported IR formats and have it be auto-converted to the target format. Support for 'timed' changes, where one value can be set on a device field, followed automatically by another at some number of minutes later. Ability to select service startup mode during installation.
New Devices Supported
Many new device drivers have been added, and existing ones updated. New devices include Advantage Air, Aquameta water sensors, Audio Authority, B&K CT series, DataNab, Denon 2808CI and 3808CI, Global Cache IRE and IRL, Insteon ISY, Kramer 2000, MyMovies, OnQ ALC, Rotel RSP-1059 and RSX-1057, Squeeze Center, TIVO, Total Media Theater, WinAmp, Yamaha VS-Vx700, and Zeebox D250. The latest TCP/IP protocol of the HAI Omni is now supported. The Elk driver was expanded to include support for custom values and counters. |
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