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The Surf sections of my ccf is far and away where I spend most of my time. That includes
both using and programming the remote. It is easily the part of my ccf that I like the
working with the most.
I watch way too much TV, and there are a few times during the week when I want to watch two or more shows that are on at the same time. Rather than just picking a show, I end up watching one and taping the others. I have two Sony SLV-960HS vcr's, which makes it a little difficult to describe them. VCR 1 is my main VCR, and it must be set to input 2 if I want to watch VCR 2. VCR 1 uses Sony's command mode vtr3 and is on the bottom of my pile of equipment. VCR 2 uses Sony's command mode vtr1 and is on top of my pile of equipment. I found myself constantly switching between the VCR 1 and VCR 2 device's to change inputs and watch TV. That was not an issue at first, but it eventually became tiresome, so I created a "misc" device that combined the common controls from VCR 1 and VCR 2 onto a single panel. 
This was pretty handy and soon made it so that I did not use the main VCR devices very often. There were a few issues that made this solution less than ideal. This particular design favored VCR 1 over VCR 2 quite a bit. The hard button's were set to control VCR 1, which had me constantly switching back to VCR 1 for watching TV. I also found myself using the main VCR 2 device for watching tapes instead of using the misc device like I did for VCR 1, which seemed kind of silly because the 2 vcr's were identical.. The "pad" button was kind of neat, it would jump to a number pad panel that was was programmed to control one of the VCR's. The pad panel had a button that would jump back to the main misc panel. There was also a button on the pad panel that would jump to the panel in the main vcr device for recording. That came about because I found myself using the misc device to set the vcr's to the correct input's and channels for recording. I would have just put the record button on the number pad panel, but I did not have room for other buttons like pause and stop that are useful when recording. It was around that time when the tabbed interface and station logo ccf's became available. I thought that was a really neat use of the pronto's power. I added it to my ccf making two copies of each station logo so I could surf with either VCR. After using it for a while I decided that while the idea was awesome, I did not like switching between panels that often to surf and that I would rather use the number pad. I did not want to remove it from my ccf though because it is really great for guests who may not be familiar with my cable system. I know that channel 25 is MTV, but my brother's cable system uses 33, so the station logo is much easier for him. I decided that I wanted to make it a little less painful to use VCR 2, and to make it more equal to VCR 1 in the misc device. I ended up making two misc devices that were identical except which VCR was controlled by the hard buttons. That worked out really well. I also figured that since I was using the misc device for setting things up to be recorded, I may as well add panels for recording to misc too. I eventually realized that I should combine the tabbed station logo's with the misc device because both were "VCR specific" now. That turned out to be a pretty good fit, but I was still a little sad because I was using the number pad for my surfing instead. I did not want to use the station logo's because I dislike changing panels while surfing and the logo's were took up enough room that I could not fit enough per panel to make it worth it for me. I did manage to squeeze them down to 3 panels worth though. The "quick" panel, was the answer for me. It is probably the panel that I use the most out of my entire ccf. It works exactly like a station logo, but without the logo graphic. I was able to fit all my favorite channels onto one panel by using rectangular buttons instead of logo's. That turned out to be a very cool way to surf, better than using the number pad, and more convenient than using the logo's spread out among 3-4 panels. 
When I first created the Surf devices, I switched between VCR 1's and VCR 2's using the device menu. That can feel a little slow after a while because of animations, so I eventually added a button to each panel that would switch between them directly. That was all well and good until I started running out of room on each panel. That is when someone came up with the awesome idea of having the current tab's tab jump to a different device instead of doing nothing. That worked perfectly for me, the current tab's button switches between VCR 1 and VCR 2 letting me free up the space being wasted by that button. The cool thing is that when I get around to adding a surf device for watching TV using the TV as the tuner, I can have it cycle between all three very easily. The last thing I want to mention about the Surf device is the help system. One of design goals I hope to eventually reach is to have a ccf that people don't need lots of "training" to use. :) What I did was add a help button as one of the tabs in the surf device. This button jumps to an exact duplicate of the current panel, except that when you press a button, it displays a text description of what the button does instead of sending an IR code. This is nice for things like the dynamic range icon's on the record panel. The graphic of the sun and moon work well for that, but people could mistake it for lighting control. If the user checks out the help, it will explain that what they do and remove the confusion. If you are interested in checking out how that works, I would suggest looking at it in the emulator because it does not jump out at you by looking at the ccf. 
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