This is part four of four on my review of the Logitech Harmony One, which I recently received from Logitech. I am an official product tester for the Logitech Harmony One. The thoughts and views expressed here are my own, not that of Logitech’s. Please read my previous blog posts for more information.

I just want to finish off my review of the Logitech harmony One with a quick “final thoughts” blog post.

Overall, I’m extremely pleased with the overall quality of the remote. The build quality is solid, the layout of keys is brilliant, and in general the remote is great.
The only aspect of the remote that I do not like is the PC setup software. This needs desperate improvement, as I have covered extensively in previous blog posts. I hope Logitech take the issues I had into consideration, and maybe update and improve the software.

The parents both absolutely love the concept of “Activities”. Mum loves the simplicity of picking the remote up off the charging base and touching “Watch TV” instead of having to press 5 different buttons on various remotes. She also loves the favourite channel icons.

I love the Harmony One so much so that I’ve ordered a Harmony 650 from LogitechShop on eBay ($55) to control the TV in the other room. I am looking forward to it arriving. Setup should be much easier, being that it’s a brand-name TV. Plus, I have the past experience from the One.

Overall, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed being a product tester for Logitech’s Harmony One. It’s been a great experience, and it’s simplified our lives quite a lot! Thanks goes to Logitech for providing the Harmony One.

Well, that wraps up another blog post. Check back soon for more!
Shaun_R

This is part three of four of my review of the Logitech Harmony One, which I recently received from Logitech. I am an official product tester for the Logitech Harmony One. The thoughts and views expressed here are my own, not that of Logitech’s. Please read my previous blog post for more information.

Sound familiar? Haha. I have to do that, per the T&Cs of the product testing. Anyway, with that out of the way, this post will be covering the good, or should I say, great aspects of the Logitech Harmony One remote.

I honestly don’t know where to begin. This remote has too many terrific aspects to it that I’m not sure it’ll fit on one blog post!

I may as well begin with the most obvious. Activity-based controls. Pure genius, I tell you! Mum, who is incredibly non tech-savvy, loves it. To bits. One touch to turn the TV & PVR one. One touch to watch a DVD. One touch to watch a Video (oldskool). One button to turn everything off when you’re finished. This, this is pure genius I tell you!

Now onto the physical design of the remote. This is quite possibly the best designed remote to hold in the hand. It sits perfectly between your fingers, and best of all, the most commonly accessed controls (volume, channel, arrows, and play/pause) are all within super easy reach of the thumb. It definitely beats the Beyonwiz remote, which until now was the best designed remote I’ve ever come across.
The buttons are labelled perfectly as well, with meaningful icons, no stupid icons or acronyms that make no sense are to be found on this remote!
Most commonly, they use text – large text at that! Perfect for those with dwindling eyesight – instead of icons, which is absolute genius.
The word “Info” instead of every different kind of “i” on each different remote, a single “Menu” button in one spot, no meaningless acronyms like “APM” (an real example from one of our remotes... To this day I don’t know what it does, and I don’t dare press it!) Must I go on?
Logitech have done their R&D here, researching exactly where each button should go.

Quite possibly the best part of the remote is that despite its incredible capabilities, there isn’t the problem of “button overload”!
This was a welcome relief for everyone in the family. I don’t have to worry about anyone pushing buttons they shouldn’t, and everyone else doesn’t have to worry about which buttons they can and can’t press!
Button overload is so commonly seen on remotes these days, which all-to-often get pressed accidentally, and often end up totally ruining a particular setting - often picture or sound. These buttons are usually just providing shortcuts for things you can get in the Menu anyway! However, the Harmony One has none of that nonsense. For that, I love it to death. Thank you Logitech!

Moving on. I’d like to mention the “Help” utility onboard the remote. While I have gripes about it (see my last post where I mention about it not being intelligent and adaptable), it is incredibly useful for when each and every sequence doesn’t quite make it to the intended device. It provides a clear, simple walkthrough of each device used in a particular activity, asking whether it is on, whether it’s on the correct input, etc. etc. Pure awesome!

Finally, I’d like to mention the visual station icon capability. This, when set up in the PC application, shows an icon (being the TV station logo) for each station that you choose to program into the device. When you touch the icon, it virtually “presses” the corresponding number keys that you set up in the PC application, thereby switching to the relevant channel. It’s a thousand times better than any “favourites list” onscreen will ever be!
I would like to mention that the website IconHarmony.com came in incredibly useful for getting each icon for the stations, pre-formatted with Logitech’s shine effect and all! Very helpful when setting it up, and a lot better than resizing logos that I would normally have to manually find!

Before I finish up, I just want to mention once again that I absolutely love this remote. So much so that I’ve also set it up to control our second TV. I’m actually seriously considering purchasing the Harmony 650 ($79 at Dick Smith) just so that we have another one of these brilliant remotes, and of course to eliminate remote fights, haha. Logitech, you’ve created a monster out of me!

