The demo video I did for Plex with Aeon skin is also part of the paper as the featured video for CenterStage+Plex.

You can get it here.

This new skin was released for XBMC a couple days ago. MediaStream by Team Razorfish is a community effort that has been going on since October 2007. It’s is a very polished piece of work as you can see in the video and need nearly no configuration and tinkering to get it working right.

This skin has replaced my other favorite Aeon for now. One other skin that I am looking forward to is the new default Plex skin. The Plex team has teamed up with the CenterStage team to bring a default skin for Plex in the coming weeks. Judging by the preliminary demos and screenshots, it is going to be a cracker.

To watch it in HD, just click the HD button on the right to jump through to Vimeo and make sure you go full screen.

Plex is an indie fork of the popular Xbox Media Center for OS X Leopard. Aeon is an outstanding skin in alpha stages for XBMC. You might have heard about both of them and you might have also seen many galleries and screenshots.

Well, I’ve got a video demo. And it is in HD if you wish to watch it that way. Just click the HD button on the right to jump through to Vimeo and make sure you go full screen.

This video which is not as smooth as the real thing, probably due to the screen casting software; showcases the system I’ve been using for the past 3-4 months. I have a Mac mini hooked up to a Sony Bravia and the experience has been nothing short of fantastic. So much so that I have deleted Front Row.

I am currently using the Movies, TV Shows and Music components of Plex. I use the Music component only to listen to Shoutcast radios–especially Dinamo 103.8 and Soma–and Last.FM stations since Plex developers haven’t gotten round to integrating iTunes and iPhoto yet; but judging by the speed they’ve been crunching at, it is just a matter of time. Plus, I have about 17,000 songs in my iTunes library and trying to navigate them with the remote is a big pain.

Plex scrapes IMDB for movies and TheTVDB for TV shows and grabs the director/writer/cast listings, ratings, genre, year, runtime, plot overviews as well as posters. There is also support for various python scripts developed for the original XBMC. I especially like The Apple Movie Trailers script which provides streaming trailers to nearly 2000 movies within the Plex interface.

There is support for the Apple Remote as well as Harmony Remotes, Universal Remotes and XBox360 controllers.

The Plex community and developers are ever helpful over at the Plex forums. Get yourself a Mac mini and head on over to Plex to meet Elan and the rest of the team as well as Barkley. ;)

Adium: A multiplatform chat client. Skins and plugins galore. Don’t need to look anywhere else, this is the app you need.

Growl: A system notification thingy. Windows don’t growl. Get it and set it.

Disc burning: Toast for kamasutra, Disco for quickies.

Fission: A quick, but clean audio editor by Roque Amoeba. If you’re into audio, you should definitely check their stuff out.

Flip4mac: Windows media codec. You need this to watch or listen to Windows Media content with Quicktime.

Perian: One of the first things I install. It adds native support for popular video formats like xvid, divx, etc to Quicktime.

VLC: There isn’t a media life without VLC. Doesn’t matter which platform you’re on.

VisualHub: This is your hub for quick video conversions.

ffmpegX: This is what you need if you are serious about video conversions.

iStat: System resources widget or menubar thingy. Take your pick.. My pick is iStat Pro. Get it and watch what your Mac is doing while you are trying to figure out how silent it is compared to that POS you left behind..

Little Snitch: Think of this little biatch as an outgoing firewall. If some software is calling home, this baby will let you decide if it may or not..

UnrarX: Run of the mill rar/par thingy.

The Unarchiver: Run of the mill archive extraction thingy supporting many formats.

MacPAR deLuxe: If you’re into usenet and parity files, you need this..

Split & Concat: Kinda like HJSplit.

Textwrangler: Text editor on steroids.

Max: Audio converter. If you wanna rip that cd or convert that file to your preferred format, you need this. Also check out AudialHub.

MP3-Info CMM: This finder plugin lets you right click on an mp3 file and peek into its tag.

Skitch: Quick image editor, screenshot grabber, image sharing app and webservice combo. Lovely!

Pixelmator: Even if you are a Photoshop guru, you still should take a look at this image editing app.

Speed Download: Download Manager. First thing I bought when I switched.

Transmission: Into torrents? This is your client.

TV Shows: You don’t need to manually download torrent files for TV shows anymore. New version coming soon..

Yummy FTP: There’s a few ftp clients out there for the Mac but this was my choice..

OS X XBMC: If you think you will miss Windows Media Center, you are mistaken. Or if you have an Xbox with XBMC running on it, now you can do HD thanks to the OSXBMC project.

Appzapper: What if you install these and don’t like some of them? Yeah, yeah.. We’ve all heard it before.. In OS X, you can move the application you wanna delete to the trash folder and that’s it.
No it isn’t.

If you do that, a bunch of other files like preferences files, etc stay behind. Zap ‘em with Appzapper so that the app and the related files are history..

The default Firefox 3 Mac theme does not show favicons for bookmarks you’ve added to your Bookmarks Toolbar. This is probably a decision that comes with mimicking the Safari theme which doesn’t display favicons either. Put simply, it sucks!

