My Review

[AndrewCowley]

My thoughts on this remote. 

Feels great in your hands.  Button placement is perfect.  The buttons have a nice feel; not too clicky but also not too mushy.  All in all, it feels like a quality product.  

The software is ordinary.  Definitely takes time to get used to it.  

I have only a few devices so can’t speak much about the IR database and its depth and accuracy.  I found all my devices in there.  Same as a Harmony remote if you can’t find an exact match you should be able to find another device from the same manufacturer that works.  

It does have a learning function that works well.  Albeit to learn commands you have to add a phantom device into your activity and learn the commands into this device.  You cannot learn commands into a supported device that you chose from the device list.  When creating each activity I added a phantom device into the activity to make future learning easy.  I’m making a point of this because adding a device into an existing activity is possible but doing so overrides all the buttons you have customised; all the buttons get returned to the default.  One of the many annoyances of the software.  I future proofed my activities by doing this  

Configuring the buttons is fairly easy.  You drag and drop commands onto the buttons.  It would be a lot better if it supported long key presses and double clicks.

In use it works fine.  Except there is no power on/off management when switching between activities.  This will be game over for some people.  It is silly that the A, B and C activity buttons can’t have commands assigned to them.  You could work around the power on/off issue if they could.  

The IR strength seems pretty good.  It is perhaps a touch slower than each factory remote I have.  You don’t really notice this though.  

All in all I’m happy.  It’s really close to being excellent.  

Would love to hear what’s coming next.  Don’t see much on this forum for the past few months.  
 

Edited November 12 by AndrewCowley

[jason]

2 minutes ago, AndrewCowley said:

My thoughts on this remote. 

Feels great in your hands.  Button placement is perfect.  The buttons have a nice feel; not too clicky but also not too mushy.  All in all, it feels like a quality product.  

The software is ordinary.  Definitely takes time to get used to it.  

I have only a few devices so can’t speak much about the IR database and its depth and accuracy.  I found all my devices in there.  Same as a Harmony remote if you can’t find an exact match you should be able to find another device from the same manufacturer that works.  

It does have a learning function that works well.  Albeit to learn commands you have to add a phantom device into your activity and learn the commands into this device.  You cannot learn commands into a supported device that you chose from the device list.  When creating each activity I added a phantom device into the activity to make future learning easy.  I’m making a point of this because adding a device into an existing activity is possible but doing so overrides all the buttons you have customised; all the buttons get returned to the default.  One of the many annoyances of the software.  

Configuring the buttons is fairly easy.  You drag and drop commands onto the buttons.  It would be a lot better if it supported long key press and double click commands.  

In use it works fine.  Except there is no power on/off management when switching between activities.  This will be game over for some people.  It is silly that the A, B and C activity buttons can’t have commands assigned to them.  You could work around the power on/off issue if they could.  

The IR strength seems pretty good.  It is perhaps a touch slower than each factory remote I have.  You don’t really notice this though.  

All in all I’m happy.  It’s really close to being excellent.  

Would love to hear what’s coming next.  Don’t see much on this forum for the past few months.  
 

Thanks for the great feedback, smarter activity switching is coming in beta release very shortly. We are trying to fix all the issues with the new beta candidate with an improved wizard experience. 

I understand regarding the 'record' into an existing device. I've given a lot of thought about this. We will do something to make this easier.  But I prioritize what we're working on based on feedback. 

Again, I'll have a release candidate with smarter activity switching soon, I need my simulator working again with the GUI and am waiting to get this fixed while we address other bigger bugs.

Thanks again.

[AndrewCowley]

Jason thanks for the quick reply.  
 

You should definitely prioritise smart activity switching over making it easier to learn IR commands.  Once you get used to the learning it’s fine.  It’s just very unintuitive.

Do you have long key presses in the pipeline?

[jason]

19 minutes ago, AndrewCowley said:

Jason thanks for the quick reply.  
 

You should definitely prioritise smart activity switching over making it easier to learn IR commands.  Once you get used to the learning it’s fine.  It’s just very unintuitive.

Do you have long key presses in the pipeline?

Yes, I hear you, I'm just naked without my simulator. But I have started initial planning.

As I think about how to handle device states in smart activity switching... I think a good compromise for forcing a specific action like 'power up' or 'power down' of an activity would be to do this via long press. So yes, in that regards, but not as feature for each button...yet.