I’m sure there’s more great features of this incredible remote, but I’m going to have to finish up here for the sake of not boring everyone to death!
I’m sure there will be another Harmony-related blog post pretty soon, so keep watching the blog for more!

However, until then, I bid farewell.
Shaun_R

This is part two of four of my review of the Logitech Harmony One, which I recently received from Logitech. I am an official product tester for the Logitech Harmony One. The thoughts and views expressed here are my own, not that of Logitech’s. Please read my previous blog post for more information.

With the official stuff out the way, I’ll start with the ugly of this remote. And boy, does this have plenty!! Before I begin, I’ll remind everyone that I received the remote around 12pm on the 9th of December 2010 (AEDST, GMT +11), and began setup almost immediately.

I’ll begin with the setup process. Boy is this a right PAIN!! This had me tearing my hair out, with how bad it was. For a start, it’s a Java application. That’s reason enough to hate it. To add insult to injury, it’s web based. These two factors combined together make for one terrible user experience. Instead of having a fast, responsive and quick system-native application, you have to wait around after every single button click for the page to completely reload from scratch. This would have set me back at least 2 hours waiting for pages to load during the setup process!!
Personally, this is not acceptable. Logitech need to spend the time and money developing a system-native, fast, responsive (non-Java!) application for setting up the Harmony. No more of this web-based Java stuff. Argh!
One of the most-touted features of the remote is the easy setup process. I find it’s anything but!

Continuing my gripes with the setup process.
Device compatibility is... lacklustre, at best. Sure, we have a no-name TV. That meant I had to program each button manually. However, the process for learning the IR codes is frustrating. Why do we need a 3 second lag between registering the button press and moving to the next one?! It’s pointless sitting there watching the screen say “IR code detected”. You can’t even press the next button as soon as it appears on-screen – that’ll be another 2 second wait, thanks! Otherwise, it simply doesn’t register you even pressed a button.
Even for brand-name devices, compatibility is poor, as well. We have a Samsung DVD/VCR combo unit (DVD-V70). While Logitech supposedly has this one on file, I found that after testing it out, buttons were mapped incorrectly, buttons didn’t work, and some features were just plain missing! I had to go through almost the entire “learn IR” process for this remote as well to get some degree of control over the unit. Not impressed by this, at all!
There was some reprieve to the process. Our Beyonwiz FV-L1 PVR has magnificent support, with just one button missing that I had to learn manually (I forget which now). This is probably accredited due to the fact there is one single model of remote that works with every Beyonwiz device, so compatibility is universal for the entire brand.

My issues with setup don’t end there. When using the “Update Remote” tool, it seems like it wipes and entirely re-flashes the remote from scratch, rather than updating what’s changed. This makes for an update process of well over 5 minutes. It gets frustrating when you have to keep going back to the setup program after testing controls to find that something is still broken. Grrrr...

Now for the “Help” tool on the remote. When I finally got it to a point where most buttons worked, I tested out the Activities. I found that consistently, every single time, it would miss one of the virtual “presses” of the Source button on our TV, meaning it would land on Component instead of HDMI, Analog TV instead of AV, or SCART instead of Component. No matter how many times I used the “Help” tool to fix the problem (telling it that the TV was not on HDMI), it doesn’t seem to intelligently adapt to the problem and send an extra press, meaning I had to use the Help tool every time. Surely the remote can be made to “learn” from repeated issues?
Now, obviously finding that the remote is rather static, I went to the PC software troubleshooter. No matter how many times I went through the process of telling it that the TV never goes to the correct input, and sitting around 5 minutes for each update, it did not fix it.
I ended up stumbling upon the “delay times” for each input by chance, and tried increasing the delay between each input. To my surprise, this actually fixed the problem!! However, I’d still spent 2+ hours tearing my hair out trying to fix the damned issue. I’m quite sure our LCD TV is somewhat more worn out, after being on, off, on, off, on, off, on, off, on, off, on, off every 10 minutes... But at least it works properly now!

However, there’s more. Going back to the setup process and remote commands, mentioned earlier, I wanted to re-order some of the buttons that appear on the remote’s touchscreen. This process is painful! I spent a good half hour re-ordering and organising commands that I wanted for our DVD/VCR while on the DVD activity. I pressed the “Done” button... And the session had timed out. I lost EVERYTHING that I’d just spent half an hour of work on! Needless to say, I was NOT a happy person by this time. I had to go back and start all over again. This time, I pressed “Done” every 5 minutes, and had to go back to the custom commands page each time, thereby making this already blood boiling process yet more painful. Why does it even time out, anyway?! And why does the process suck so much?! It needs re-working. Desperately.
Then I had to do virtually the same process for the “Watch a Movie” (VHS) activity as well... Oh, and again for the individual device control, as well. This process took well over 2 and a half hours.

