EyeTV 3 for Mac: smart guides (at last!)

I've been using EyeTV 2 for the past few years with my iMac G5 / TwinhanDTV Alpha digital TV tuner combination, and since then I have not looked back.  The convenience of pre-recorded digital TV means that I avoid watching live TV nowadays.  I much prefer watching the shows I have recorded at a time of my choosing, and with the option of skipping those annoying ads.  But as good as EyeTV 2 is, it was missing what I consider to be an essential feature- the ability to create a list of TV shows that you want to have recorded in future, no matter when the shows are broadcast.  Eg. a list of titles/keywords that can be run against the EPG, with the resulting matching programmes automatically scheduled for recording.  If I want to record each weekly episode of Good Game, and all Columbo movies that happen to be broadcast at obscure times, then I shouldn't need to manually scan the EPG and schedule everything myself.  

Thankfully, Elgato's EyeTV 3 provides a solution to this problem in the form of smart guides.  A long-overdue feature, smart guides are highly-configurable and work as advertised.  Smart guides can be created to simply record all future shows matching a particular title, or more complex smart guides can be designed to use a combination of fields such as repeat, channel, director, year, description and more.  So it is easy to schedule a series for recording on a particular channel based on its name, with recordings limited to non-repeats only, and keeping a maximum of three recordings.  Precisely what I was looking for.  Of course there are many other new features in version 3, but for me, the inclusion of smart guides alone makes the US$39.95 upgrade for EyeTv 2 users an essential purchase.  In fact, somewhat of a bargain I would say...

(image from elgato.com)