For quite a while, I’ve had a Mac Mini hooked up the TV, streaming DVDs and xvids to the TV, and all my music on for streaming to an Airport Express.

The Mini is on 24/7, also acting as a dev web server for nerding, and running ftp and a few other protocols, allowing me to grab an album from wherever, whenever.

As good as Front Row has been, it’s just not… geeky enough for me. The wife uses it without issue, and my son yells when the selector is on a few of the menu options he wants. But I want more geek.

I tried the XBMC, but it stank of PC design asthetics, like a chavved up Corsa, Plex wasn’t bad, but Boxee so far, has been great.

It wasn’t immediately great, it did take a few months to grow on me, but once it did, I now actually like browsing through videos, and music and finding things I’d missed or forgotten.

So how does Boxee make this an interesting process again?

While Boxee and Plex are built on the XBMC framework, the big difference is the social and online aspects of Boxee.

For example, all your films are scanned, and cover art, reviews, and a link to a trailer are downloaded from online databases.The reviews are brilliant for jogging your memory about the plot, or convincing the other half that it’s not a horror movie and she will like it.

You can also rate the films at any point while watching them, and these rating show up in your online profile. Online profiles? Yeah, the social interaction side of Boxee allows you to search for friends, add them and see their stream of activity. In fact, the first screen of the Boxee interface has four of the 16 boxes dedicated to recent activity from your online mates.

As a side note, I truly believe there’s only about 100 people actually online, as I have the same friends on Flickr, Twitter, Last.fm, all the others… and Boxee. Everyone else on the internet must be a NPC.

Boxee also features some great web integration. You can add Flickr profiles to view photos, scrobble all your music to Last.fm, and watch BBC TV through the iPlayer plug-in. iPlayer’s not the only TV content, Joost, YouTube, Hulu, CNN and more, the integration of all the plug-ins is very good, and feels like a coherent whole package. I’ve found myself spending time browsing, reading reviews and rediscovering media I forgot I had.

Another thing that’s made the switch from Front Row to Boxee easier is a plug-in for Front Row that adds Boxee as a menu item, meaning the wife can use Front Row but I can jump from that to Boxee, no keyboard or messing about required. There’s also a free, official iPhone Boxee app due to hit the Apple Store any day now too!

All this through the little white Apple Remote…

ps. Add a comment if you want an invite to the Boxee Alpha!

One of the lads on my regular video gaming forum, NTSC-uk, is getting a Mac, and was asking what apps and widgets people use on Mac. No specifics, just chuck some ideas at him. Here’s what I said;

Quicksilver (keyboard app/file launcher)
Once you’ve tried it, you really can’t be without it.

Perian (xvid/divx/x264 codec)
Plug-in to play divx and many other formats in all apps that use the Quicktime architecture. That means watching x264 .mkv files in Front Row

VLC (movie media viewer)
Better movie player than Quicktime, handles everything, does interlacing and subtitles etc.

Adium (instant messaging)
Like the PC/Linux Pigeon, but better. Handles all forms of IM like MSN, AIM, Yahoo, Jabber and Facebook.

Opera (Browser)
I’m a big Opera fan, and the latest versions are great. They don’t suffer slow down and bloat like Firefox and Safari do. If you use a lot of multiple tabs when browsing, try Opera.

Transmisson (Bittorrent client)
Best BT client on the mac

If you do any design, get FontExplorerX for font handling. Free, and looks like iTunes for your fonts.

This was a top-of-my-head list, so if you’ve got something you use and feel other’s would benefit, lemme know!

Pixelmator‘s been making in-roads into designers/programmers toolboxes on the mac for a year or so now. You may have read or heard about it on the various Mac news sites, it’s a light-weight image editor, built on Cocoa, passing graphics tasks off to your graphics chip, challenging Photoshop etc.

Some of it’s hype, some of it hyperbole, but what can’t be ignored is that Pixelmator’s a great app that’s turning heads. And it’s $59. No, that’s not a typo.

