As we can see in the trend of touch-screen phones there is usually a need to tell the user that he actually pressed the button in another way than doing it with just different graphics. The phones usually vibrate in the pronto's we can use sounds.

At first I used the beep sound, but I found out that it can be really annoying for the clients when in the middle of a meeting someone does something with the remote. Even at the lowest volume setting it can be annoying. Then I decided to try the feature to add sounds to the buttons, just the standard Touch mono sound that comes with PEP2.

You add the sound to the beginning of an action list and when the button is touched it is played (although with a little delay). One of the limitations I found for this is that the sound is part of the actions. This means if for some reason you need to delay the actions, the sound will play with a delay which is not good.

Playing with this stuff today I noticed something else. As some of you know, sometimes when you press a button nothing happens, sure the animation is there, and so is the beep, but the actions don't get executed (seems it's a bug). In this case If you use the beep, the user thinks all is fine, because he heard the beep as he pressed the button, but he is wrong, nothing really happened. On the other hand if you use the wav sounds it doesn't play and the user knows there is something wrong, and then proceeds to re-press the button.

I wonder if any of you had problems with these things in a project.

IMO the press sounds should work in another way:
- press sound is played when something actually happens (if it's a miss-press it doesn't)
- press sounds should always play at the time of the press (with regards to the previous rule), and not when the actions are executed
- press sounds should not be an action, but like the beep a button sound

Please comment.

Sounds are annoying to me in general. If the extender command fails, the actionlist is aborted anyway.

I guess the only way to guarantee that an action was confirmed is to add a wav file to the end of your actionlist which says something like. "Thank you master. I have completed the task of executing your commands."

For sure you can submit product feature request to the email address on ProntoTeam account as well.

I made this one macro for adding chapters to a movie on my DVD recorder / DVR . At the end it would beep once. Then I added another macro that would reuse the first macro about fifteen times. It would beep three times quickly to let me when it was done.The time for it to finish is about ten minutes. All the beeps alert me that it is still running the macro. The first time I made the macro without the beeps . If I accidentally moved the remote , I would have to wait for the macro to stop or reboot to stop the macro. The beeps were a big help as a fix. But using that macro three or four times with no screen would use up my battery real quick.

In general I use the default button volume at 25% and the general volume at 75% as seen on my settings page for the 9400. Nothing seems to go wrong and the timing seems right for button sounds. On the 9400 you don't have a choice of what sounds to use.

I agree with you lyndell, sounds are usually a nightmare, especially when people use sound tracks as the one you mentioned. But I'm talking about button sounds, the clicks the beeps and other staff that help enhance the UI.

I will write to the pronto team.

In general I like quiet clicks to acknowledge keypresses, but on a Pronto they are not welcome.

I want the click to coincide exactly with the press and this is difficult to guarantee. Further, I want the click to confirm that the action will eventually be executed. I don't mind that execution may be delayed, but I expect that a queued command will eventually be completed.

Significant others may not appreciate clicking and crying Prontos late at night.