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Customization: Design & Theme

PulseCAD lets each community theme every terminal independently. Open the editor from Admin → Design & Theme. It is built like a small website builder: pick a terminal, edit its colors, and watch a live copy of the real page repaint as you work.

Themes are per terminal and per mode

There is no single global palette. Each terminal (Dispatch, LEO, Fire, Tow, Civilian, Court, Records) has its own colors, and within a terminal you edit Light and Dark palettes separately. What you change is scoped to the surface you are on.

The editor layout

The page is a split layout: a color editor on one side and a live preview on the other.

  • A tab per terminal runs across the top: Dispatch, LEO, Fire, Tow, Civilian, Court, and Records. Switch tabs to theme a different surface. Each tab carries its own set of colors and its own descriptions of what each color drives.
  • Separate Light and Dark palettes. Toggle which mode you are editing. Light and dark are edited independently, so a color that reads well on a dark board and one that reads well on a light portal can be set to different values.
  • Per-color controls with plain-language descriptions telling you exactly what each color affects on that terminal (background, panels, accent, status chips, text, borders, and so on).

Live preview

Alongside the editor is a live iframe preview of the actual page for the selected terminal - not a mockup or a swatch grid, but a rendered copy of the real surface. As you change a color, the preview repaints so you see the true result in context.

The preview follows the mode you are editing

Switch between editing Light and Dark and the preview follows, rendering the terminal in that mode. That way you are always looking at the palette you are actually changing.

The preview is a static, read-only rendering. It shows the terminal's chrome and layout (including gated areas) so you can judge your palette without touching or exposing any live data.

Inspect mode

Finding which control drives a particular element can be fiddly on a busy terminal, so the editor has an Inspect mode. Turn it on and click an element in the preview - the editor jumps straight to the color control that drives it. Use it when you can see the thing you want to recolor but are not sure which color token it maps to.

Saving and resetting

  • Changes save per surface - saving on the LEO tab affects only the LEO terminal. Move to another tab to theme it separately.
  • A reset returns a terminal's palette to the PulseCAD defaults if you want to start over.

Design directives still apply

Themes change colors, not copy or iconography. Keep to the house rules elsewhere in the product: no em dashes in visible strings, no decorative emojis (the UI uses line icons), and legible contrast in both light and dark.

Terminal looks (skins)

Themes recolor a terminal. A skin goes further and changes its layout. Every responder terminal - LEO, Fire & EMS, and Tow & DOT - can wear one.

Each department picks its default in Admin → Departments:

  • Standard MDT - the shared PulseCAD console, the same one LEO and Dispatch use.
  • Fire MDT - dark red, with navigation moved into a vertical rail down the right-hand side. Offered on fire and medical departments.
  • EMS MDT - light clinical teal, with large color-coded status tiles and numbered statuses. Offered on fire and medical departments.
  • Retro MDT - a green phosphor terminal in Windows XP chrome: monospace tables, bracketed buttons and amber function keys.
  • Spillman - a Windows console with two permanent status grids, calls above units, a named-action bar and a working status bar. See below.

The department setting is the default; a member can pick a different look for themselves under MORE → Display on the terminal, and "follow my department" is always the way back. Looks are free on every plan, and they stack with themes: pick a look for the layout, then use the editor above to recolor it.

The Spillman console

Every other look is a stylesheet. Spillman is a different console: the call queue and the unit board are on screen permanently instead of being pages you navigate to, and everything else - a call, a query, a report - opens as a window over the top of them.

What that changes for an operator:

  • The board is home. Closing a window returns you to the grids rather than wherever you were before. The Call Queue button gets you there from anywhere in one press.
  • Colour is the state. A row is inked in your community's own configured status colour, and the Time cell turns red when a call or unit has sat past its timer.
  • The map is a page, opened from the toolbar, not a pane.
  • Right-click a call or a unit for its common actions.
  • Day and night: the chrome darkens and the grids do not, so the colours mean the same thing either way. Toggle with Ctrl+F7 or Console → Colors.

Nothing behaves differently underneath. A Spillman operator and a standard-theme operator can work the same shift on the same calls, and Dispatch sees no difference between them - the console changes what you see and where you click, never what is recorded.

Community branding

Broader branding for your community lives nearby in the Admin Console, separate from the per-terminal color themes: