[Otto]

You are right in that we can put anything we want on the activity screens. However, once they are on those activity screens, they are organized by device, and then alphabetically under device (or something like that). Yes, I'm talking in the activity screen, they are ordered by device, even though device isn't necessarily obvious.

Let's say I have two activities: 1) "listen to CDs" 2) "listen to Sirius".

In the "CD" activity, I use a Denon DVD player and an Outlaw pre/pro. In the Sirius activity, I use the Sirius receiver and the Outlaw. Since I use a two-zone system with the Outlaw, I would like to always have my "Room 2 Vol Up" and "Room 2 Vol Down" in the top left corner of the soft button display. In the CD case, controls for the DVD player will be ordered first in that screen, even though I told it to put the Outlaw stuff first ("Denon" comes before "Outlaw". Now the Outlaw controls are not in the top left of the screen because the Denon stuff is ordered first.

In the Sirius case, it will put the Outlaw stuff first ("Outlaw" comes before "Sirius") - this is where I want it. Great, but now it's different that the "CD" activity. Add in different activities and devices, and the layout of the soft buttons begins to look random. Depending on activity, I'm never really sure where "Room 2 Vol Up/Down" are going to end up, and I may actually even have to "scroll" to other pages to find them.

I believe there are some tricks that we can use to make this "better". It may be possible to reorganize the alphabetical-ness of the functions under each device. That is, once they reorder it "their way," you can go in and change the order of the commands under the device. But I think the device has to stay in alphabetical. I think it's also possible to "learn" all the commands for all devices under each device. That is, I could "learn" my Outlaw stuff and then assign it to each other device. Each "device" is then authorized to control any other device, and there's no need for ordering by device. You are then open to order under each device any way you want. Unfortunately, those to workarounds are too lame and time consuming for me to try.

As a programmer, I know they can fix this. And from the recent gossip, it appears that they are working on it. The thing that surprises me the most is that they actually designed it that way in the first place. I also hope they change their interface so that it's more intuitive as to how you set up the "pages." Currently, they are just in a straight list. Entry #1 is top left, Entry #2 is top right, Entry #3 is second-from-top left, and so on. It should be "page based" so that it will look just like the remote will when you are done.

Hope all that makes sense...