Pop some acid and the above video above will look chromatically normal to you, but as some owners of Sony and Philips brand televisions are discovering, dropping some lysergic bliss is about the only way to get the new AppleTV to play nice with their sets.
If you’ve got a second generation AppleTV and looking to add a couple of o’s to its oomph, Fire Core have just announced that they’ve got you covered: they’re porting their popular aTV Flash software from the first-generation AppleTV to the second, complete with Last.fm and browser support.
It is widely rumored that when the Mac App Store finally launches early next year, it’ll launch with the iWork ’11 productivity suite available as separately purchasable applications… but could iWork also be delayed to make sure there’s enough time to bake AirPlay support into Keynote?
Maybe. An email from Apple CEO Steve Jobs strongly implies that when iWork ’11 drops, Keynote ’11, at the very least, will support AirPlay functionality.
We personally love it, but not everyone thinks the new AppleTV is much of an improvement over the old model, which featured local storage, legacy outputs, was fairly easily upgradeable and was easily hackable with great media center software like the Boxee Box.
If you’re one of those nostalgists and think the AppleTV took a step back when it became a streaming media only affair, good news: Apple’s dropped the price of the 160GB first-gen AppleTV from just $50 more than the new model.
Of course, buy that and you’ll miss out on the inevitable fun that everyone is going to start having once jailbreak developers start really mastering the capabilities of the new iOS-driven AppleTV, but heck, there’s always room for both in your entertainment center.
As a glimpse of the possible gaming future of an iOS-capable AppleTV, this is pretty tops: for the latest update of The Incident, Big Bucket Software has added the ability to hook your iPad up to your HDTV and play the game from your couch using a Bluetooth-paired iPhone as the controller.
If Apple ever introduces an App Store for the AppleTV, this is the way they’re going to do it: in the meantime, we can count on jailbreak developers implementing this sort of functionality in jailbroken AppleTV apps. I can’t wait for someone to get an emulator working on this thing already!
According to Apple, the new A4-powered AppleTV has been a modest success, selling over 250,000 units by mid-October, but despite this, it’s not listed in Amazon.com’s list of the top 100 electronics…. and some people smell a conspiracy.
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Well, what do you know: the guys over at Plex, who make one of my favorite media center apps for the Mac, have jailbroken their second-gen AppleTV and managed to get the Plex client up and running on the little $99 box.
The proof of concept’s a little rough around the edges, but once this is polished up, it could be a huge boon for AppleTV owners hoping to expand their box’s capabilities. Sure, you still need to stream your media from a paired Mac, but Plex supports a lot more codecs than AirPlay. I can’t wait to see this project progress.
Eager to get the full iTunes experience on your AppleTV? It’s one step closer to reality: Apple will introduce support for iTunes LP and iTunes Extras on the new AppleTV sometime soon, according to a letter from Steve Jobs.
Here at Cult of Mac, we love Apple’s new A4-powered update to their “hobbyist” set-top box, the AppleTV… but all is not rosy for everyone. According to reports coming in from users, the new AppleTV might be prone to a very, very subtle skipping problem that — once seen — becomes impossible to unsee.
The AppleTV has been jailbroken and we’ve already seen the release of the first AppleTV app courtesy of nitoTV, but how to install it without an AppleTV version of Cydia? Jailbreak maestro MuscleNerd gives us the four-one-one:
1) Jailbreak your AppleTV using PwnageTool
2) SSH into your Apple TV2, the default password is “alpine”
3) Type “passwd” and enter a new password (if you haven’t already)
4) Type: echo “deb https://apt.awkwardtv.org ./” > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/awkwardtv.list
5) Type: apt-get update
6) Type: apt-get install com.nito.nitoTV
7) Type: killall Lowtide
Done and dusted! Enjoy the amazing ability to get weather… on your television! The future is now!
