I’ve been a Pronto user for many users now. I loved my pronto, but I didn’t love designing screens, the lack of hard buttons nor teaching people how to use it.
So when I heard about the Harmony, I waited for awhile and then finally picked one up.
Pros
Anyone with a home theater, or at least TV/stereo needs one. You program it via the web, then it downloads a file to your mac which installs it over USB. The database is user supplied and it knows things like “How do you listen to sound, through the TV or stereo?” You tell it what devices you have, and since it is ACTIVITY based, there is one off button and no on buttons nor device buttons.
You click “Watch a movie” or “Listen to music” and it turns on what needs to be on, turns off what needs to be off, and sets up the inputs.
My Toshiba TV sucks. It has 5 inputs but no discreet codes for any of them so the thing knew to press channel up to get to the first input, then source 5 times to get to HD component. However it never worked. The wrong input was always selected. I went to the website, clicked on my TV, clicked edit options and it had timing delays for tv on, between input and bewteen keypress. So I changed the TV on delay to 5500ms and the inter input to 1500ms. Now it works like a charm!
The Harmony has three emitters, I can control my iPOD from around the corner! Harmony even knew about my Navipod IR remotre for my ipod. Though not at first, so I recorded the play button into the remote then connected it and it searched thieir database and said “You have a ten technogies navipod, right?” and I said yes and boom, done!
This is one great, easy to use remote and for the $199, ($159 at MacForce) highly recommended.
Cons I had to dremel the case a little, as some buttons were sticking. There seems to be some QC issues as all of the remotes at MacForce had sticking buttons, and one person’s backlight didn’t work, but Harmony will replace it. My problem only required a #000 philips and a little time, plus was fun 🙂
The programming is all done via the Harmony website, so should the company every go bust and not release the software in a client form, it’ll take the will of the community to generate software before you can change your remote.