The Plex media center project spiffs up the XBMC code base for Mac OS X. Or you could just start your very own fork. The second is with true plug-ins written in Python these are mainly tools for sucking down lists of content sources from the Web and arranging for them to play. All accept skins, which are mainly rules for how to display the information on the screen. There are two ways that the XBMC platform encourages simple contributions. The company continues to support the XBMC code base, contributes some of its own code into the commonweal, and is listed as one of the supporters of the project.

Buried under all of this amity is the Boxee application, which is built on top of much of XBMC. If you join, you start out with the founder Avner Ronen in your friendship circle. Then there's Boxee, a venture-capital-funded startup that wants to help you share your video and music consumption with your close and personal friends.

The code from XBMC continues to migrate toward Plex, but the Plex code base is optimized for Mac OS X. The Plex project is a true fork that is available for one and only one machine, the Mac. The story grows complicated because two other groups began to use the XBMC code. If you attach your TV to a Mac with some decent speakers, you'll get a media center that will play music and Internet video directly from your couch. The XBMC project offers a skinnable tool with many of the same features as Front Row, and it distributes builds for the major OSes. There are three good alternatives to Front Row, and they all share much of the same code. Perhaps the company is staffed by design fascists. The software combined with the tiny, six-button mouse is one of the most elegant achievements by the Apple design team. Get past Front Row with Boxee, Plex, or XBMC Apple's Front Row tool will turn your Mac into a living room computer by displaying all of the crucial media choices in big letters so that you can manipulate the menus from your couch. If you ask too many questions, you'll end up burning the time you've saved by making your Mac more efficient - so don't.ĪppleJack can resurrect a dead Mac by cleaning up the detritus left by system crashes. The permissions will all be fixed and your Mac will run faster and smoother. The only limitation is that you need to run it in Single User mode (hit Command-S at startup).ĪppleJack won't ask you how you want to set the permissions because, well, that would shatter the myth by letting you, the system owner, know what's going on. One way to fix the permissions and perform a host of housekeeping chores is to run AppleJack, an open source tool that triggers many of the standard housekeeping scripts like disk repair and cache cleanup. Fix your Mac with AppleJack Why is one of the simplest ways to mend a sluggish Mac is to 'fix the permissions'? Who changes the permissions on my files? Shouldn't I know? Shouldn't I - what is that word? - give permission for the change? What good are permissions if some gremlin can just come in and change them without asking me?

Open source mac file cleaner