Whooummm!With that strait , wherever you were in your Mac , the Front Row port swung into scene .
Front Row was fab . put in first on the iMac G5 , this was Apple ’s “ 10 - metrical unit UI , ” a mode of interacting with your medicine , movies , and exposure in a simplified user interface so that you did n’t have to be sitting directly in front of it with a keyboard and black eye . Instead , you could mill around on the couch and use Apple ’s dinky unexampled infra - red removed control to play DVDs , podcasts , portion out euphony from other iTunes Libraries on your meshing , to bore your Quaker rigid with slideshows of your holidays in iPhoto , and more .
Unsurprisingly , it was Front Row , as much as anything , that experience folks think aboutusing a Mac as a media centre , and it was a great way of giving a Modern lease on life to a Mac after you ’d upgrade to a newer model . Or indeed , you could do what I did and apply it as an excuse to buy a unexampled Mac — in my case , a little Intel Core Solo Mac mini , which spend years hooked up first to a vast , fuzzy 21 - inch Philips CRT TV , and afterward a 32 - in Samsung flatscreen which , in hindsight , had gigantic bezels .
And I loved it . I plugged anElgato EyeTV stickinto the back and we ’d use it to watch resilient broadcast TV — with the add bonus that we could hesitate it as sirens screamed past the window of our London flat at all hours of the day or Nox .
It was Front Row , though , that was the tangible wiz . With it , it was picayune to clean tunes to play from my Library on my Mac , from my wife ’s Library on her Mac , or our communal Library on the Mac miniskirt itself , and watching videodisc — quaint though that sounds now — was simple and true .
The simple small distant command was a cinch to use by feel alone , and did n’t distract or confuse you with a splatter of outside buttons . ( It could get easily suffer , judgement , but my picayune hack for lot with that was meet Velcro pads on the remote and on the border of our coffee table . ) Plus , there was endless prank potential in iron the Menu button in an office full of Macs to trigger Front Row to appear — since by nonpayment , Macs would accept the IR command from any remote .
For me , the version of Front Row that came with sustain Macs run Mac OS X 10.4 was the One True Version . The way it swing and twirled onto screen whenever you press Menu on the remote or hitCommand - Escapeon the keyboard looked impressive , and the little sound effects as you span it round and pick computer menu options were perfect . ( Sorry about the roughness of the video below ; it was the best my sieve gaining control software system could cope . )
It was n’t just visual showing - off for its own sake , though . Like so much of Apple ’s traditional attention to item , the way your current cover receded into the background while the Front Row icons span in actually and deliberately helped you translate what was move on . It helped you deposit yourself in a practical place , and without it having to be explicitly explicate to you , you would realize what trade to and from Front Row meant . It gave you context , and that ’s why , even though it was glazed and more extensible through some reverse engineering , I never like Leopard ’s version , which just faded in . Here it is again is slow motion . ( You know you’re able to slow down many O X animations by holding down ⇧ , right ? )
Front Row , sadly , does n’t exist any more ; it wasdropped by Apple in OS X 10.7 , partially because its “ digital hub ” strategy was being deprecated , and partly , presumably , because the Apple TV was becoming Apple ’s focus . And the true be severalise , when I last broke and bought my first Apple TV — I’d held out until the third generation — I was softly , secretly proud of to be relieved of the burden of ministering to a full figurer play the part of a medium host . The Mac miniskirt was relegate to server duty — which it do admirably — and with the addition of Air Video Server to transcode non - standard codecs on the fly via my iPhone and AirPlay , there was no doubt that I sacrifice fiddling and gained a huge amount of sanity and robustness in ditching my medium center Mac miniskirt for an Apple TV .
Still , though , thatwhooummmas Front Row spin out into place is enormously remindful . Like the cube transition of Fast User Switching before it , it made me realise that the familiar , apparently immutable screen background I ’d been staring at in one form or another for a X or so was just one way of present my data , and one way of understanding what my computer was doing . What ’s more , like the Genie issue as you belittle windows to the Dock , it ’s a terrific good example of how the sorts of animations and passage that Apple hater like to mock as soft fripperies are in reality enormously valuable and extremely considered cues to help you understand what ’s happening on silver screen .
