…To MacBook

I recently heard about, and installed Understudy; an open source plugin for Front Row that allows access to streamin media. It currently supports Netflix streaming and Hulu. I don’t really care about Hulu but I do have a netflix account and I already use netflix to watch movies on my xbox. Installing front row was straight forward but once in the front row interface, it was a little tricky to get used to the operation of the plugin.

First you need to go into the understudy category and add new feed. From the netflix menu you can add different categories like the most popular list of all time, the newest movies avaqilable to watch instantly, most popular last week and so on. You need to open safari before loading front row and you need to be logged into your netflix account. In true front row fashion the list shows up on the right and a thumbnail with a description of the movie on the left.

What I like about the plugin is the clean interface of front row to browse the movies. I also like the fact that I can browse list of movies especially the latest additions to the instant system. The code seems to work fine without any problems.

My gripe though is that I need to open safari, go to netflix.com, log in and then open front row. If I need to do all that then why not just continue using safari? I wish this plugin had an area where I could put my username and password and it would log into netflix wihtout the need to start safari. The other issue is that my own movie queue does not show up which is available on the xbox version. Both the xbox and understudy have no way of searching the netflix library and you are pretty much stuck just using the lists that are available. It’s a little ahead of the xbox because of the ability to browse some lists at least whereas the xbox only has your queue. To watch anything on the xbox you need to first log into your account on a computer, find the movie and add it to your queue.

Even though it’s missing some of the features that I’d like to see, understudy is in it’s infancy and is a great step forward in streaming movies on front row. I encourage mac users to download the plugin.

If you ask me which application I’ve used the most on my new Mac, I’d have to say it’s Quicksilver by Blacktree.

I haven’t even used all the capabilities/features of this program. Currently I use it mostly to open other apps. I should explain what quicksilver is first for those who don’t know.

From the surface, quicksilver seems to be an application launcher but it’s much more than that. Quicksilver indexes your applications so that with just a few keypresses it’ll bring up the app you are looking for and you can open it from there. It’s also adaptive so pressing “f” now brings up firefox for me and “t” brings up terminal. As for other functions quicksilver provides. You can add the contacts plugin and it will index your address book as well. You can then search for addresses and phone numbers from your address book. For example pressing the first few characters of a name “serg” will bring up my information (including my picture that’s set in address book). Then if I press the right arrow key, I see a menu pop up with the different elements in address book like address, mobile phone, home phone, email. Pressing the down arrow, I can go to home phone and if I press enter it will bring up my phone number in big text on the screen and stays there until I press another button. Very useful if you are dialing someone. Another feature is that you can find a file through quicksilver and when you press tab it will bring up the action menu that allows you to perform different actions on that file such as compress it, email it, send it through IM.
You can find a good tutorial on quicksilver on Dan Dickinson’s blog. You can find other good tutorials on blacktree’s tutorial page.

I highly recommend you install and make quicksilver a startup item on your Mac OS X. I now officially can’t use a computer if it’s not installed on there and when it crashes (which isn’t too often) and exits I feel something missing.