Following the success of the implementation of MIDI in Photon, many people have asked us for the possibility to switch from one scene to another. One solution would be to deactivate all the previous dashboard buttons automatically when the scene button is pressed.
Many of you have suggested the integration of a “Latch Mode” and it’s done!
How it works ?
The Latch mode is only available on the dashboard buttons. It doesn’t affect the faders.
To configure the Latch Mode go to the edit panel of a dashboard button. There are 3 modes available to you:
NORMAL : default mode, when this button is activated it does not modify the state of the other buttons. It can be deactivated by another SOLO button
SOLO : disable other buttons when pressed, except the LOCKED button
LOCKED : Can’t be disabled by a SOLO button
Once configured, these modes can be identified with the padlock icon (LOCKED) or the S (SOLO)
If you want to force some properties of your lights to remain constantly active then you can apply the LOCKED mode on your buttons. The SOLO button disables all other buttons except the LOCKED ones.
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As usual, we try to respond to your feature requests as best we can, so don’t hesitate to give us your feedback for this Photon 2.5.0.
Others smalls features will come in this version.
Contact me by PM or reply to this thread, I’ll give you an early access to Photon 2.5
Hi! I bought photon 2 last week and i begins to install my materials. I can testers photon 2.5. Just an question, when i create custom devices and i Share it, how can it end up in the library. Thanks
Hello Cyrille and welcome ! When you share something is for the community, there will have an approval and it will be published in the Photon global library for all users.
Thanks, it works great! Are you going to implement latch groups in the future? I think I read it somewhere in the community. Also if it works great, I cannot really use it at the moment, because I have splitted up my setup in Stage and all the surrounding lights. Others maybe use moving heads and need the groups for that.
But again, it works great! It is very great for the overview that you implemented the „index“ in the buttons!
Initial testing shows the solo feature works when the button is physically pressed (see solo’d red button at top right in linked video) but NOT when the button is triggered by MIDI (from OnSong, in my case). Any thoughts why this might be the case?
I confirm the same behavior using MIDI from Bandhelper. The buttons trigger on/off fine when pressed or by MIDI command, Latch mode works when physically pressed but has no effect when triggered by MIDI.
I think Latch mode is great, btw, but i would say what’s really helpful is to have latching groups, not one huge system. For instance, if I had a block of buttons to effect color, I would want only one active at a time. But i might have another block for different intensities or patterns for a moving light where I only want one in each group to be active. Turning off all other buttons isn’t that great, and locking certain isn’t a great solution if you want multiple groups with exclusivity.
Hey everyone,
thank you very much for your quick feedbacks, we are happy that global latch mode works great even with MIDI.
You are a lot to ask us for grouped buttons (and maybe faders).
This feature is not yet integrated because we are struggling to imagine the interface with the right user experience.
The groups latch feature suggested by @Flupsi and @gurumonkey is very good.
But the idea is to be able to group the buttons with the least amount of time wasted, as intuitively as possible. If you have ideas of Apple apps or other equivalent that could have an equivalent interaction we are interested. We need to find inspiration.
We don’t want to add features that are not user friendly to (new) users.
I thought that we can get into the geoup menu by pressing a button like the edit button (in the picture in blue). If the button is pressed, the groups appear (I did it in numbers, on the left, there is a plus button for adding new groups). If s group button is active, we can add buttons by tapping on them. For example, the button in the left up corner is selected, it has a different background colour. It could be of course a tick in the corner of a button, too, like when selecting mails. If we deactive the „group button“, the selection mode for the groups is turned of and the dashboard works normal again. (Not about latch groups: if midi could be assigned like that, it would improve my workflow to. A button, that activates midi edit mode, selecting the button and pressing the button on my midi keyboard. Then, I don‘t have to open the button menu every time. But midi works great - that is not important at the moment.)
The latch group menu is in the button settings menu as a new category. There, we can select the groups and adding new ones.
I would prefer the first idea, I think it works much more faster than in the second idea, especially if we want to create groups. Second idea has the advantage, that it could be possible to give the groups individual names. As I said, the first would be better, but I think that two is easier to code (as far as I can estimate that), cause it‘s „only adding a new category“ (okay, there is more to code, but it seems easier for me).
The icing on the cake would be that the group number is shown like the latch mode in the button right now. But that‘s really not necessary.
Hope my ideas could help! Thanks for developing and coding!
Lightkey, a software for mac only is very good at this. if icons are touching each other in the live view mode they are grouped. You definitely should check out lightkey for inspiration.
Thank you very much for your advice and ideas. We’ll keep this in mind as we look into the development of this feature. For now we prefer to release the “Global Latch” feature already, which is ready and I hope not contrary to the rules of the future “Latch group”. Currently, we prefer to deliver small, stable developments more frequently than large, risky features.
In any case, I think that for the future version of Photon we will ask you to vote for the priority feature you would like to see in the app.
Thanks for your ideas!
Clément here, co-founder of Photon
How it works ?
Does it fit your use cases?..
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