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!

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.