CQC 1.4 Beta available

["Dean Roddey" <droddey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

A very late beta of CQC 1.4 is available if anyone wants to play with it. By
very late I mean it's basically about ready to ship so it's only a beta in
name. It's really very solid and has been through a number of internal betas
and within the existing user community.

The major new goodies in this release are:

Media Management - The biggest ticket item in this release is CQC's first
steps into the media management world. Our driver architecture has been
extended to support 'media drivers'. This allows CQC to provide browsing of
media repositories and control of media renderers, and to coordinate them
into a coherent media system.

Graphical Interface Features. - CQC's user interface designer/viewer system
has been extensively improved in this release. Interface widgets were added
to support the new media management features, to allow you to view cover
art, to browse media categories and cover art. The 'action system' was
extended to include the interface widgets themselves, allowing you to create
very dynamic interfaces without any programming. The new toolbar widget is a
very convenient way to provide access to more buttons than you have physical
space for. And a new simple animation widget allows you to easily represent
the active states of devices under control.

Elk M1 Support. - A new driver is available for the Elk M1 and M1 Gold
automation panels. It supports both the serial and Ethernet based
connections. The M1 is a very popular automation panel that is very
reasonably priced.

Escient Fireball Support. - The first media repository device supported in
our new media architecture is the Escient Fireball, which is a single zone,
media repository and renderer for CDs and DVDs. You can browse the Escient
cover art database and control it during playback.

J.River Disk Repository Support. - J.River Media Center 11's disk based
media repository is now supported as a CQC media repository, so you can
browse the repository via category and cover art and invoke a renderer to
play selected media.

Zoom Player Support. - Zoom Player is now supported as a media renderer, and
is a very powerful combination with a file-based media repository like
J.River above, with CQC providing the coordination.

Undo in Interface Designer. - The user interface designer tool now supports
Undo, which allows you to safely experiment or to recover from accidental
changes.

Z-Wave Driver Improvements. - The Z-Wave driver was vastly improved in this
release, and now is very quick and very reliable. Z-Wave automation via CQC
now shows what Z-Wave is capable of.

JPEG Support. - You can now import JPEG images into CQC for use in
interfaces, in addition to the already supported PNG and bitmap formats.


The web site is being reworked for the new version. It's not completed yet,
and it's not fully polished, but it is here:

http://www.charmedquark.com/Web2/WebTest/

There is a new 'Quick Tutorial' now, which is online instead of being in a
separate Word document like the old one. It's the fastest way to evaluate
CQC. Use the Learn tab, and then select the Quick Tutorial link and you can
step through it. It will take you through a hands on installation and
configuration of CQC. It will only be able to skim the surface in that short
a time, but it will give you a good feel for what CQC is and does, what
tools it provides, and so forth. We'd love to get some more feedback before
we go live on the 5th.

-------------------------------------
Dean Roddey
Chairman/CTO, Charmed Quark Systems
www.charmedquark.com