The Education Alliance Program (EAP) is now gathering considerable momentum here with quite a bit of activity from member universities acquiring product from points earned. Membership ‘down under’ now sits at 30 universities and growing as per the graph below.

There have been some developments in the US recently – with some interesting additions to the points scheme. AMX are now offering EAP points for participation in selected activities. For example attendance at a designated EAP-sponsored event will earn the university 25 EAP points. Other activities which earn points are hosting an AMX event, presenting on an AMX product or case study and being a finalist in the AMX Innovations Awards. The rationale behind this is to support and thank universities who support us. A win-win.

Also on the new EAP points list are all the new digital products like the DVX-3150 and Enova DGX. I need to manage your expectations here – these products will not be available for redemption until ninety days after the ‘General Availability’ release date. The reason is that AMX will want to fill all outstanding back-orders before handing out free product. Call it ‘commercial reality’!

We will distribute the new points list to the EAP contact person at each member institution shortly.

For the cynics out there – and I could run a PhD course in cynicism – I have yet to discover any downside to the EAP. I’m one of those people who look for little asterisks against offers in papers and magazines and then read the fine print at the bottom of the page to see what the hidden traps are. You know the sort of thing I mean – like ‘interest-free’ actually means 38%pa after 7 days! You will see asterisks on new products as I mentioned above – but we are being very up-front about that. Apart from that, I’ll throw out a challenge – if you can find any hidden traps anywhere in the Education Alliance Program, please let me know. I may even arrange a prize!

If you haven’t already joined, simply go to http://www.amxcampus.com/rewardprogram/join.aspx and complete the form. Note the program is open to all universities, not just AMX users.

In this article I’d like to explore some of the more abstract or esoteric aspects of User Interface (UI) design and in doing so, hopefully identify areas where we can improve on what we offer our end users. I’ll approach this using different lines and angles of inquiry because this is actually quite a complex topic.

First, let’s all get on the same page.

The term ‘User Interface’ is quite broad and needs a definition. I’ll define it here as the point at which the User (and I’ll use a capital U) interacts with the control system. It’s where the User (human) and control system (machine) communicate with each other. The UI takes a command from the User and responds to the User via button feedback or a message on the panel. So the role of the UI is to act as a translator between the human world and the machine world. Typically this UI will be a touchpanel or button panel, but could also be an iPad, smart phone, tablet or a browser window.

For this exercise, I’m going to cut the UI into smaller and smaller clunks of functional components to try to understand how a good UI works – and why a bad UI doesn’t. Any UI is more than just hardware. By its very nature and purpose, it involves the User - a human with a myriad of human qualities like emotion, logic and judgment.

So I’d now like to narrow this discussion down a little by slicing off most of the physical elements of the UI – the hardware and the software tools used to build what the user sees – and putting them to one side. This ‘technology’ and how it all fits together is easily understood by technologists, so needs no further expansion. We’ll come back to it if we need to.

What I want to focus on are the non-technical or abstract elements – so lets get started......

Click Here to read the whole aricle

As mentioned above most Modero touchpanels have an inbuilt PIR motion sensor. It can – and should – be used to wake the panel from sleep mode. This is how:

..I thought I’d be clever and write a simple FOR loop like..

The ‘x’ above was declared as a global variable in the DEFINE_VARIABLE section as a generic loop counter that I also used elsewhere. Well it all worked as expected with no obvious problems. I thought the program was a bit sluggish but wasn’t too alarmed. However, checking CPU usage in telnet gave some worrying results. Why was CPU usage so high?

I stumbled across TechNote 993 (URL: http://www.amx.com/techsupport/techNote.asp?id=993) which pointed out my mistake. You see when mainline runs, one of the things it does is evaluate the value of global variables. Every time mainline loops (thousands of times a second) it increments the value of X and sets the feedback to the buttons. This consumes CPU power.
The fix is simple – prevent the constant looping by only allowing the FOR loop to run at intervals. In other words change the uncontrolled looping to a controlled loop. By putting the loop in a short delay like...

..we have taken control of when it runs and the effect on CPU usage is quite amazing (see below). Of course you could slow the loop down a lot more – updating feedback every second is probably enough in my case – but the extra saving on CPU usage is minimal.

You are probably aware that AMX has announced a lot of new digital products of great relevance to the tertiary sector. These include the DVX-3150 all-in-one unit, the Enova DGX digital switcher range, ISCLan network interface boxes and Modero X-series touchpanels. These products are being released to the market at various times over the next few months, but we have adopted a deliberately cautious approach to product releases to ensure we catch any bugs or issues prior to full release.

Our strategy is a two-stage process: Limited Release (LR) followed approximately 90 days later by General Availability (GA).

Products in LR will be thoroughly tested in-house at AMX Australia by a selected number of ‘product champions’ prior to being made available for evaluations by dealers and universities. The reason for in-house testing is to allow our staff to become familiar with the products so we can answer questions from people evaluating them. And it allows us to report any issues we observe directly to the product development teams at AMX HQ.

A key point I’d like to make about LR – the number of units we have available for evaluation is quite limited and we know that demand will exceed supply for the most popular products (like DVX-3150). To be fair to all, we will be enforcing a strict time limit of 10 days for loans. To obtain a loan unit for evaluation, you will need to sign an acknowledgement that the product is not in its final production state, may be subject to firmware updates and that you will provide us with feedback on your experience with the product. And of course that you accept the 10-day time limit.

I know this all sounds a bit Draconian, but interest in and demand for these products is HUGE and we need to manage it in the fairest way possible.

Release dates and unit availability are variable and somewhat of a moving target, so if you need to evaluate a particular product, I suggest you email me (regularly!) for an update.

I get a little chuckle out of various people’s little quotes or tag lines attached to their email signatures and forum posts. Here’s a sample of some that tickled my (admittedly defective) sense of humour....

Even the mighty oak is just a nut that stood its ground.

Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity.

I’m just a startled bunny in the headlights of life.

We live in a free country. We have freedom of choice. You can choose to agree with me or you can choose to be wrong.

I know you believe you understand what you think I wrote, but I'm not sure you realize that what you just read is not what I meant.

And one of my favourites...

That’s it for this issue. Looking back through my files, I noticed this is the tenth edition of this newsletter I’ve written since joining the AMX family. If you would like a copy of past issues please drop me a line and I’ll troll through my archives.