Advent OGM-1 Owners: New feature requests?

[Brian66D]

maybe louder beeps when backing up? I can't hear them if I have the volume on higher than level 15

[Duramax.1]

posted 3 march

Just to let's you know if you come from New Brunswick Canada and you want to go with igo primo that are some missing streets number when your looking for a adress,if any update or fix came out i'll let you know.

 

No news yet did any body have a idea or update that i can try,with navetech they show me 20 roads around my place and igo primo show me only 16 and that is just around my place,i wonder in all New Brunswick and Canada if more missing,i try the update at naviextras and the update that holty gave me and didn't change nothing any help will be apreciate thanks

[Doug_Scott]

did not see any mention of this, I would like to have the o/s ported to windows mobile 7.

[skicrave]

I've had my OGM-1 installed for a couple of weeks now, so I feel like I have a pretty good idea of what it's like to use on a daily basis. Based on that, here are my recommendations for the Advent engineers. I've tried to be realistic about what can actually be done within the constraints of the hardware/software they're using, so hopefully most/all of these things could actually end up being implemented (unlike some of the other pipe dreams requested in this thread ).

 

Disclaimer: I recognize that some of the items below may be due to differences in hardware configuration from one vehicle to the next, and because all Advent navigation use a common software base, there are elements that don't make sense based on the OGM1 hardware. Perhaps it makes sense for Advent to explore branching their software builds for a specific vehicle based on that.

 

General

Improvements to UI: It's decent to begin with, but here are couple of items I would like to see resolved:

• Main Menu: The current icons on the main menu look a little too cartoony for a $1,000 piece of electronics that is trying to replace an OEM solution. Perhaps look at making it more classy, even just switching to black and white icons would help a ton.
  
• Notification Pane: The notification bar that slides down from the top of the screen when adjusting the volume, or when bluetooth is connected is a really nice effect. It would be great if that was expanded to include additional notifications. For example when navigation is active it could pop down when the next prompt is announced. Or if you're viewing the navigation screens it could show up when the song changes in the A/V Source and list the current song/artist, album, etc. I would also like to see icons for the bluetooth connection status (including battery level and signal strength if supported by the phone). Basically turn it into a true global notification area with high quality icons.
  
• Make buttons as big as possible: There are a lot of soft keys that are very small and hard to hit when driving and trying to keep your eyes on the road. As outlined below, cleaning up the UI would allow the soft keys that stay to get much bigger and easier to push.
  
• Remove redundant controls: It doesn't make sense to have a soft button for illumination taking up real-estate on the screen when there is a hard key four inches away that does the same thing. Same thing goes for the "Audio" button on the A/V source screens, the physical A/V button (tuning knob) is less than an inch away, that's a waste of screen real-estate that could be used for something more important.
  
• Remove unnecessary controls: Does anyone actually change the illumination from orange to blue often enough to necessitate having a soft key dedicated to that on the main menu? It's fine to offer that feature for matching different vehicles, but why is that not in the setup menu along with the button illumination level?
  

 

 

A/V Sources

Across all sources: Refine and unify UI as outlined throughout this post, removing redundant controls as mentioned above. Source screens should have a common layout, with an area dedicated to common controls, as well as one dedicated to controls specific to that source.

 

A2DP:

• Split A2DP Bluetooth streaming apart from the hands-free functionality. This may not be possible due to how the integration is done with the Parrot chipset, but A2DP really deserves to be it's own audio source and not "hidden" under the phone menu. That would make it possible to access the A2DP "Source" directly from the main menu, which makes a lot more sense to me than having it be a subset of the phone screen (especially since there is a hard key for the phone already).
  
• It would be really nice to have more functionality on the A2DP screen. This has been suggested multiple times, and I have to believe the Advent/Audiovox engineers are working on it, but that the current version was released just to offer the functionality, and more refinement will be coming in future updates. Hopefully that's the case.
  

 

XM:

• Steering wheel controls should advance presets, not scan channels. I know this is supposedly coming, but it's important enough that it's worth repeating. Even better would be the option to choose how the wheel controls work in the setup menu to cover both options.
  
• Display channel artwork (again this could create more unity between the iPod source and XM source).
  
• Preset buttons should be much larger, more along the lines of those used in the AM/FM sources (again, unification of the UI). Get rid of P1, P2, P3, etc. that serves no purpose and just takes up space.
  

 

iPod:

The iPod experience is pretty good overall, and it's clear they spent some time developing this screen (which makes sense as I'm sure that's what the majority of people will use their Advent for). General unification of the UI along the guidelines outlined above is all that I would see doing here.

