This month Boxee announced the availability of its public beta release, a major new version of the popular media center software. The update brings significant improvements to the user experience and delivers an impressive degree of aesthetic refinement, but the program lacks stability and will need more work before it is ready to conquer the living room.
Boxee is a multimedia player application that is designed primarily to be used on home theater PC (HTPC) systems. It has a television-friendly user interface that can be seen easily from a couch and operated with either a remote control or conventional input devices. It is based on the open source XBMC media center application. One of the distinguishing features of Boxee is that it has an integrated social networking service that allows users to share what they are watching and see recommendations based on what their friends are watching. The program also has extensive support for playing audio and video content from popular streaming media Web services, including Hulu.
Filed under: Hardware, Software, Hacks, iPhone
It’s impossible not to love a blog post that begins, “I found a way to remote control my R2D2 with an iPhone.”
The video above shows the author, ggpipe, using the iPhone’s accelerometer to control R2’s dome. Pretty cool. In the future, he plans to use the phone to send text to R2’s logic displays. We love it and can’t wait to see a fully assembled, iPhone-powered R2D2!
It’s great to see people extending the iPhone’s capabilities, and homegrown remotes are a cool choice. A couple of weeks ago, we posted a story about a guy who turned his iPhone into an R/C aircraft controller, and last year we saw Delphi’s Wireless Vehicle Access software that lets you control many of your car’s functions. Keep up the good work, everyone!
[Via Rick Yaeger]
TUAWiPhone-controlled R2D2 originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 12 May 2009 23:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments