Common problems and how to solve them

1. When a Light Action Window is blacked out inside

Every Light allows the user to interact internally, in many ways, but there are times that it appears that this feature has been disabled and the user sees a screen that looks something like the following:

When clicking on a Light to turn it On immediately, it's not always noticeable that the details within the Light are not rendering properly, so this is most likely going to be apparent when a user is responding to an active Light. Because this is a local problem and is not affecting any other workstations, only one computer at a time will typically display this issue. The image below includes a view of how to fix this problem, and how the Light Action Window should appear once the problem has been corrected.

To restore the Light Action Window's function, click "Back" (if needed). Then select Menu > Shutdown > Restart. This will restart the BlueNote Communicator application. Click on a Light to make sure that the Light Action Window is working again.

2. When the BlueNote Communicator icon shows in the taskbar, but won't appear when clicked

This can be a very frustrating situation when BlueNote appears to be running, but it's nowhere to be found! Fortunately, all that has happened is that Windows has moved the software window to monitor coordinates that do not actually exist. Imagine a user that has a really tiny monitor but Windows thinks that that the screen size is twice as large as it really is! Because these coordinates don't exist on an actual monitor where the BlueNote window can be grabbed and moved manually, instead, the window will need to be moved from the Windows System Tray.

Resetting the Screen Location of a missing BlueNote window

In Windows 11, this appears as a small up-arrow in the lower right hand corner of the Windows Taskbar. Click on this to "Show Hidden Icons, look for the BlueNote Communicator icon, then click on it (or sometimes right-click) and select "Reset Screen Location."

3. When previous messages are getting lost

Conversations

Many users complain that when they click on the name of a user in Conversations that they see "New Conversation" instead of a chat history. This is because Conversations are not chat! Instead, they are organized more like live email threads. This way, there are only a limited number of Users and a limited number of Groups that are set up by the office Administrator. Instead of clicking on the name of three users and then seeing all history with those three users (or two, or twenty), a new thought, or thread begins. This is exactly how starting a new email thread works, minus the need to add a subject line, but the Conversations flow much more quickly and easily than regular email, which is possibly why it gets confused with the way that Chat is organized.

Don't reply with a New Conversation

Clicking on a User or a Group starts a new Conversation, without any previous context, which is fine when moving on to a new topic. But what if you need to read back what was sent as a message previously? Everything should still be right there, under the Messages tab, where the Search bar will help to find any previous conversation quickly.

Instead, reply back from the previous Message

To Search for a previous Conversation, tab over to Messages, click into the Search bar, and type to Search for any thread that contains the search variables. Then double-click the thread to open the reply option and press Enter or the Send button when the reply has been completed.

If there are many items in the Inbox, it also has a separate Search bar, so to keep everything in the same tab, be sure to click "Mark all Read" to move all Conversations in your Inbox to the Messages (archive) tab.

Light Notifications

If a Light is still On, click on it and then click the Comments button in the top-right to view all previous comments added to that Light from the moment it was turned On until the present.

Once a Light Notification has been turned Off, go to Menu > Daily Lights Activity to view all Light History for that day. Choose Menu > Preferences > Activity and un-check the box "Reset Lights Activity Daily" to keep more than a single day's events within that BlueNote client.