Apple TV remote Tips

At first I was a little frustrated by the simplicity of the Apple TV remote. Effectively there are only six buttons - up, down, left, right, center select and menu. Having been a Tivo user for many years I always found that there were a treasure trove of shortcuts to be found hiding in all the myriad of buttons found on a regular AV remote. I used to like jumping from the Tivo home page to the To Do list by hitting the number 2. Get it? To Do - number two. Now I found myself shuffling between menus one screen at a time on the Apple TV. This feature cheered me up from InnerException.com

Press and hold the menu button to get to the highest menu level. Sweet. I think that there a few other combos to be found if I poke around some more. For instance, during playback you can skip ahead in play back or press and hold to get into the scan mode with it's three speeds of fast forward and rewind. I wonder if the up and down buttons will ever be used for rating a la Tivo's thumbs up and down.

Sometime I feel like this searching for arcane combos or sequences of buttons is somewhat akin to looking for game cheats but when it comes down it it's more like trying to program your sprinkler timer. There are only a few buttons so the desinger had to get creative in order to all the UI out of it that they could. I'm sure if Steve had his way the remote would have no buttons on it all.

Follow up on Apple TV Apps and Tools

This is a follow up on my search for useful software that will help me get more out of my Apple TV.

My first discovery was a veteran app that I'd never heard of until recently --iSquint. iSquint comes from the makers of Visualhub, iSquint just converts video to iPod or Apple TV format without all the fancy settings and fine tunings that it's bigger sibling offers. I think the main win for the app is it's speed. It out paces Quicktime Pro and can convert some videos to some format is real time. However when I tried it on a couple of videos it choked on their formats. I'm going to wait until there's a more standards compliant piece of video that I want to move over to the Apple TV and then I'll put it in a head to head race with Quicktime on another machine.

The other app that's really interesting me answers a question I had about listening to BBC Real streams on the Apple TV. Airfoil from Rogueamoeba. Itdoes exactly what I'm looking for. $25 will buy you the ability to play audio of any type that can come out of your Mac or PC's speakers to a variety of other networked devices around your home. Nice. I've got visions of playing recordings of Mao like orders for my family to assembly for daily exercise sessions through my new, over head public address system.

I really like this idea of extending my general computer content to the Apple TV. I don't simpley mean entertainment content like audio or video but I'd really like to see IM alerts be able to appear in the interface. Or even a way to plug in a camera and do AV web chat through the TV. I'm sure Apple's going to do something interesting with that USB port sooner or later.