Guide
Tivo's Guide is brilliant: I've written about it before but it's a marvel of interface design. It uses a unique two-column approach that packs a lot of information on the screen at once.

Tivo's on-screen Guide makes it easy to see what shows are coming up on a particular channel. Notice how we can see all the shows on channel 12 (Fox) from 7 p.m. to midnight. We can also see the current show on eight different channels in the left column.

The disadvantage of this approach is that unlike a table-style view (like TV Guide grids), you cannot see future shows on multiple channels simultaneously (you can see what's airing currently on multiple channels). In other words, you can see what's coming up at 10 p.m. on channel 19 by selecting it in the Guide, but you can't see what's going to air at 10 p.m. on channel 20 at the same time (you'd have to move off of channel 19 and select channel 20 in the Guide).

While this sounds like a disadvantage -- table-style grid views are nice as you can easily compare what shows are airing at the time you want to watch -- the reality of a DVR is that show times don't matter as much. This is even more true with a dual-tuner DVR. With a DVR you don't need to select shows by time, but by name, and these days, with shows often repeating on various sister channels, your DVR can figure out a way to record it even if the air time conflicts with other shows you want to watch.

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