I grabbed a beta of Pixelmator when it first launched and was mildly impressed. On a recent MacHeist bundle, Pixelmator was one of the apps, to which I thought, bonus, I’ll try it out more.

One to watch, I thought, a feeling echoed by long time friend and graphics man, Mark Coleran. He felt that while Photoshop was such a bohemoth, and with a prohibitive cost as a major entry barrier for casual users or coders needing a solid graphcis app, there was a market area for someone to sneak in, steal a user base and make in-roads, all for about 40quid.

So as a long time Photoshop user and beta tester, where would Pixelmator fit in my workflow?

I usually have Photoshop open at any given time of the day, so when I’m working away coding/debugging HTML and CSS I might not use an image editor much, but if the need arises, and I see Photoshop isn’t open for any reason (as I look in my dock, the icon’s there and lit alright) I’m almost frustrated as I know it’ll take a set amount of time to open, and if I’ve got Parallels, 4 browsers, Transmit, Coda, Textmate, CSSEdit, Adium and iTunes (natch) then opening Photoshop can start the old disk swap shuffle.

Enter Pixelmator. It opens in a flash, provides pretty much everything I’ll need at hand in an image editor, and looks very tidy. Small memory footprint and great handling of many varied graphic formats is a big plus, so you can see where, in a pinch if I’m mid-code/task/mental thread and don’t want to lose a thought, why I might pitch for Pixelmator over Photoshop.

Pixelmator also integrates into the Mac OS very well, providing access to the iSight camera, iPhoto libraries and hooking into Automator. This means it’s excellent for streamlining repetitive tasks and going one further with file manipulations or other Automator related cleverness.

In the last week, I received an email from the Pixelmator team inviting me to try the 1.3 beta, better known as Tempo. The new beta boasts massive improvements when handling big images, which is great, as I deal with a lot of images from print designers, plus some very powerful tools like the Instant Alpha selector and colour wheel tools. Pixelmator is bringing back the enjoyment of exploration in a graphics package, something I’ve not had since Photoshop 3 introduced layers…

So, there’s gotta be something bad, yeah?

Yes, there most definitely is. Pixelmator is crying out for some “Save for web…” options.

There are none. You can save as a JPEG or GIF, with very little control over either. The omission in today’s software world of such obvious feature sets leaves me scratching my head. Pixelmator is a beautiful app. It ticks boxes for the “delicious generation” of mac users, and would nestle nicely in a coders tool set. The Tempo beta I tried may not be feature complete yet, and these things may be on the way, but as it stands, it’s a glaring omission.

But would I recommend Pixelmator?

Of course! If you’re a student or begrudge spending a lot on a tool you’ll use seldomly, try Pixelmator (free 30 day demo!) and see if you like it. If you like the sound of some of the benefits I’ve listed here, give it a go. In fact, give it a go simply to challenge the dominance of Photoshop.

The more I use Pixelmator (and the more they update it), the more I like it.

But please lads, sort out the save for web options!

Bruce Lawson asked the Twitterverse for a show of hands of Opera users, and their whys, but if not, let him know the reasons. At the moment, I’m an Opera user.

I say at the moment because my browser of choice seems to change on a bi-monthly basis. Being a Mac user, with the whole Mobile Me set-up and an iPhone, there’s a certain amont of comfort in using Safari. As such, I usually flirt with another browser for a few weeks, then fall back to old faithful.

So what sets me off looking to swap browsers?

My line of work has me using a browser for a large percentage of the day. Developing we sites means I usually have Safari and Firefox open all day. While I like Firefox and it’s rane of plug-ins, Firebug being the obvious one, I feel the app is bloated and sluggish. Having more than 8 tabs open for extended periods on a regular basis, and my MacBook Pro starts to stutter when tab flipping. Same with Safari, you have a few tabs open and a few Flash movies and it really crawls.

