Owner's Manual (Complete)

Chapter 1—What is the Home Control Assistant?
The Home Control Assistant 9
 The design pane can be organized to show objects within their folders or within their
type.
 Names in HCA are two part where the name is the folder name and the object name taken
together.
Working within the design pane
There are a number of things you can do in the design pane to help create an organization that is
best for your use.
1. You can rename a device, program, group, or schedule. Right click on the name and
select Rename from the popup menu. You can then enter the new name.
2. You can rename a folder. This is done in the same way as described above.
3. You can reorder the folders, by grabbing the folder, dragging it and dropping it on the
folder you want it to appear
after.
4. You can drag an object from one folder to another. This changes which folder it is stored
in. Each object must be stored in some folder, and can only be stored in a single folder.
That is, one object can’t appear in two different folders.
5. You can close or open a folder. To close the folder click on the small minus sign next to
it. All the objects in the folder disappear. To have them reappear just click on the small
plus sign next to it. HCA will remember which folders are open and closed when you
close and reopen your file.
6. You can select more than one device, program, or group and operate upon them all at
once. Not all operations are possible if you have more than one item selected. In general
you can control them all on, all off, suspend, resume, delete or open their properties. You
can also drag more than one object from one folder to another to change their location.
You can also control the order of the objects within a folder. To do this, right click on the
folder name in the design pane and select one of the ordering options.
The small icon next to the name in the design pane can be changed in only one way. You
must open the properties for the object and if there are any choices, select an icon from the
choices displayed. There are a limited set of choices, if any, and you can’t add you own icons
to the design pane like you can for the display pane.
Design pane information
In addition to a simple listing of your design elements by name and in folders, the design pane also
shows the state of the object in two ways.
1. If the device, group, or controller is ON or if a program is running, the background of the
icon in the design pane is colored yellow.
2. If the devices, program, group, or controller is suspended a red slash is drawn across it.
Working with the design and display panes together
HCA supports drag and drop between the design pane and the display pane. To add an icon to a
display (one that supports icons – see the Displays chapter for more information), just grab the
device, program, or group name and drag it onto the display pane and drop it. You can select more
than one object and drag them as a group onto a display.