FYI: Just in case there is some confusion in this area. Some people were wondering why their MAIN1 page, created on the remote, was not showing up in MXOP when the Operating System was uploaded.

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When you first receive your remote, if you create a MAIN1 page on the remote itself, then try to upload it, it will not show in your MXOP.

However, if you create a MAIN1 page in the MXOP...... by right-clicking on a MAIN page DEVICE button and selecting "Send to MAIN1", then a MAIN 1 page will be created in your MXOP.

From then on, any changes made on the remote will be reflected on MAIN1 in MXOP when you upload, and the reverse is true - any changes made in to MAIN 1 in MXOP will be downloaded to your remote.


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Remember though, that MAIN1 reflects only what you have sent from MAIN1. All macros and learned commands must be made to the MAIN page devices, and then COPIED, either on the remote, or in MXOP, to the MAIN1 page.

Any questions, please ask.

...Greg

> Remember though, that MAIN1 reflects only what you have sent from MAIN1

???

You mean sent from MAIN?

You can't make a macro in MXOP, and macros don't get uploaded/downloaded, so how exactly do you put a macro on MAIN1?

Conversely, what I'd really like to do is move all my device buttons to MAIN1 and fill MAIN with my macros. Any suggestions as to how I could do that?

The MAIN page is nearly impossible to work with. You must have 12 device buttons and 3 macro buttons. That's it, period.

Okay, so I can live with having all my device buttons on MAIN and my big macros on MAIN1.

I'm still baffled as to how I put macros on MAIN1.

And is there any chance they'll fix these silly MAIN restrictions at some point?

Peter: My mistake, it shoud have been:

"Remember though, that MAIN1 reflects only what you have sent from the MAIN page."

1) You put a macro on MAIN1 by creating it on the DEVICE button on the MAIN page (in SETUP mode), and then do your copying of the DEVICE button to MAIN1. You cannot directly apply macros to MAIN1 buttons. They must be copied from the MAIN page.

2) I would assume (and I will try this out later and confirm), that if you set up all of your DEVICE buttons on the MAIN page (i.e. pre-program them, etc.), and then copy only the ones you want to your MAIN1 page, then you will have the MAIN1 page that you want for DEVICE buttons only with no macros.

Then, you can go back to your MAIN page, and apply macros to those DEVICES on it.

Simple enough.

... Greg

P.S. And, yes, we eagerly await the uploading/downloading of macros in the next release of the MXOP.

Device buttons copied to the MAIN1 page still alias the macros from the MAIN page. It's strictly "fewer" buttons that are possible.

Thanks for the info, Daniel, I was unsure of that, and now I don't have to test it!

... Greg :-)

Oh, that's just ridiculous.

So I can't even build MAIN with devices and MAIN1 with a bunch of (different) macro buttons (that would be too many buttons).

Who thought up all these idiotic restrictions? Just build a bloody generic page system...

Argh.

How much of this is a limitation of MXOP and how much is a limitation of the current OS?

Peter: The request has gone in to Home Theater Master for the ability to add and delete pages, not restricting each device to the default 4 pages.

Home Theater Master monitors this site each and every day. If you are interested in something like what you mentioned above being written into the MXOP (which in fact IS the Operating System, along with an editor), a simple request would go a whole lot farther than calling the designers' ideas ridiculous.

This remote does a LOT and will continue to mature. Let's hope Home Theater Master sees your request and considers it for implementation!

Cheers!

... Greg

Well, I had a long talk with Universal Remote at CES. Basically, the MX-1000 was originally designed for all editing to be done right on the unit. Thus, to make it easier, certain restrictions were created that have yet to be overcome even though we've got the software. They do have plans to work on this issue, and as you've probably noticed they're very receptive to user suggestions that make sense.

Sorry for the rant. It's just that every time I think I've figured out all the current restrictions, another seemingly arbitrary one blocks my way.

I do understand that they needed to impose some restrictions on the remote in order to keep a user from really hosing things.

But what disappoints me a bit is that they didn't design a very simple, generic paging system which allows for great flexibility, while imposing the restrictions at the UI level.

It's usually actually EASIER to implement a very powerful generic system than to try to hobble the underlying data structures. But, I will concede that that might not be the case here.

Anyway, in an effort to be constructive, here's what I'd like to see:

- Fully customizable pages. All of them.
- Control over which page the Main and Page hard buttons go to.
- Control over the appearance of the Last Page soft button.
- Macros which can be assigned to any button, which can emit any known IR instruction and jump to any page.
- And the ability to change the behavior of the other hard buttons based on the current page.

Note that this entirely obliterates the notion of 'device', which seems to be the root of a lot of restrictions. The existing device model might be a good way to create the initial tree of pages.

If they build such a flexible paging system, then there's an issue of how to assign IR commands to various buttons. One way to handle this is to have a nice listing of known IR commands. For example:

Built-In:
Amplifiers
DVD Players
Panasonic 3021
Play
Rewind
FF

Learned:
DVD Players
Panasonic A-110
Power On
Power Off

Then you can just link any IR command to any button, without the myriad of restrictions currently imposed. For learned IR commands, you'd probably only be able to name them (not categorize them), but on the MXOP side, it would be nice to be able to categorize them by device. And then to be able to generate IR databases, even ones which include both (references to) built-in and learned codes. That way, for example, someone could generate a database for the Panasonic A110 DVD player, which would include the right built-in IR codes as well as learned (or imported from Pronto) IR codes.

Incidentally, it would nice to be have such a registry of macros as well, that way I could assign the same macro to multiple buttons.

So that's the pie-in-the-sky ideal.

More immediately, I just need the following:

- Customizable MAIN1.
- Macros on any page which can jump to any other page (and transmit IR).

Basically, what I want to have as my primary page is MAIN1, which is accessible from any page via "Help". It contains a list of task-oriented buttons (e.g. "Listen to CD"), which are just macros, which set up the whole A/V system the right way. MAIN is a good backup to MAIN1, which lets you manually twiddle each device.

Peter: Thank you! I will forward your list of requests to Home Theater Master.

... Greg

It would be nice to get the moving and deleting buttons problems resolved. Hopefully the next software release will address that.

By the way, I created my MAIN1 page with the MXOP and downloaded it to the remote, but I've never been able to upload the operating program to my computer without the MAIN1 disappearing. I'm about to update my layout with some new commands and buttons so we'll see how that works out.

Hmmmmmmmm..... I've had no problem with that, mroll. In fact, changes to the MAIN1 are reflected in MXOP in the upload.

... Greg

I've had them same success as GregoriusM.