The following page was printed from RemoteCentral.com:
The Great Philips ProntoPro NG PCF Design Contest
#21: Seashells
With this file I wanted to demonstrate the usage of animations. The theme that is chosen is based on the seashore. Four types of shells are used to represent the four devices TV, VCR, DVD and Amp. They are presented right away on the home page.
All devices have their own sea shore background. The buttons on each device are small versions of the shells to get a uniform look and feel. The top bar shows the other devices for quick selection.
The animations are implemented as macros (in hidden devices) with a series of page jumps. The following animations are included: - When a shell is selected on the home page this one becomes enlarged on the background. The others move to their place in the top bar. - In a device page press the Home hardkey and the same animation is played backwards. - In a device page select another device from the top bar and this one becomes the center. This is not a separate animation. Instead it just executes the Home macro and then the device selection macro from the home page. - There is a fifth animation, but that one you have to find for yourself!
Background bitmaps are created from photographic material found on the internet and are all non-transparent for optimal display speed. The button bitmaps are created with PaintShop Pro and all contain an alpha mask to generate drop shadows on the background.
The system page contains custom color bitmaps for the battery display. This cannot be done with the (current) editor. The bitmaps in the pcf (=zip) file are replaced directly.
Speeding up the animations. On the simulator everything looked fine, but when downloaded on the device the animating speed was not acceptable. And that is the only thing that matters in the end! The following measures speeded it up to run smoothly: - Remove the delays between the page jumps. The calculation of each frame already takes up enough time! - Reduce the system page to the minimum. For every page that is drawn, first the system page is displayed, even if it is not visible due to the full screen bitmaps. So better not use full screen background bitmaps on the system page but paste them when needed on each individual page. - Replace semitransparent alpha bitmaps where possible by upper-left or nontransparent bitmaps. A big part of the speed was improved by reducing the big semitransparent Pronto icon and making it much smaller and non-transparent.
You'll need Philips' ProntoProEdit NG software package to view this file. Use the built-in "ProntoPro NG Emulator" to see exactly how an entry will look and operate on the actual remote!
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