Thanks to Daniel Einspanjer, who wrote a Stylish style called Mac bookmark toolbar favicon, you can have all your favicons back in Firefox 3 with all their glory.

The Smart Bookmarks Bar extension which hides the names of bookmarks showing only the icon is currently not compatible with Firefox 3 Beta 5. It runs with the help of Nightly Tester Tools extension, but it is not very good at hiding the names of bookmarks. Even though it restores favicons on the Bookmark Toolbar without the use of the Stylish style mentioned above, it doesn’t work when it comes to hiding the names of bookmarks. You would have to go in to Organize Bookmarks and delete the names of bookmarks manually. You could just install the Stylish extension and delete the names manually, but you have control over the spacing between the icons with Smart Bookmarks bar.

The photo above was taken in Pupa Apple Store, Mayadrom Shopping Center, Istanbul. They are also bundling a copy of Vista Basic with every Mac purchase. How about selling Pepsi in a Coke fridge?

This one above is from the Bimeks weekend paper insert. It says Virus free with OS X. You can load Windows as well!

And the prices are so cheap(!), aren’t they? 2197 Euros + 18% Tax for a 2.4 Ghz 15″ MBP. That’s 4 grand for a Windows laptop. ;)

David Heinemeier of 37signals says on his post titled The MacBook Air could easily be the only machine:

But what I continue to be impressed with the most on the Air is simply the build quality. The MacBook Pro has OK build quality, but the regular MacBook frankly blows in this department in my mind. The plastic feels too cheap, it creaks and bends, and the black surface gets permanently smudged way too quickly. It just doesn’t feel tight in the same way the Air does.

What most people are complaining about the Air is the non user replaceable battery; right?

On the other hand it feels very well built, very tight; right?

Have you ever heard of structural rigidity?

The fact that the underbelly of this thin piece of gorgeous metal structure is one solid piece plays an outstanding role in the way that it feels so tight and well built. Most people would be complaining that it creaks and flexes and it was built like crap if it had a big deep hole at the bottom.

This is very much like the big difference in handling between a two door sports car and the convertible version of the exact same car. Most of the time, the convertible version handles like crap, because it flexes due to the absence of a roof. Oh, and it also makes all sorts of crackling noises when you run over a pothole.

To overcome this, engineers tend to equip the convertible one with extra bracing elements throughout the chassis which helps the structural rigidity, but also increases weight.

And weight helps neither handling nor portability.

Someone pinch me!!

Props to Geohot. Instructions can be found on his blog and on hackint0sh.org as always. Will try this on a few OTBs beginning of next week… Just wanna wait for the early adopters to report back their findings over the weekend.

You wanna Mac Pro, but don’t got the dough to get a Mac Pro? You can build yourself one on the cheap, though not legal; or as quiet, or as good looking. There is a few tutorials out there and I am sure it works perfectly as we are all one big happy family under the Intel sun. ;)

• Build a Hackintosh Mac for Under $800 by hacker extraordinaire Adam Pash
• DIY Hackintosh Tutorial: Build a Mac Pro for Cheap by Darwinian at MacApper
• Hack Attack : Install Leopard On your PC in Just One Step at Dailyapps
• OSx86 Project is where all the magic happens
• The ultimate OSX on PC guide

I might give this a go if I find the time in the next month or so. I’ll keep you posted.

Leopard’s new Front Row look great and acts great and all, but there is a very crucial problem with it. If you have Perian, which is an open source QuickTime component that adds native support for popular video formats suchs as DivX and Xvid, installed on your system; you used to be able to see the subtitles (.srt, .sub) in Quicktime and in Front Row 1.3 – the old one in Tiger. With the new Front Row in Leopard, when the subtitles kick in all you get is a black screen.

I’ve been tinkering with this issue for a while now and boy, have I tried! I tried using Submerge to merge the subtitles with the movie. When you use the Save to disk option in Submerge, it throws out a .mov file that includes a .png layer that is the subtitles on top of the movie. It works in Quicktime, but you get the same black screen in Leopard.

I tried installing the old Front Row (1.3, forTiger) to Leopard. Front Row sits in /System/Library/CoreServices. If you have a machine running Tiger, you can copy the old Front Row from that to the machine running Leopard. Remember to back up the one you’re replacing though.

If you don’t have a machine running Tiger, you can download Front Row 1.3.1 from Apple, but you gotta fool the installer to install it on Leopard. I strongly recommend backing up your system before attempting this. Here’s what you gotta do:

-Remember to back up your current Front Row that is sitting in /System/Library/CoreServices.
-Copy FrontRowUpdate1.3.1.pkg from the .dmg you downloaded to your desktop.
-Right click on FrontRowUpdate1.3.1.pkg and select Show Package Contents.
-Extract Archive.pax.gz and copy the resulting Front Row.app to /System/Library/CoreServices
-Restart your machine and you should be able to launch old Front Row from your Apple Remote.

In my testing it worked most of the time, but it spurts out an error here and there. I can’t say that it’s very stable, but I’ll keep tinkering with this. Also, there is a discussion about this on the Apple Support Forum which you might want to check out.

If any of you reading this has any info or ideas about how to circumvent this subtitle black screen thingy, please sound off in the comments.