 

 

Phone

The UI on the phone screen is absolutely abysmal; it's so bad I'm not even sure it's worth making a list of areas to focus on. I think it's pretty clear whoever was responsible for that is a software engineer and not a UI designer. Our company (we do embedded software) dealt with this same issue 15 years ago before we realized that those are two very different positions, but both are equally important. Advent/Audiovox or Parrot (whoever is responsible for developing this section) needs to hire someone to design a proper phone interface for this system.

 

That said, here are just a couple of my thoughts:

• In the current UI priority is given to being able to dial a phone number. How often do you dial a number that isn't in memory in your phone, or from a POI in the nav system? Especially when you're driving in the car? The priority should be dialing numbers from your contact list, and even then, I would hazard a guess that most of us don't dial more than five or six numbers on a regular basis. I would make that main screen have shortcuts for the handful of numbers that are dialed most often. It could also have pop-up soft keys for dialing numbers, but I'm sure most people would rarely use that, so giving it priority makes no sense.
  
• The second most important thing should be accessing your phonebook, which right now is a very depressing experience. Give us a keyboard and allow us to search our phonebook by typing in a few letters to filter results. Just showing a long list with scroll arrows the way it is right now is pretty painful (especially if you have a friend's name that starts with a Z).
  

 

I know voice control has probably eliminated a lot of the concerns with this screen, and if all you do is receive calls then it's probably fine, but why not try to have the most complete rich user experience possible?

• Speaking of voice control, there's no reason the steering wheel controls can't be harnessed to control the phone. They are not "hard-keyed" to the body control module, as installation of the OGM1 already modifies the functionality of every button on the right side of the wheel (including the voice control button).
  

 

 

Navigation

• New iGo Boot Screen: See below for more on this, but the default iGo boot screen that is included is atrocious. How about just a simple "System Starting" floating in the middle with the progress bar below that?
  
• Redesigned UI: One of the great aspects of iGo is the ability to customize it. Based on that it sure would be nice to have a skin that matches the rest of the Advent UI. I would just hire one of the talented customizers to make a skin that offers a more integrated solution.
  
• 
  Automatically Load Navigation: I understand priority booting is implemented to get audio running as soon as possible, but why do I have to wait for the Navigation to load after pressing the nav button if the truck has been running for 30 minutes? iGo should automatically be loaded after the A/V components are ready to go so that a press on the Nav or Dest button brings up the iGo disclaimer screen immediately. Pressing those buttons at system startup can show the boot screen (outlined above), which is how most OEM nav systems work.
  
• 
   
  Nav Hard Key: Ideally I think this button should take you straight to the map no matter what screen you're on when you push it (unless the navigation segment hasn't been accessed during that use, in which case it would go to the disclaimer first, and then the map screen would load).
  

 

Bug Fixes

These are the bugs I've encountered so far in my day-to-day usage:

• XM tuner is not recognized by head unit, the only solution is to reboot. I have not yet been able to determine a pattern that applies 100% of the time this happens, but there most be some static on the CAN that is messing it up.
  
• Button backlights do not turn on sometimes at night. I leave my auto lights on all the time, and when this happens cycling the lights off manually and back to auto will cause the OGM1 to detect that signal on the CAN bus and turn on backlighting. Again, there must be too much traffic, or some signal that the OGM1 is not able to interpret that is causing the interference.
  

 

 

Sorry for the long post, and I know this list may be a little ambitious (and that some items I've mentioned may be of zero interest to anyone but me), but I'm a firm believe in trying to build the best product possible, no matter how small the details are, and often times it's upgrades to problems that people didn't even recognize that make or break the user experience. Advent has a pretty solid product on their hands (certainly better than a lot of the other Windows CE based in dash units), and with a little more work to refine the whole experience and pull together the individual pieces provided by different companies I think the user experience would be very impressive.

[holty]

The real question is, are the RIGHT people from Advent reading this?

[skicrave]

Haha, great question. I sure hope so after taking that long to write my post!

[wottenad]

The real question is, are the RIGHT people from Advent reading this?

Haha, great question. I sure hope so after taking that long to write my post!

 

Nicely done! Lots of very good points made, and most are UI related, right? In the world of car audio, the user interface is where most of the development dollars should be spent IMO, but they rarely ever are (or if they are, they fail in some pretty major way in some phase of the execution). This is no exception - in some ways, it's by far the best thing out there, and in some ways, it leaves a little to be desired.

