For those of us poor souls still feeling for the ghost of Google-gobbled SimplifyMedia and looking for a way to easily share our media across our computers and social networks, Libox has stepped in to fit the bill.
Think of Libox as a personal P2P streaming application for your media. You simply download the software for the PC or Mac and let it scan your computer for media like movies, music and images. Once it’s done, any medial then be available for streaming on any computer you own, or even on your iPhone or iPad through a free (and attractive) universal app.
Want to share your media with friends? That’s easy enough too: just add them as contacts and they’ll be able to play any media you select to share. You can even selectively share media: Leander can take a look at my movie collection, sure, but he’s not getting access to the porn directory.
I’m really impressed with the technology of Libox, and the iPhone app is great, but on the Mac desktop side, there’s a lot of interface work to be done. The Libox Mac application is confusingly and unattractively designed, and even such rote tasks as selecting multiple items to share with your contacts is hellish.
For example, trying to share some old Betty Boop cartoons with Leander, I tried to select all of them at once by clicking the first, holding down shift then clicking the last file. Only the first was selected. Noticing that the application itself instructed me that “to select several items, click the first and drag,” I tried to do just that, only for nothing to happen at all.
In other words, on the Mac side, things feel sloppy, and I still haven’t figured out how to share files without clicking them individually. Once that gets cleaned up though, Libox should be a fantastic solution: a streaming, iPhone-friendly P2P social network that even runs acceptably through 3G.
[via Gizmodo]
