February 1, 2012

I ♥ media, I want to ♣ Flash to the ground and steal its lunch money.

I have a basic home media setup with an older receiver, an older CD/DVD player that now just gets used for audio CDs, a dedicated computer running WinAmp and holding a bunch of ripped CDs, a BlueRay player, DirecTV box and a flat-screen. Oh yeah, an input for an iPod for the receiver. Nothing fancy. I have played with "universal remotes" from time to time -- have a lot of them in a box somewhere. Recently read online that the Logitech Harmony 650 was a sweet unit and saw them for sale at Costco. Impulse purchase -- so sue me. Got it home and trying to set it up -- it required me to set up a username and password and to download a 10MB install file. I then visit the configuration web page and get to the screen where it says
What's next:
1. Collect your model numbers
2. Add your devices
3. Add your activities
4. Sync your remote to your account
and it just hangs without letting me know why. I have had compatibility issues with Adobe Flash before so I visit their site and see the following:
Adobe Flash Player 11.1.102.55
Note:Flash Player does not support 64-bit versions of Windows XP and Vista.
Flash Player 11 now includes support for Windows 7 64-bit
Yes, I am running 64-bit Vista -- it is now stable and although I much prefer Win7 to Vista I cannot afford to upgrade every one of my computers every time a new OS comes out. My main systems are Win7 but this media machine is Vista. I check to download an earlier version of Flash but am only presented with 32-bit options for Vista. I understand that Flash at one time served a need and there is an entrenched base of Flash code out there but Adobe really needs to put some better programmers onto this product. Their current code is abject crap and a fscking joke for this company. Shame on Adobe for letting such a piece of shite out the door. Shame on Logitech for hamstringing what looks to be a great product by requiring their users to trip over this showstopper. If I ran Logitech, I would ditch Flash/Adobe ASAP and rewrite the code in Visual Studio or even (shudder) Java. I had to download a 10MB file to initiate installation -- that is a lot of definition files for various pieces of equipment. They could have made this a stand-alone EXE and I would have been happy. No, they had to go with pretty pictures instead of functionality. I will try this again with my laptop but I am sitting here fuming... Posted by DaveH at February 1, 2012 10:25 PM
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