Testing

After downloading the latest version of the software and playing around for awhile with the different tools, Art.Lebedev brought out a new version and made several major improvements so obviously development is still continuing.

The Configurator is nice and simple featuring drag and drop functionality onto the separate screens. There are several plugins which allow you to display different information or do different tasks when clicked. If you find that the plugins supplied aren’t to your taste, you can easily import your own but you’ll need to learn a little C++ first.

The colour of the buttons are a little green biased and no matter what colour warmth you set in the Confugurator, the green tinge will stay. It’s a bit of a shame but new technology usually comes with downsides.

The screens refresh rate is quite noticeable and you can see the flicker if you move the unit or wave it around like a maniac. When using the media plugin, or the volume control, you can see how restrictive the refresh is. The unit feels a little sluggish especially when changing volume. The pictures of the unit have banding on the displays because of this refresh rate.

The unit would sporadically crash, and clicking the buttons fast would normally result in another crash. When the Mini three crashes, you have to close down the Configurator and unplug the Optimus and then doing the reverse. It’s a little annoying and probably insanely frustrating if you have modded this unit into your case as it would be plugged directly into the motherboard headers so unplugging wouldn’t be an easy process.

Since the update, you can use the Optimus as a Powerpoint remote allowing you to go to the Next, Previous and Next Nearest slide. The Mini three can now be your office presentation helper too.

A nice feature of the Configuration software are the different modes that it can be used in. For example, you have a global set which is shown when no other conditions are met (e.g when your not using an specific programs) then you have an idle mode which is displayed if you don’t use your computer for a while (essentially a screensaver). Then you can have a different set for an opened application. For example, the Configurator software comes with a Word set which shows New, Save and Open options when Word is open.

It’s a nice little feature which allows you to have a button set for any program that has your focus. However, I mainly used this unit to change songs and often opening a program would put a new set of buttons on and the next song button would become Save or New layer (in Photoshop). This got a little annoying after a while, but this feature is easily turned off, or customised to your personal environment.

You can set any button to do a certain shortcut. For example, I set up a set for Photoshop with each button doing an often repeated task such as New Layer, Repeat filter and Save. You can either just have the text of the shortcut (e.g. Ctrl+S) or your own text (e.g. Save). This text can then be combined with a picture of your choice.

To further increase the number of things that can be shown on the display, you can set up display sets when you press Ctrl, Shift, Alt, Alt+Shift and Ctrl+Shift giving you 18 different buttons for any particular mode (global, idle, in a program).

Incidentally, the font that the Optimus Mini three uses is remarkably close to a Mac type font. This goes to show that this is mainly focuses at Mac users. I.e. people who never play games and enjoy being Jehovah’s Witnesses for their choice of computer (/Wink).

Speaking of gaming, you can set the Optimus up to do any short cut, so its more than possible to use it to, say, fire all 10 Battlefield 2142 fighter missiles in one go. Of course you can set it to do anything you like, with an image of choice.

The media plugin play/pause buttons will show song information with both Winamp and Media Player out of the box with no program specific plugin required. The song name will slowly scroll across this button or stay stationary if the name isn’t too long.

Before the recent update, the Configurator would use ~10% processing power on a Celeron P4 2.80Ghz. Now however, it normally idles @ ~1% and shoots up a couple of percents when changing song or clicking a shortcut. It now only uses ~8mb of RAM which is reasonable considering what it’s doing. The Art.Lebedev team have obviously listened to their customers regarding the CPU usage.

After a weeks usage, the buttons soon were a little scratched (look at your mobile phone screen and you’ll see what I mean) and they were nice and smudged with all the finger grease. A little window cleaner and they were as good as new.