03/05/2010 - Weather forecast plugin for Apple TV
We can imagine your windows are tightly curtained while you’re watching latest Vampire Diaries episode. Zombieland requires dark vibe too. But in case you suddenly need to pop out for extra popcorn, don’t be surprised with the nasty weather outside. Here is the WeatherFront, a weather forecast plugin for the Front Row. It fetches the weather forecast from the internet and displays the current conditions and a three days forecast for your area. Stefan, a German software developer who sent this to us says it’s not the final version, but works already quite okay. Thanks, Stef!
28/09/2009 - DVDpedia Comes To Apple TV
Thanks to PARA9 it’s now possible to browse DVDpedia movie catalog on Apple TV. This small Montréal based team, specializing in web and Mac OS X development, released DVDpedia plugin for Front Row that now also supports Apple TV 2.4 (and only this version).
The plugin is offered as a free download.
To install it on Apple TV you need to enable at least SSH and AFP (if your device isn’t hacked yet) – find the instructions here. Then just copy the plugin from the Front Row library to Apple TV, make your DVDpedia database accessible from Apple TV, reboot the device and then make DVDpedia desktop application open the database at the new location.
The plugin enables to browse movies by Title, Director, Actor, Genre, Year, Country or Recently Added. You will also get a little info for each entry selected. And if you have a movie linked to the entry, you can start playing it right there in Front Row.
For more details and download links go to PARA9 website.
23/01/2009 - ATVDigiframe plugin to use AppleTV as a DigitalFrame
Based on comments made by the company behind the product to appleTvHacks.net
Our plugin allows to setup any period of time between 2 slides in the “Slideshow” screensaver mode of AppleTV. The time can be set up in 1 second steps from 1 second to 9999 hours. The standard Apple TV application cripples the slideshow mode and only allows 2,3,5,10 or 20 seconds of time between 2 slides, which is not really usable for displaying digital art. Our ATVDigiframe plugin integrates seamlessly and matches the minimalist style of the AppleTV UI.
They idea came from a photographer willing to have a nice solution to display photos, non satisfied with the current solutions
I’am a huge AppleTV fan and I am a photographer myself. Before buying an AppleTV, I had looked into digital picture frames to display my own photographs. But they were either too small or they were really expensive when they had a nice size.
Also using an iMac mounted on the wall is a rather expensive solution. So I came up with the idea to use AppleTV as my own digital picture frame. However there are limitations on the AppleTV software that do not allow to use the slideshow function in a practical way.
So I decided that a piece of software has to do the job and allow people to share their photographs with their loved ones without having to be crammed in front of a computer screen. These days many people have nice Plasma and LCD TV’s so why not use their already existing “picture frames”? This is how the idea was born.
The company is base in Montreal Canada, and is providing the installation as a service for $78.91 or you can purchase an appleTV with the plugin already installed. They also allow you to download trial version (here) of the software. Cost for registering the plugin is $59.99
You can download the plugin for free and use it as long as you want. The trial version has the same features as the full version, but has a limitation regarding the time between the slides. The trial version is restricted to durations of up to 2 minutes between two slides. To remove this limitation, you need to purchase a registration key.
It looks like a basic hack, but it could be quite useful.
What do you think ?
More info at: http://atvdigiframe.blogspot.com/