It’s now possible to jailbreak your AppleTV thanks to PwnageTool and greenpois0n, but there’s not much to do with that jailbreak until developers get cracking on their apps. Luckily, it seems that development for jailbroken AppleTVs is already well under way. A small team of developers over at nitoTV have already written the first native AppleTV app.
It’s not much, really: just a simple weather app for now. Barely even a widget in scope. The point, though, isn’t in the scope: it’s the proof of concept demonstrating that developers can actually run apps on the AppleTV instead of just playing around in the command line.
Limera1n and greenpois0n have made it possible to jailbreak your iOS 4.1 device for almost a couple weeks now, but if you’re like me, any jailbreak not officially released by the iPhone Dev Team under the PwnageTool moniker is worth an eyebrow arch of circumspection.
Good news, then: the Dev Team have finally released PwnageTool 4.1 for Mac OS X, which used a combination of geohot’s contentious limera1n exploit, Comex’s PF kernetl exploit and the Dev Team’s own pwnage2 exploit.
The timing of Scosche’s new sneakPEEK II accessory seems curiously timed.
You can’t fault it’s functionality, really. The sneakPEEK II allows you to pump content from your iPad or iPhone to your television easily by just connecting it to your device via their umbilical. On one end is the standard Apple docking connector and, on the other, composite and component inputs for plugging into pretty much any television out there. It’ll even charge your iPad while you watch a movie or play a game, thanks to an integrated micro USB connector and AC adapter.
That’s not bad functionality, but when iOS 4.2 rolls around, isn’t the point of a cable like this going to be pretty much obviated when AirPlay allows you to stream video or audio from any app to any AirPlay-compatible device… including Apple’s own $99 AppleTV?
The sneakPEEK II, of course, is cheaper than an AppleTV, but at $59.99, the price discrepancy is so minimal that we can’t help but feel there aren’t a lot of people who will opt for Scosche’s solution over Apple’s sexy black box. In fact, about the only thing to recommend it over an AppleTV is if you want to pump video from a classic iPod up to your television, or if your television lacks an HDMI port.
Little more than a week after Apple started shipping their all-new AppleTV, Google announced that they too would join the home entertainment party and offer a TV service of their own. It’s iOS vs. Android all over again, but this time the battle’s in your living room, not in your pocket.
The first product to offer Google’s new TV service is the Logitech Revue. It’s a black set-top box, just like you’d get for AppleTV, but it’s not as pretty, obviously. So, let’s take a look at how the two devices compare.
It only took hours for the iPhone Dev Team to successfully jailbreak the newest AppleTV through the SHAtter exploit once it slid through their front mail slot, which should at the very least open the door to hacks like native 1080p playback and which might — fingers crossed — allow the new AppleTV to run apps.
But how hard is it going to be to install and execute user apps on the new AppleTV once the jailbreak has been officially released?
iPhone hacker Steven Troughton-Smith has done some homework and there’s good news and bad news. On the one hand, he has confirmed that you can actually install applications to the AppleTV already. The bad news? There’s no way to launch them once they’re on the device.
It was common knowledge that Apple’s new AppleTV was running some sort of variation of iOS under the hood, especially since it uses the iPhone 4 and iPad’s A4 CPU for silicon horsepower, but TUAW has confirmed it: the AppleTV is an iOS device, and therefore jailbreakable using existing techniques… although since there’s no local storage, I would imagine any AppleTV jailbreaking would mostly focus on improving functionality by beefing HD output up to 1080p.
Too busy to read our liveblog coverage of Apple’s September iPod Event? Everything you need to know about Apple’s new products is below the fold, including details about the new iPod Shuffle, Nano, iPod Touch, AppleTV, iTunes and iOS update.
The AppleTV was a bizarre misstep for Cupertino, and judging by how they’ve consistently ignored the device since it launched, Apple damn well seems to know it. Popular AppleTV media software suite Boxee seem to too: they have just announced their own competing set-top media player for release in 2010.