Logitech Harmony Remote & Leopard

Posted on January 10, 2008
Filed Under /dev/null/ | 3,239 views |

A couple of days ago I picked up a Logitech Harmony 550 universal remote control. I was impressed how well the web application worked in OS X - it took about fifteen minutes to get everything set up and now, to parrot the phrase, “it just works”.

I didn’t connect the dots between it and copy/paste not working on my Mac anymore. One morning I woke up and suddenly I couldn’t copy from Safari’s URI bar or paste into TextEdit. That was confounding. Then I noticed that I couldn’t move any items on my desktop. That was a pretty good clue.

I fired up Disk Utility, ran “Repair Permissions” and afterwards everything was alright.

This morning it seems the whole Logitech/Repair Permissions process is in the middle of a lon-standing pissing match between MacJournals and MacFixIt. I can summarize in two statements. MacFixIt says:

As such, running a permissions repair after installing software is never a bad idea, and can often serve to obviate problems if you’re willing to spend a few extra minutes.

MacJournals retorts with:

What’s “useless” is to repair permissions as if it were some form of necessary system maintenance. It’s not, or Apple would have set up the daily, weekly, or monthly automatic launchd tasks to do it for you. In fact, Panther and Tiger both had to add extra code to undo the damage caused by people repairing permissions frequently for no reason at all.

In other words, it seems to boil down to “throwing salt over your shoulder to ward off bad luck is never a bad idea” vs. “only throw salt over your shoulder when the sidewalk’s icy so you don’t fall down” (ok, that’s a terrible, terrible analogy but it’s still early. For southern readers, salting ice lowers the freezing point, turning it into slush and making it less-slippery).

My take on all of this is pretty simple:

If your machine starts acting oddly and you suddenly can’t do things you could do the day before, try rebooting. If that doesn’t work, try repairing permissions. If that doesn’t work, dig and start trouble-shooting (and no, its not likely a virus, at least not on a Mac).

And if you get the Logitech Harmony 550, which I’m thoroughly enjoying, do repair your permissions afterwards.

It’s just good sense, really ;)

Comments

4 Responses to “Logitech Harmony Remote & Leopard”

  1. Andre on January 10th, 2008 2:02 pm

    I picked up the 880 and after pre-checking the forums I opted to install the Logitech app in XP via parallels. Other than that silly extra step I love my uber-remote as well.

    I really wish Logitech would get a few GOOD OSX engineers and take more pride in the Mac software they release.

  2. MrHappy on January 10th, 2008 7:52 pm

    That was good thinking about using Parallels. To be honest I was pretty impressed with the quality of the software under OS X, which is probably because i wasn’t actually expecting any at all so the something i got was adequate indeed.

    I managed to get my remote to control iTunes and QuickTime on my laptop but it’s not quite perfect yet (for instance I haven’t found a way to tell the laptop to launch iTunes if it isn’t already running). Someone needs to hack the Logitech software to make it extensible. Where’s the iPhone-like outrage that it isn’t!?! ;)

  3. Andre on January 12th, 2008 12:34 am

    I read in the forums that if you tell the remote that your mac is a MacMini it’ll work perfectly. Might be worth a try.

  4. MrHappy on January 12th, 2008 2:54 am

    As soon as I get back to Canada I’ll give that a go.

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