What little Word "expertise" I have does not extend to the mysteries of section breaks, alas.

Okay, Harmony report. Setup trickier than promised, remote MADE OF AWESOME.

We got the 670 from Amazon. It's the lower-end model of the two that are shaped vaguely like TiVo remotes; Logitech claims that you can control all of the same devices with any of their remotes, and I liked the button layout way better on this one than the 550. While I was waiting for it to get here, I installed the software and set up an account on their website to play around with their test drive -- look up my devices, set up possible activities, and suchlike. Fun!

So, once the thing got here, I plugged it in, fired up the setup account, and discovered problem 1:

1. If you haven't gone *all* the way through the dumbassed setup wizard, the site will keep dumping you at things like "continue where you left off your 'watch a videotape' activity" and there's NO way on earth short of a whole new account to make it cancel the wizard, go back to the beginning, start the setup over, or anything else of the sort. Which also means that if you've, say, fudged on some model numbers a week ago under the impression that "test drive" meant "dick around with the website to get a feel for the interface", you have to go through the whole setup with the wrong model numbers, just to get to where you can erase them and start over again with the correct toys.

Which led more or less directly to problem 2:

2. THE SHITTY SOFTWARE DOESN'T PLAY WITH MY MAC. It didn't give me any errors on install, but it just won't do anything. I reinstall from the CD. It doesn't do anything. I reinstall the latest from the website. It doesn't do anything. I uninstall again, carefully nuking all the stray preferences files. And reinstall. And every single reinstall asks me to reboot the computer, which just shouldn't be necessary at all. Please note, there appear to be all kinds of people out there who can work this thing just fine on a mac -- just not MY mac.

But luckily, plan B is sitting right there on the coffee table in the form of S's Windows laptop, which installs everything right nice, asks me to hook up the remote, recognizes it and does its woo-woo updatey thing so that I can get out of the setup wizard and into actually letting me set things up.

So I follow its suggestion to set up "activities" for stuff like watching a movie or playing a game. And this shit is the COOLEST THING EVER. Unlike previous universal remotes I've had, which let you, say, hit a "DVD" button and then use the play, pause, whatever buttons on the same remote to control the DVD player, this thing lets you hit one button to turn on the TV, switch it to the DVD input, turn on the DVD player, switch to widescreen, set up the sound system, dim the lights, buy you a drink, and try to cop a feel.

Only problem is, well, welcome to Problem 3.

3. My cheapass TV is in the database, sort of. That is, I looked up the model number, and it was there, and it passed all its little tests to make sure it was using the right infrared codes, yay. But when I tried to use any of those fancy actions, they just wouldn't fire. Hmm.

...

And then it was time to go to my shrink followed by a couple of beers, a large rare cheeseburger, and garlic fries. Which was the main reason it took me all night to write up a review.

...

Two hours later, back home and fortified with beer and fries, I notice that (a) the list of inputs I'm seeing in the setup software isn't at all like the ones my TV actually has and (b) it doesn't seem to think I have a button to switch between inputs at all. (Nor does it see a button to switch between widescreen and normal. Note that these are the two buttons I use the most, after On and Volume.) In other words, my cheapass off-brand TV is in the Harmony database, but linked to the remote layout from a slightly different (older? newer? swapped at birth by fairies?) model.

Now, my cheapass off-brand TV is lovely (and did I mention cheap, for an LCD), but nothing on earth plays with its remote. I've never gotten the TiVo remote to (continued...)

( continues...) do so much as recognize its power button, even after trying ALL the possible codes from 001 to 999. So being 90% of the way there is pretty cool, but having to learn to custom-program the buttons right out of the gate is kind of a disappointment... until I find out that the way you do this is to point the new remote at the old one and press the button. It's actually kind of cute, in a dogs-sniffing-each-others'-butts way. Plus, makes stuff work, which is a bonus.

All my whizbangy one-button activities work like a charm. I didn't like how it assigned the thumbs up and thumbs down buttons by default, so I assigned them to a different key altogether. It has the 30-second skip button the TiVo should've always had. And if I'd just had a bigger-name TV and... well, lord only knows what's up with the software install... anyway, the setup was much glitchier than advertised, but the Harmony is my new Best Friend Forever.

2. THE SHITTY SOFTWARE DOESN'T PLAY WITH MY MAC. It didn't give me any errors on install, but it just won't do anything. I reinstall from the CD. It doesn't do anything. I reinstall the latest from the website. It doesn't do anything. I uninstall again, carefully nuking all the stray preferences files. And reinstall. And every single reinstall asks me to reboot the computer, which just shouldn't be necessary at all. Please note, there appear to be all kinds of people out there who can work this thing just fine on a mac -- just not MY mac.

This would be my major worry -- so many fun toys don't play well with Macs! And we have no backup Windows machine. Hrm.

I have the (I think) 880, and I've only ever used it with my Mac. The software doesn't auto-start as prompted by the website, but that's simply handled by starting it before I go in to tweak stuff.

When my remote arrives, I\'m going to first try and set it up with my Mac Mini (since that computer is already attached to the TV, vs. the PC that is upstairs). I\'ll let you know if I have the same trouble as amych.

(Also, I have a mortgage and a baby on the way. But, you know, if someone were to buy me one as a present, MAc-compatibility would be my major worry.)

I regret to say at this time I'm not a skilled enough knitter to make a Harmony remote.

Do let us know, Jon -- as I said before, and ita confirms, there are plenty of people who are using them with Macs, so I was surprised to have it fail so utterly on me. And it could be some random thing to do with this particular machine, even though it claims to be a supported version of the OS yadda yadda...

Hmm. I think part of my annoyance is that the usability of things like consumer product configuration have improved so much over the last few years (and, when it's working right, this is really a good example of that) that to have it really go south when things aren't just perfect seems... I dunno, sloppy?

This would be my major worry -- so many fun toys don't play well with Macs!

Like, for instance, the Blackberry Pearl. I could kill the smarmy little kid who swore up and down that the Blackberry was "TOTALLY" compatible and that the installation disc was for Mac as well as PC. Yeah, nsm. KILL KILL KILL! Luckily Missing Sync has a beta version up for Mac/Blackberry that seems to be working all right, but I still want to march back into the store and knock him upside the head.

The thing that killed me is that I was debating between a Blackjack (which runs Windows Mobile) and the Blackberry, and the kid tried to tell me that "nothing running Windows will work with a Mac" and refused to believe me when I told him I'd been happily syncing my 8125 via Missing Sync with no problem. SMACK!