There don’t seem to be too many iPhone app reviews out there, so I thought I’d throw my hat in the ring. Here are some reviews of everything I’ve tried so far.

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As part of an ongoing quest to get the most out of my Mac Mini media centre setup, I took a couple things for a spin recently: XBMC for Mac, a Front Row replacement, and Sapphire Browser, a plugin for Front Row. Be warned: both of these apps are in beta, and aren’t polished final products. But they are certainly interesting.

One thing I was specifically looking for was something that handled HD content a lot better than front row. The mini is no slouch processor-wise, but it ain’t no Mac Pro, and perian -enhanced Front Row seems to have issues playing back HD files – dropped frames, curtailed fast-forwarding use until the entire flick is loaded, and worst of all for me, it outputs surround sound as regular old stereo. So I have to play files out of VLC if I want to give all my speakers a nice workout.

XBMC for Mac

Hell, I don’t even know how I got into this one. I guess I saw on Lifehacker that there was a new beta that supported the Apple Remote, and I figured I’d give it a shot. It’s the open-source media centre developed for the oldschool Xbox and now ported to Linux and Mac. It’s got a lot going for it, which I will sum up in delightful bullet point form:

• plays 5.1 audio properly
• plays HD video very nicely
• extremely feature-laden
• if you treat it properly, it will scrape IMDb and suchlike for rich metadata about your media. Once this has happened, you can browse by film poster, call up plot summaries and cast and even then browse by cast / director / what have you
• will tell you the weather, for fuck’s sake
• is free.

HD playback is a huge advantage right there. The Mini lifted 720p like a champ; word on the street is that it will sometimes have trouble with 1080p files, although I didn’t have any to test.

Unfortunately, the audio is another matter. I couldn’t get surround working at all. This has to do with the amp itself – mine refused to decode whatever XBMC was putting out. However, most people apparently have no issues, and the feature is going to see improvements a couple betas down the road, which might be a couple months away.

XBMC supports skins, and there are a few nice ones out there – to my eyes, nothing as refined as Front Row itself, but not bad and hell, you could make your own skin if you were really fussy. And that’s the nice thing about XBMC – it’s an open source project, with all the advantages with go with it.

XBMC has a lot of detailed configuration parameters, and there is great power and versatility in them. You can fine tune the details of your playback down to the scaling algorithms, and you can even do this while playing something back.

But, alas, with great power comes great… complexity. Who’s kidding who, it’s pretty complicated to set this thing up properly.

A note on the concept of “library” in XBMC. This must have been an evolutionary layer that grew on top of the original, simple XBMC interface. The library is the mode that scrapes the web for metadata (something not apparent to me at first glance), and it isn’t enabled by default. Until you figure that out, the XBMC interface is completely bereft of visual frills, even lacking thumbnails of the videos: something that is undoubtedly awesome to get working on an Xbox, but pointless on a Mac with a hardy competitor in Front Row built in.

Once you get the library thing sorted out, things are a bit better, but you’ll be impressed by one feature, annoyed by another. Possibly the biggest strike against XBMC is that it doesn’t recognize your iTunes metadata, so all your carefully-curated album art is out the window and reconstituted, badly, by a lengthy allmusic scrape. The cover art for DVD rips and such looks great though, and the plot summaries and cast & crew details are great to have.

Ultimately, I set XBMC aside because the surround sound issue was too important for me. I’m going to keep an eye on it, though; the app is under active development and seems to be progressing well, and I may well be using it heavily in a couple months.

Sapphire Browser

Sapphire browser is a Front Row ‘plugin’ that will do all that scraping for you right within Front Row, giving you the film/TV show art, summaries etc. just like XBMC. The idea is beautiful, and if I could review the idea, I’d give it top marks.

However, the reality don’t live up. I won’t bother getting into too many details, but the scraping process did not work well at all. It takes forever, hangs repeatedly, and ultimately messed up some fairly easy categorizations. When sapphire hits upon a file it doesn’t know what to do with, it asks you to identify the correct name out of a list of results. Unfortunately, it chooses whether files are ‘movies’ or ‘tv shows’ automatically and doesn’t let you correct it other than saying ‘this isn’t a movie’ – you have no way of saying ‘this is a TV show’, so your show won’t show up in its listing at all. Only one out of six Star Wars films actually made it through this failed screening process, which is a pretty sad result. To say nothing of the several different seasons of different shows I had to click through saying ‘this isn’t a movie’ for each episode.

Again, Sapphire is in beta, so it may very well improve in the future. But right now, I can hardly recommend you try it unless you really enjoy repetitive and fruitless clicking.

So that’s it for this latest bout; personally, nothing sticks this time around, but your needs may be different. And regardless, I’ll be keeping my eye on both of these, especially XBMC. The Mac version developers have recently liberated themselves from the main project, so more good things could come of that. I’ve pretty much exhausted my look at mac mini media centre apps – there’s still MediaCentral to consider, but the price is a little steep for me. Maybe someday!