By now, the time is 8pm. I’ve finally gotten the remote control to a half-useable state.
I give up with the remote, place it on the charging cradle, and crash.
This remote, with it’s supposedly “easy” layman-targeted setup took me EIGHT HOURS solid to get to a point where it’s half useable. And I’m still not done. That speaks a lot as to how “easy” it really is to set up. In other words, it’s far from!

I’m sure there’s other gripes and issues that I’ve forgotten to mention here.

I hope Logitech read this and do their best to take the problems I’ve outlined here and fix their software. I can only pray.

Now, I’m going back to making this remote work nicely for me. See you all in my next blog post, which will hopefully be a positive one - what I do like about the Harmony! Haha.

Shaun_R

This is part one of four of my review of the Logitech Harmony One, which I recently received from Logitech. I am an official product tester for the Logitech Harmony One. The thoughts and views expressed here are my own, not that of Logitech’s. Please read my previous blog post for more information.

What a day it’s been! Wow.

A few weeks ago, I noticed a post on Facebook by the Logitech Australia team, asking if anyone would like to be a product tester for Logitech, testing and reviewing the Logitech Harmony One Universal Remote. Naturally, I applied and filled out the short survey, figuring that it was worth a shot. I doubted I’d get further than that.

What a surprise I got when I got an email from Logitech Australia telling me that I’d been selected to test the Harmony One! I was absolutely amazed!

Around midday today, I received the remote (weirdly, the courier never rang the doorbell, and instead just dropped it at the front door - no sign, nothing). Naturally, I got straight into setting it up.

Well, I finished all of 45 minutes ago — it’s now 7pm. What a process that was!

I’ll admit I’m a perfectionist, and I spent a lot of time making it “just right”. However, there were a lot of issues and flaws that I cam across in the software provided that I just hated, setting me back over and over again.
I also had problems getting input selection to work correctly - the remote would always forget that last ‘press’ of the Input button and I’d be left on YPbPr (Component) instead of HDMI, or SCART instead of YPbPr, or Analog TV instead of AV. Very frustrating!
It turns out the issue was that the delay time set for allowing the TV to turn on was too low (3 sec, should have been 4 sec), and the input press delay was too short as well (1 sec, should have been 1.2 sec).

I will also admit that we have a no-name TV. This meant I had to program every command in by hand, manually, instead of it being setup for me automatically with the wizard. This was a simple, but time consuming process.

I have yet to have a chance to truly use and explore the remote, so I’ll save a full review for my next blog post. Expect a full review within the next couple days.

Shaun_R

I promised in my last blog post that I’d post a review of Reeder for Mac Beta at some point in the near future.
Well, I recently found this excellent article that sums up all my thoughts a lot better than I ever could.

I’d encourage you to take a look at it by clicking here.

Hopefully the guys behind Reeder will read it and change the way Reeder for mac works. Until then, I’ll stick with my old method - not using RSS at all, as I’ve done for many years prior.

My next blog post will be big. However, its content is a secret for now; so make sure you check back here soon!
Shaun_R

I reckon these were timed. Within days of each other, the new Weet for Mac beta and Reeder for Mac beta were released to the public, and they’ve generated a nice amount of hype around them.

In this post, I’ll cover Weet for Mac.

Before I begin, I want to say that I like it. However, I don’t love it.
Sure, Tweetie for Mac is dated. Despite Atebits’ many promises of releasing Tweetie 2 for Mac (“April” came and went, “soon” got old quick, “not long now” got long...), I’d go so far to call it “abandon-ware”. However, it’s still my favourite OS X Twitter client.
I don’t like Echofon, Kiwi or any of the others. They try to do too much at once, and it ends up just looking horrible.

I hoped Weet would be different.
In a way, it is. In others, it’s not. While the iPhone app is really good (it hasn’t replaced Twitter/Tweetie for me, however); the Mac app isn’t quite there yet.

Firstly, there’s some major bugs - opening a conversation (double click) often results in very strange in-reply-to chains, oft containing foreign-language Tweets. This has caused me confusion on a number of occasions - why are people replying to me about some random Tweet?!

Secondly, there’s some UI glitches and issues. I’ll start with the “shiny” look. I hate it with a passion, proved by my work on my iTunes 10 UI Overhaul. Unfortunately, Weet uses this very “shiny” UI that I loathe. It would be good if it had an option to perhaps turn it back to normal?

Finally, there’s a glitch where using Cmd-W in the Preferences window closes Weet, rather than Weet’s Preferences. A minor bug, but a bug nonetheless. Would be good if this was fixed.

In my next post (hopefully within a few days time), I’ll cover Reeder for Mac and what I think of it.

For now, stay safe!
Shaun_R