You can reorder activities on a Harmony 628 remote. I just did it. Here's how you can too. EVERYONE: please let us know if this works on other 6xx remotes. This is hackery, so USE AT YOUR OWN RISK.

First, you borrow this URL from an 880 user:

[Link: members.harmonyremote.com]

You'll need to login to your account, then use the URL above. (Open another browser window and paste the url in the Address.) You should get a straightforward screen where you can rearrange your activities.

The REALLY WIERD THING on my 628 is that the activities shown as 1 & 2 in the list will actually show up last on the remote. 3 & 4 will come first, followed by 5, 6, ... So shift your last two choices into the first two places, and you should get what you want.
(or it's really just random and I got really lucky!)

Anyone tried this?

kctx7, Oh! what a neat trick. We need a sticky for this one. I tried it on my 659 and it works like a charm. I am pretty sure it will also work on my 680.
Note 1: The activities assigned to the hard activity keys (3 on the 659) are always listed last regardless of their home page order. To minimize confusion, you should re-order them last.
Note 2: You can also paste the URL in your login window. You don't need a new browser window.

Aha, you figured out the quirky renumbering I was seeing. I hadn't related it to the "hard" keys, but you're right.

Glad it's working on some other remotes!

Working also in a 680.
The only thing I've seen is that these procedure alter hard buttons assignement (maybe it was my fault trying things but I don't think so). A quick reasingnement resolve the problem.

I was looking for this feature and now is in a favorite link in my browser (just log in and anytime you want, choose it)

Thank you very much.

Also works on a 676. Very cool!

(Now the question is, can't Logitech just make activity reordering a native option within the setup pages for the models that have confirmed this trick works?)

kctx7, thank-you for this tip.

I just tried this on my 659 and it works great. I had to reassign the hard-keys after changing the order, but no problems otherwise.

Thanks again.

Thanks for the tip--I love being able to move things around! But it does seem to behave a little flaky at times. Last night, I could not change one of the hard keys on my 680. I kept telling it to assign "Watch TiVo", it kept showing that it was "Watch TiVo", but every time I downloaded to the remote, the button came up as "Watch TV (Ant)". After many tries (including ones where I managed to change the other hard keys), I was ready to give up. I moved "Watch TiVo" to the top of the list, so that even if it wasn't on a hard key it would at least be as convenient as possible. For some reason, that did the trick--"Watch TiVo" appeared correctly on the hard key, and not at the top of the list. I'm not sure what the problem was, but I thought I'd pass on the info.

PS Is there any way this could be added to hugbug's fantastic FireFox Mod extension? I don't know enough about it to know if that is even possible.

Yes, there sure is. I added that to my copy of hugbug's extension a few days ago. However, I am not sure whether to release the updated extension given a) this feature has some quirks and b) it is mostly hugbug's work (I figured hugbug would have added this by now).

Sqary, I too had the same problem with the middle hard key (Watch TV) on both my 659 and 680. The key was assigned to "Watch PVR" but I noticed that it flagged this activity as the default for that key. The activity for the other 2 hard keys were not flagged. So I created another "Watch PVR" activity which became the flagged default. So I assigned the non-flagged "Watch PVR" activity to that key and that cured the problem. I then deleted the flagged activity to see if the problem would come back. It did not although the now single non-flagged "Watch PVR" activity became the flagged default. Very strange quirk. It might come back when I do another reorder.

Well...I purchased my 628 a few months ago and have been using it without any problems. But, I remembered this thread and thought it would be cool to be able to re-order the activities.

So, I tried the workaround as described and was able to access the proper page. I moved things around and am afraid to report that it has totally screwed up my remote. Nothing life threatening...but here's what happened.

As some of you have reported, the re-ordering did not work out completely as hoped for. the hard buttons also got out of whack...with the middle button being the biggest problem. Also, my two most-used activities...Watch DVD" and "Watch PVR"...both lost all of their soft button commands! Except for one--the PVR activity left the "C" button command but lost all others including the "A" and "B" button commands.

I tried to restore the default button commands for those two activities and while SOME (not all) of the soft button commands would return to the computer screen...they would not "save". Even after I pushed "done", they would disappear again.

I went so far as to TWICE delete all activities from my remote...update the remote...restore all the activities on their software...and update the remote...only to have the same outcome.

Pretty frustrating. Makes me wish I had left well enough alone.

You guys are so good at this stuff I thought I would put it out to you and see if you know what happened...or think I should call Harmony support.

I would love to re-set the entire remote to factory default and start over by re-entering all my gear and activities...but I guess that's something you can't do? BTW, I did NOT delete all my gear...just the activities...figuring it would do a defact re-set of the activity buttons. But no luck.

I would be glad to answer any questions.

Create a new account and start over.

Done. Simple solution. Worked perfectly. All soft buttons have returned.

I think I'll stick with the activities order as they are given to me for now.

I followed this link to reorder my activities and I reassigned activities(however default got changed) to hard buttons. But for some reason I notice "watch tv"(hard button mapped to watch cable) does not turn on my TV all the time. I'm sure before the reorder it was working wherever I had the remote pointing to.

Another problem I see now is clicking "more activities" takes me to soft button activity screen. Once I'm in soft button activity screen when I press "more activities" the green ligth stays lit for a while(obviously sending out some IR commands) and it turns on my Dish PVR. Before it used to take me back to activity screen i was previously on.

has anyone seen this behaviour? I feel the reordering activities has made it unstable and I hate to redo everything.

Milli: How is this going for you? Did you straighten things out?

As you can see from my posts above, I ran into similar problems after re-ordering activities. I made many attempts to stragithen things out and they kept getting progressively worse. So, I took jlet's advice and created a new account and started over. Everything is now working properly...I just wish I didn't have to advance two screens into "More Activities" to get to my Watch Cable/DVR" activity!