UPDATE See this more recent article, which takes a look at the new XBMC for Mac, now known as Plex, and the new app Boxee.

I’ve gone on another Mac Mini media centre bender. This seems to happen periodically; I get sick of how my 21st-century media experience is turning out, and I try a bunch of different stuff to see if I can’t improve the system. I’ve just tried out a few utilities designed to extend the power of the Apple Remote, as doing more things with your remote is a must if you want to get the most out of your media centre Mac.

Along with Mira, the Apple Remote extender I was using off and on, I’ll tell you about the competition: Remote Buddy, and Sofa Control.

Current Sitch

My mini is hooked up to the TV and I use Front Row to play shit back – movies and music both. This machine also functions as a torrent hose, and that’s what set off this latest round of testing – there is a lot of fussing to be done before a downloaded torrent is ready to be played in Front Row, stuff that I have to screen share in from my MacBook Pro to do, while I’d rather do it with the remote, from the couch. Namely, I want to do some limited file management with the remote – unpacking zips and rars, adding music to iTunes, and moving files to different directories.

What do these things do?

By default, the Apple Remote is more or less tied to Front Row. It can control iTunes too, and DVD Player. But it can’t switch apps or playlists or do anything elaborate. The idea with these extenders is that when you press ‘menu’ on the remote, instead of Front Row starting, you get a pop-up menu with a bunch of different choices. This is implemented a bit differently in each app, though.

Mira

I had been using Mira. It’s got a whole slew of applications pre-programmed with remote controls. You can customize your initial pop-up menu, and you can re-map buttons in any app that already has actions defined. You can even assign applescripts to buttons – more on that later.

Anyway, for one reason or another, I’d stopped using it. I decided I’d bust it out again, so I checked the site for the latest version and discovered to my horror that it hasn’t been updated since forever and is having issues with leopard. Well, that won’t do.

Remote Buddy

Remote Buddy is the quicksilver of the apple remote: it can do just about anything, if you can figure out how to convince it to. It can control any app, can browse through your media collection or file system, has a virtual keyboard and mouse, and can be scripted and expanded.

It’s also relatively expensive at 20 Euros, and is unfortunately too ominous and complicated for my girlfriend to use. For example, the default action when you press menu is to show a menu with tasks for the currently active app. To get to the ‘main menu’, you have to click left to navigate back up to it. Seems simple, but since you can browse your music (in a clever way BTW), it’s possible to get several menu screens in, and when you click menu to hide Remote Buddy’s display, it doesn’t revert to the top level when you press it again. So my lady would have to keep hitting left about seven times to get back to where she could choose front row. Which she’s not going to do; she gives these things about three seconds to explain themselves, and then shrugs and walks away, and I’m trying to encourage her to use the technology, not scare her off. However, if you’re flying solo or the SO is a crazy nerd like you, I’d give this one a shot. You’ll be using your Apple Remote to launch tactical nuclear strikes once you’ve figured it out.

Oh yeah – I should mention that Remote Buddy not only supports a variety of different remotes, you can also use a Wiimote or iPhone to control your mac with it. Bitchin’.

Sofa Control

This is another Apple Remote extender – in fact, it’s remarkably similar to Mira. In fact, I don’t know which one to recommend to you; they’re the same price and do much the same thing. Mira’s menu is more customizable than Sofa Control’s, but then again, Mira’s having issues with Leopard. Sofa control does have a virtual mouse feature, which Mira lacks and which can come in handy in a jam. And it allows for customization via scripting, so pretty much anything you could do with Mira, I’m sure you could do with this one. But I haven’t bought Sofa Control yet and so haven’t tested it enough to know it rocks fer sure.

Back to Mira; and some dull details that should nonetheless be noted

Upon seeing how similar Sofa Control and Mira are, I concluded that I might as well stick with the app I already own, so I went back into mira to see if I could make it work. The answer is: yes, with some button remapping and a lot of help from Automator.

I am starting to love Automator. I tried to love Applescript before it, but it was far too complicated for a brain like mine (I’m “creative”, okay?). Automator is where it’s at. But I’m getting ahead of myself, let me start with a simpler problem and a solution that doesn’t need automator.

Problem: I sometimes forget to stop all the downloadin’ before I get on Xbox Live to play with my homies, and then it’s lag city and I have to get up off the couch (outrage!) and screen share into my Mini to pause downloads in Transmission.

Solution:

1. add Transmission as an app in Mira preference pane
2. assign play/pause button to keypress “command-option-period” (pause all in Transmission)
3. assign next button to keypress “command-option-slash” (resume all in Transmission)
4. add Transmission to the Mira main menu
5. profit! Or, at least, stay on couch!

Now how about something more elaborate that requires Automator.

Problem: newly downloaded video files need to be moved into the Movies directory before Front Row will see them.

