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New Front Row - Looks like Apple TV!


Takuro
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In all the buzz of the WWDC, Jobs seemed to focus on a lot of Leopard features that have already been centered upon in the last keynote. However, there's one big change to Leopard that he failed to mention: an all-new Front Row.

 

http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/features/frontrow.html

 

As you can see, the new Front Row bears a very close resemblance to Apple TV.

 

New features:

 

- DVD menu option now only appears if there's an actual playable DVD in the optical drive.

- Movies section. Videos are no longer lumped together. Uses iTunes meta data to group all movies together.

- TV shows section. Similar to movies section in that it's now given its own group.

- Podcasts sections. Again, given it's own group and organized much better.

- Cover art is now browsed as you go through your libraries in Front Row, just like in Apple TV

 

Looks like all those people who hacked Apple TV to run on Macs are out of the business. This really is essentially Apple TV for your Mac!

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Whatever Apple TV has that Leopard's Front Row doesn't is probably redundant. For example, streaming capabilities. I'm sure YouTube isn't bundled with Front Row, but who needs it when you have a complete desktop and browser handy?

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IMO, this makes me very interested in Leopard. And DVD Player. A mac mini with a lacie mini 750gig drive will fare wonderfully as a full fledged media-server with remote buddy for my new home-entertainment system.

Leopard is really exciting me!

 

And may I just predict that FrontRow 2.0 is probably the exact same binary app from the AppleTV's finder, which means most mods will be compatible. They even tout on their site that it looks similar, and it's obvious enough that functionality is indeed similar. So who's to say we wouldn't see Frontrow support?

 

I'm glad I made the decision to stick with my mac mini instead of getting an AppleTV!

 

-Urby

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