Garmin Mobile PC GMPC - CF3 / CF2 Plugin - Rebellium 3 OSK & Skin w/ Voice Prompts

[tempgp]

I was out of soace for space bar =)
I will try to fit it in somwehere

[f1racr]

So this version will allow you to switch back to CF and leave GMPC running in the background OK ? Also is there any way for you to add a button to close GMPC that's a bit bigger than the little Windows X in the tope Right. It's workable, but is a bit of a pain to close when using a smaller screen.

Also interested to know how you're going to implement the volume stuff we discussed in the other thread, but regardless of all of that, fantastic work, it's what I had hoped was possible from day 1 when I first posted asking about it.

Also one more thing........ any way you can write that bit of script you mentioned to get rid of the message that comes up when you start GMPC....... it's annoying.

[tempgp]

a) I can add button for permament closing of GMPC but I dont get why you need it?

b)volume... when GMPC send audio play request to windows i can intecept that and use that a trugering event for anything... ex bring GMPC window up and reduce volumes of CF (well CF api seams not to be good friend w. me so i hope Enforcer would write a transponder plugin that will allow external programs to talk to CF)

c) well yes i can write that script.. i will see if i have some time today

[Wulfsige]

Hi tempgp, a bit of feedback from my end. Most things work great, i did notice that my controls at the bottom (i.e. play, pause, forward, reverse buttons) and the info bar at the top take a while to show up after GMPC has loaded. Also when i swop from centrafuse to GMPC I get the garmin map logo on the screen for a few seconds before it changes to GMPC. Otherwise an excellent app so far.

Would also be great to have a full screen version (i.e. only have controls at the bottom showing and no info bar at the top), so garmin could show more of the map. Also if we could get this app to run at 1024x768 would be excellent.

[Carz]

tempgp,

I understand this is still beta stage but I wonder if the toggle speed between showing/hiding GMPC and the OSK screen is normal? I'm not at my car pc right now but it seems the same on my notebook i.e. about 3 secs. Do you think the speed can be improved down the road? Not a biggie for me as I'm already very happy and appreciative (same too to the garmin helper developer) just to be able to improve my GMPC usage experience within CF as I depend very much on it.

Regarding the keyboard. I think the space could be rearranged a little i.e. not neccessary to have space between the alphabet and numbers keys. There are still spaces at both left and right side so you may be able to increase this space in between to squeeze in the del key (maybe named as BkS short form for backspace as that is the actual function) at the top row, followed by enter key (not really necessary as sometimes the focus in on Garmin back button causing some confusion when enter key is hit and also cos garmin has buttons for touch/click input to confirm selection just like enter key), and followed by space key. If these keys are kept as a square (of course depending on how many additional keys you include, more important keys may occupy 2 squares if less additional keys are introduced), you might even squeeze in a caps lock and shift key (for pple who's like me who likes to store data in mixed caps and small letters e.g. in favourites). Caps lock and shift key may share a button. Tab and hold to caps lock, tab and hold again to unlock and tab only to act as shift.

One thing I would really love to see is the text input field is autofocused. Meaning everything I hit the keyboard keys, the focus is correctly at the text input field cos sometimes I end up hitting a few keys before I realised the keystrokes are not generated cos the focus is lost and not in the text input field .

The other function that would really help operation while driving is sound feedback when hitting each buttons so that we know we have generated the keystrokes. This will allows us to focus more on the road.

The above are of course just my humble suggestions you may include at your own leisure time as I know your hands might be full at the moment. These suggestion are of couse w/o any understanding of limitations and difficulities that only a programmer (I'm not) may know.

Btw, I'm using Zero Weight Keyboard outside CF. It is also using .Net 3.5. Not sure if it will give you some ideas or help you in anyway.

[Carz]

I was writing my above post before Wulfsige's. So it seems it is not because my systems are slow but not really a problem in exchange for better GMPC experience within CF.

Regarding full screen. Yes it will be great if it included as a configurable option as some might prefer to have the bars on top while other might not.

I need to clarify if full-screen needs to be enable (different issue with above full-screen) when adding the skins & osk as an external appz. For some reason but I can't duplicate consistently, GMPC shifted all the way to the top covering the top CF bar but remaining at the same size (meaning it is not sitting inbetween top and bottom CF bars). It seems to happen if I were to go to desktop and return later, perhaps clicked on the wrong appz instead of CF when returing. I'm running at 800x600. Again, not really a problem as I can't duplicate it consistenly and it seems to happen less frequently is I were to enable full-screen.

[tempgp]

here is rendom preply:
a) transaction speed: it is limited to your comp spesificly - on my dev machine im deting 500ms transaction time.. in car its about 300ms on 2.6Ghz Core2Duo CPU... i cantrealy optimize it due to structure of GMPC itself. If i find beter way to speed up skin i will do that.

b) splash screen = you see it when we are doing transactions, it hides some glithes that GMPC has when i reseting its coordinates... I can add opion to disable splash screen if you wish

c) will probably do it as then my skin will be useful to Ride Runner users

d) Auto Focus - is alredy implemented, if you lost focus on text field some how then you probably cliked somwhere on the area that i dodnt cover in my app (hmmm) shouldnt be happening if you are running CF in full screen mode

e) GMPC position shift = only possible if you drag GMPC away... cant prevent dragin area at this time...

f) extra keys - will try to work on that.. i dont want to move buttons to the sides... touch screens monitrs seams to have troubles in side areas

g)1024x768 resolution support = i need to re-draw skin images.. not to exited to do that so you may have to wait online :P (unfortunatly dynamic skin adjustment not gonna work)

h) wow i just proved the phychological theory that human short memory can only keep track of 6 things at the same time, so I forgot all the remaining comments so I will try to do some improvements

[tempgp]

new version is posted on front page.
new features:

1. Hide Legal Warning
2. Hide / Show splash screen

Both options are configyrable by editing "config.ini" file

i didnt do testing so let me know if that works

[d0tech]

Awesome! Will test today!

[Carz]

Just tested v1.3.0.0 on my notebook.

Happy to report Hide Legal Warning & Hide / Show splash screen is working with either True or False value.

Also, without the splash screen, it seems to be half a second faster switching in and out of GMPC by mental counting. Maybe its just in my mind.

Just to clarify, am I right I don't have to run the setup.exe again if I had ran it previously for the older version and I only need to point it to the directory containing the new files (or overwrite older version files with new files if using fixed directory)?