Solution: First step is to create a passable way of navigating around the finder. We’re going to need to mod the ‘finder’ control set in Mira. I’ve set it up so that up and down on the remote use the “duoPress” thing in such a way that up makes your selection move up one, and holding up triggers command-up aka move up one directory. I’ve made the play button ‘open’, and the back button sends a file to the trash.

You’re going to want to add common directories to Mira’s main menu, too. Add your downloads folder, that way you can easily navigate to it and then select the files you need. You may also want to add your home directory and the finder itself. I’ve also added the Movies directory in case a video isn’t playing well in Front Row and I want to launch it with something else.

Now, create an automator workflow that has the following steps: “get selected finder items”, “move selected finder items” to the Movies directory. That’s it. Save it as an app.

Finally, put this in your Mira main menu, or assign it to a button in your finder control scheme.

I saved the right button in my finder setup for a slightly more complicated but far more common task, which is adding music to iTunes. Same deal as before, but the automator actions should be as follows:

1. get selected finder items
2. get the contents of this folder (and any subfolders)
3. filter finder items to those of file extension .mp3 (this is to avoid adding image files or .m3us that might be in the album directory)
4. add to iTunes library.

So with all of these controls set up in mira, I can now do all the routine file management stuff that used to require a screen share.

(The smart reader may point out that folder actions could handle these chores automatically, and while that’s theoretically true, I’ve had little luck with folder actions myself. They run whenever files are added, which can potentially be while the Mini is already shuddering under the weight of HD video, and they are frequently confounded by partially-complete torrent downloads. But I’m still exploring this. I’m definitely considering an action on the MBP that will scan my MBP’s downloads folder for torrent files and move them to a folder on the Mini that Transmission watches for torrents, auotomating a lot of the stupid busywork that goes along with, you know, not paying for stuff.)

Finally, I should add that while my Mira experience under Leopard is relatively painless, there are still periodic problems. Ghost presses are sent, and sometimes one press results in two. I’ve contacted the developer as he hints on his site that workarounds are available; I hope this is the case as until I get them and/or he updates Mira for Leopard, I can’t really recommend it to you, as much as I’d like to. I would say that you could certainly set up either of the other apps I’ve mentioned here to do much the same thing, should you want to.

Next, I’ll have a look at XBMC for Mac, a Front Row replacement, and Sapphire Browser, a plugin for Front Row. Both scrape the net for metadata in really interesting ways, but both seem to have their share of problems, too.

UPDATE See this more recent article, which points out that Mira now works with Leopard.

Wow, note-taking has rocketed ahead a few decades while I was jotting down notes by actually typing like a sucka. I use an assorted hodegpodge of notetaking and organizational tools, because I’ve yet to find one that does everything, but mostly I use Backpack since it makes it easy to organize things by project. (However, I don’t necessarily recommend it since the $5/month plan I currently enjoy is no longer offered.)

Now I just became aware of a couple interesting, high tech note-taking tools. One is evernote. The big twist here is OCR, which I guess has advanced to ‘good enough’ status over the last few years. So with evernote, you can simply hold up a piece of paper to your computer’s iSight, or take a picture with your phone, and the image will be eaten by evernote and scanned for text. Then it will be searchable. I’ve tried it and it did okay with a page from Now Magazine, but I have a feeling it might choke on my handwriting, which is a cross between sanskrit and semaphore.

It has all the usual features, including tagging and emailing notes to yourself. It makes it easy to grab things off web pages. It also has a robust desktop version (both for PC and Mac) that syncs effortlessly with the cloud, something I wish backpack did without recourse to third party apps. Anyway if you want to give ‘er a shot, I have some invite codes I can send out.

The other, potentially more mind-blowing service is Jott. It’s all about voice recognition. So you sign up, register your phone number, and make note of the number you need to call (yes, it works in Canada). When you call and record a message, it converts it into text and emails it to you.

The beauty of the thing is that it will play nice with other services. You could set it up with your secret Evernote email address and turn your random blatherings into a searchable archive. It will deal with wordpress, blogger &c, but sadly not textpattern or I’d totally be dialing in some posts.

Or – SPECIAL AWESOME ALERT, this works beautifully – you can set it up with your Google Calendar account, tell yourself “2pm tomorrow poutine-eating marathon”, and if you’ve got your SMS notifications all set up, google will text your hungry ass tomorrow and remind you. It’s like having a freaking secretary. Now I just need to get it to respond to the voice cue “Diane” and I’ll finally be living my fantasy of being Agent Cooper in Twin Peaks.

In North America anyway! Ha! Scrabble has launched their official version on Facebook but because of certain legal issues it can’t be played in the the States or Canada.

That’s hilarious!

I don’t Facebook myself but I know many who do and also play the much adored ripoff. I just think it’s funny that the “official” version of a game can’t be played in the hotspot of activity that started the whole desire to make an “official” version in the first place!

The online organizer app that I tend to use, Backpack, has been updated. It now includes search (hooray!), and the ability to move things around on a page, or to a different page. The look has been refined as well. Unfortunately, the API update has broken a lot of third-party utilities that interface with it.