 

Has ANYONE ever done a UI that fits all users? I don't think so. IMO, the best option is to let the user decide on what they think is important and arrange the controls to suit their preferences. I'm still waiting for someone to allow us that flexibility. The iGo interface comes close in one respect - the customizable Quick Menu is a great thing, but in my 36 years in car audio, I haven't seen perfection yet, so I guess we shouldn't hold our breath that we'll get it any time soon, huh?

 

Faced with the technical challenges of even making this unit work in an environment where you have to reverse engineer EVERYTHING because GM won't volunteer CAN codes to anyone, they did a spectacular job compared to the competition. IMO, on a 1-10 scale, I think this unit ranks a solid 7.5-8 (where a 10 is for all intents unobtainable), and as you rightly point out, it could be a solid 9 - 9.5 with some finessing of the details.

 

Technically, it has a few things left to be massaged, and because some of those details can be massaged with firmware, fixing them is a whole lot more do-able on this chassis than just about any other option we have for these vehicles. And remember, there are people on the other end that care about the product - that by itself is not necessarily a rarity, but it's rare to have the kind of immediate feedback in the development curve that we have with this unit.

 

As far as the feedback getting to the right set of eyes? It's already been forwarded...

[skicrave]

I agree, they've done a remarkable job of making one product work in numerous applications, and I have to imagine for as much activity as there is on this forum (and other GM sites), that same thing is probably happening for all of the brands they support. That's a huge commitment from a resource standpoint, and I can only imagine how difficult it is to keep track of all of the different applications, and how changing one thing might alter functionality in another vehicle.

 

They definitely deserve compliments for the quality of product they've produced so far, and hopefully our feedback will help them make it that much better. I think you're absolutely right that few UIs in auto electronics are fully baked, but hopefully that's not any excuse for Advent (or any other manufacturer) to settle for less than perfect.

 

I fully recognize that every request in this thread holds just as much weight as those that I've made; from the perspective of the person that suggested it, it's just as important as the suggestions I've made. That said, I think spending dollars on improving, simplifying and streamlining the interface is never a mistake because EVERY user has exposure to the UI, so I hope that's what they focus on BEFORE they go crazy adding features that are more obscure, or only a subset of users will experience.

 

$0.02

 

At the end of the day, it's just nice to see more companies taking the Apple approach to offering free upgrades to their product that extend the life and ownership. Say what you will about Apple, but they were the first mainstream CE company to do that, and it's changed the model throughout the industry, which we all benefit from.

 

And thanks to you Walt for acting as the interface between some zealot owners and Advent, that's priceless for getting feedback to where it actually matters.

[ToeJamm]

The factory NAV in some Nissans has a feature that allows you to turn off the display screen. When you adjust the volume or change radio stations or access other features in the system the display comes back on for a few seconds or whatever time you set.. Then it goes back to an off state when there is no more activity.

 

On the OGM1 you can turn off the display but when you adjust the volume for example the screen comes back up but does not go back to an off state.

 

Personally I think the screen for the Radio is kind of bland with the gray background. To bad there is not a way to customize the radio screen.

[MikeNH]

If you use the volume knob rather than the buttons the display stays off.

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[skicrave]

Yeah, but that actually turns the system off completely. He's looking for a way to turn the screen off, but still have his A/V source playing, and just turn the screen back on momentarily when a setting is changed.

 

I would like to add a feature request that a clock be displayed when the screen is off. The only clock in the truck is on the radio, so it would be great if that was available when the screen is off.

[Bluegrasseddy]

Have a way to answer/make calls by pressing the call button on the steering wheel control.

[Velocity12]

I would like the ability to turn the chimes off completely. I have the Centerpoint system and the chimes are in the amp (or so I've been told) so the chimes play at the same time. Also, the reverse sensors make 2 different sounds on top of each other and not at the same time so it sounds really screwed up. I actually like the fact that the steering wheel controls switch through the XM stations instead of presets.

[Bluegrasseddy]

What about having a screen saver- like the splash screen. Then, when you touch the screen or press a button, it "wakes-up."

[Bill in Niantic]

I would like the ability to have USB default to "Random", rather than having to hit the button each time you start the truck. I have found that I enjoy the USB over the Nano. because the volume input appears to be louder volume control to be lower.

 

I would also like speed controlled volume, as the OEM radio had.

 

I am currently having problems with the Naviextras Toolbox seeing the microSD card, so I can't update the maps or use any of the "extras". Walt is looking into that with Igo. My audio on the maps seems to stutter a bit. I never had that problem on my Garmin.