Ok, so Firefox for work, how about Camino for home? Camino’s nice for a mac user. Built on the Gecko rendering engine, but with a heavily mac-ified user experience, Camino offers a good, mac-like, browsing experience, but there’s a few bits and pieces I don’t like. No way to easily auto-sync bookmarks, slows down like Firefox when lots of active tabs etc. There’s even more choice with browsers now than ever before, with Flock, Omniweb and iCab offering further alternatives, but I’m not going to numb your brain.

Enter Opera. I’ve been aware of Opera since the very first Mac versions around version 5. The first version were not up to much on the Mac, and I never used it for much, not even paying attetion to how sites looked in it. However, as I got more and more conscious of standards based browsing, I dutifully downloaded every version and started tweaking, revelling in how much better Opera was getting.

Recently, this has been amplified by our lead nerd at JP74 being a massive Opera fan. The browser, that is. I respect Nathan’s opinion on many things (except some rather daft allegations he made saying the PC UX was more consistent than a Mac’s) but anything internet related, he’s usually spot on.

Earlier this year, I got an Asus EEE 701. One of the first things I did was install Ubuntu and look for a decent browser. Firefox on an Asus was alright, but the small screen was getting cramped. I tried the latest 9.5 versions of Opera and found the 90% view size was fantastic. This made me start trying the desktop versions on my Mac when browsing out of work.

Before my iPhone, I had a Sony Ericcson K800i, which is a great phone. I was using the Opera Mini browser on it, and tho So now, in my quest for speedy, stable browsing, ths last two months I’ve been using Opera. And this was before meeting the mighty Chris Mills and 1:80 scale punk-epitomised Bruce Lawton! Discussing Opera with Chris gave me a few insights into the company and their views and goals, which I found admirable and honourable.

However, there are a few things I don’t like about Opera. Obviously, the user-interface on the Mac is a travesty. It looks like it was abandoned at lunch time. I reverted to the default Opera skin straight away. Secondly, I really dislike a browser that’s trying to do too much. Mail, RSS readers, Bittorrent… nice idea, but I just want a browser.

With email, I think a stand alone mail app would be a better way to go, like the separation of Firefox and Thunderbird. I don’t need Mail on the Asus as I use Google Mail, just a browser.

The RSS feeds could be passed to a HTML set-up like Google Reader within the My.Opera area of the site, which would possibly encourage a greater user sign-up rate and offer the chance to discover other users RSS feeds etc.

Bittorrent? Transmission. Nuff said.

But seriously, if you’re sick of Firefox bloat, slow Safari tab swapping or just want a change, give Opera a go. It’s compliant, fast, very stable, and a friend of mine, Gareth, who breaks browsers for fun, says Opera’s code rocks. Nerds like Nathan and Gareth reassure me and my current browser choice!

I know I’m late in mentioning this, but I’ve been very busy in both professional and personal life, so things like spewing bile on a blog have to wait.

Anyway, Kismac has been moved away from it’s German roots, due to draconian and rather pathetic laws that have been passed there, from the Kismac team;

“As you may well be aware, we have moved this part of the site offshore to Switzerland. The German politicians have shown their lack of understanding of security matters by deciding to ban anything that can be used to breach security.”

The new site is located at http://kismac.macpirate.ch/ so drop by there, and if you can program, get involved!

There’s a neat bit of software that you can use in conjunction with your GPS unit and Google Earth to show your position in realtime while Stumblin’.

Using gps2geX, the software generates an “on the fly” KML file which is loaded in Google Earth. The co-ordinates for gps2geX are updated from the gpsdX daemon, which is also being used by KisMac, so no one app is taking sole control of the GPS unit.

The results are pretty cool. You can see your exact position on Google Earth, updated as per your settings in gps2geX, Google Earth even tilts and pans the camera around based on what direction and speed you’re moving in.

So if you’re driving around looking for wireless networks, how are you streaming images in Google Earth? Ahh, good question. I use my Sony Ericcson K800i as a bluetooth modem. I’m on T-Mobile’s Web’n'Walk Plus service plan, an unlimited (yeah, with the usual cavaets) internet access plan. A drive around my home town worked well, probably because I had a lot of imagery cached already, but it all seemed to work just fine.